Just The Caffeine Talking

Food Bragging: Harvest Edition

When you belong to a farm share, you get the vegetables in season, and you get as many as the farmers have produced. This means one must learn to deal with huge waves of vegetables, often more than can be eaten in a week. We're just past peak sweet corn season, so we're still getting half a dozen ears a week. Skip a day or two and it starts to accumulate.

I discovered a nice way to burn up accumulated fresh corn, especially the ears which have been sitting for a few days: make a pie. Tonight's dinner was corn pie and a salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh lettuce.

How do you make a corn pie? Not hard. It's your favorite savory pie crust, with a large onion, some celery, half a dozen ears of corn cut off the cobs, a couple of sliced hard-boiled eggs, and parsley. To thicken the filling, one recipe I found suggested making a puree of some of the corn and mixing it with another egg to help it set. 

Not especially difficult to make, though what with preparing the filling, making the crust, assembling the pie, and then baking it, this is not at all quick. Save it for a weekend if you're pressed for time.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with a peck of hot peppers. Any ideas?

More Food Bragging

Turned 20 lbs. of tomatoes (from the farm stand, not our garden) into 6 quarts of sauce, put up in jars for winter. Had the excess sauce with some garlic and basil over homemade linguine.

It was very good.

Summer Afternoon Supper

The fresh corn and tomatoes are now appearing in our farm-share and at the local farm stands. Also, it's really hot. The obvious solution: Caprese Salad and Corn Fritters.

Caprese Salad is one of the simplest, most elegant salads out there. Tomato, fresh mozzarella, and basil leaves, with some oil, salt and pepper. Cool, subtle, and delicious. As a bonus, like so many Italian dishes, it patriotically displays the colors of the Italian flag. (The United States and other red-white-blue countries are all handicapped by the lack of blue foods to include in national dishes.)

The corn fritters were mostly a way to use up a couple of left over ears of corn. It's also pig-easy: cut the corn off the cobs, mix together with a large egg, a minced green onion, grated cheese, and a chopped small pepper (I don't know what kind of pepper it was, but it was a mild one). Flavor with salt, pepper, and a generous amount of cumin. Add flour until the mix is the right thickness for a batter. I can't be more specific than that, but stop just before you think you've added enough. Fry in about half an inch of oil until brown.

Accompanied by a butter-smooth Gascon white wine.

Movie Review: Pig

Went to see the new Nicholas Cage movie Pig. It's . . . unlike anything else. 

This isn't gonzo Nick Cage, it isn't action-movie Cage, it isn't "I'll do anything for money" Cage. This is Nicholas Cage the by-God actor, in a movie with a real story about people having real emotions. We thought the other Cages had locked this one in a buried schoolbus in the desert, but he's back.

Oh, and it's about a reclusive ex-chef delving into the seedy underbelly of the Portland restaurant scene in search of his kidnapped truffle-hunting pig. So, yes, there is some weirdness.

I could include a lot of "spoilers" without spoiling it, because it's a movie you watch unfold, driven by sheer interest in what's going on rather than mystery or edge-of-the-seat suspense. Stuff happens, but not the stuff you might expect. There is no paint-the-kitchen-red rampage of revenge. Mr. Cage seldom raises his voice, and spends much of the movie being barely audible. It does go on the list of Great Food Movies, along with Babette's Feast, Tampopo, and Big Night.

Highly recommended.

 

Everything But The Quack

For some reason the local discount club store had ducks for $2.99 a pound. That's cheaper than I've seen duck in a long time, so I got one last time I was there. Diane wanted to try making duck confit, so we thawed the bird and began taking it apart today.

She cut up and partly deboned the duck, and popped the meat into a bag to cook sous vide for about thirty hours. (Confiture is long cooking at low temperature, covered by fat to keep the meat from drying out. Sound familiar? It's sous vide with duck fat instead of a plastic bag. We're just combining the techniques.)

But that's not all. As she finished with the carcass, I took the bits she left. I roasted the bones and skin — which browned them nicely and rendered out about a pint of duck fat. Then most of the roasted bits went into the stock pot, so I can make duck stock, which means duck soup ramen later this week. Some pieces of skin stayed in the oven until brown and crispy, because if you're going to cook a duck, you simply must get some duck cracklings out of it.

Our house certainly does smell good this weekend.

Happy Boxing Day!

The perfect day for a strong Yuletide Punch!

Kitchen Report: Tortillas

The little locally-owned supermarket up in Greenfield has a good selection of Mexican items — I don't mean Mission brand tortillas or Paul Newman salsa, I mean stuff like masa flour, corn husks for making tamales, and big bags of dried beans. This probably has something to do with the fact that this is farm country and we get a lot of seasonal workers on the farms during the growing season. So when I want cornmeal I get the five-pound bag of masa flour. It makes good cornbread and fine polenta.

But I'd never tried making tortillas before. Somehow I had it in my mind that they require a lot of labor. In a way that's true, but the drudgery comes in turning dried corn kernels into finely-ground masa flour. Nowadays we have machines for that, rather than some poor ancient Aztec woman sliding a chunk of stone back and forth. So the only drudgery involved is going to the supermarket for masa flour, and waiting in line at the checkout.

With that step automated, the actual process of making tortillas consists of:

Mix flour with water,

Roll into balls,

Squash the balls flat into tortillas, and

Cook on the griddle. 

It was quick, easy, and the resulting tortillas were sturdy but tender. They tasted a lot better than the premade ones from the store. So I think I'm just going to make them myself from now on.

Kitchen Report: The Elvis

If you suddenly went from poverty to vast wealth, and could have more or less anything you wanted, what would you eat?

Well, if you were Elvis Presley, the King of Rock 'n Roll, you'd have a sandwich. Specifically, a peanut butter-banana-and-bacon sandwich, sometimes on an entire loaf of bread cut lengthwise. 

Today for brunch Diane and I tried our hands at the King's favorite sandwich. I've seen some recipes which call for the whole thing to be fried, but we stuck with two slices of regular toast, two strips of fried bacon cut in half, one sliced banana, and about a tablespoon of peanut butter from a jar. The two of us shared one sandwich. 

It's quite good, really. I think eating more than a half-sized sandwich might quickly turn into a chore, but as a little brunch it was pretty tasty. If we do it again I think I'll sautee the banana slices with the bacon, to give it a little caramelization, and Diane suggested a little brown sugar. At the back of my mind there is also the question of whether some caramelized onion might go well with this, too.

Most people's reaction to the Elvis sandwich is an eye-roll, but I suspect that is partly cultural snobbery. Consider: peanut butter, bananas, and pork are all key ingredients in Southeast Asian cuisine. Make an Elvis sandwich on a baguette with some cilantro and a shot of hot sauce and you could persuade just about anyone that it's an exciting variant version of the Vietnamese banh mi. 

Hmm . . . 

Kitchen Report: Bucatini Alla Flamande

These weeks of enforced leisure have inspired me to go ahead and do some cooking projects I've long put off. I did the first of them this past Saturday, a dish called Bucatini Alla Flamande.

It's a molded pasta dish — you line a pudding basin or a rounded double boiler with semi-cooked bucatini, line the inside with a forcemeat paste, then fill with cooked meat and bechamel sauce, cover with another layer of bucatini, and cook the whole thing over a pot of boiling water for about 45 minutes. When it's done you invert the basin onto a platter and if everything has gone properly, you get a sort of pasta beehive or igloo full of meat.

Bucatini, incidentally, is a long pasta like spaghetti, but it's a hollow tube.

I got the recipe from one of my dependable pasta cookbooks: The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed. It leads of the section on "Special Occasion Dishes" and would definitely be a showstopper if it comes out right.

Making it was quite long and involved. I started the process about four hours before we could eat anything. Admittedly, one of those hours was devoted to making stock, and in the future I'll do that part a few days in advance. After that I made the sauce, essentially a puree of cooked celery-carrot-and-onion with some stock to thin it. So far, so good.

Then I made the "meat paste" — the layer that's supposed to go inside the pasta envelope and seal the cracks like spackle. The recipe was charmingly vague about what meat you should use, so I went with cooked chicken. In future I may try something a bit gummier, like maybe stewing beef. The book was also vague about how much bechamel to incorporate into the paste. I later found another vague recipe on line which did at least give an amount, and I had far underestimated it. So my paste was more like the sauce. In fact, given that it also contained pureed celery-carrot-and-onion, I realized that the meat paste was really supposed to be meat and bechamel with some of the sauce for flavor. In future I'll do it that way, which should knock another half-hour off the cooking time.

Getting the bucatini to coil around the inside of the double boiler bowl was very tricky and involved some swearing, but I finally managed to get it done, and then smeared meat paste (I just love saying "meat paste") all over the inside.

The filling was a mix of chicken, tongue, and ham. The ham dominated the flavor, but it was good so I have no complaints. The tongue added richness (and the leftover tongue became tacos de lengua the next day. I layered in the chopped meat and the remains of the bechamel, then topped with the last of the meat paste and made a flat layer of bucatini for the lid.

Forty-five minutes later it was time to serve. We got it inverted onto a platter in one piece, but had trouble getting the bucatini to leave the bowl (despite a lavish layer of butter). Diane suggested lining the bowl with parchment or foil next time, and I may do that.

And then we ate it all up. No leftovers. It was good, no question. But the ratio of 4 hours preparation to 15 minutes consumption is a little high. If I can get the prep time down to maybe 2 hours I'll try making it again.

What's interesting about the dish is what it doesn't contain: tomatoes. Also almost nothing in the way of herbs or spices, nor any cheese. There's garlic, salt, and pepper. That's all. The main flavors are ham and carrot. It's quite good, but very far from the typical red-gravy southern Italian culinary stereotype. I am inclined to think it may be a very old recipe, from before 1500, although the absence of spices argues against that. Every other Renaissance-era dish I've tried has a ton of saffron, clove, or some such in it.

I confess to a little dissatisfaction with the cookbook. Most of the recipes in The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces are clearly written and appear to have been tested, but I think this one got in through a back door. The author claims to have gotten it from a Neapolitan aristocrat, and I believe her because it reads as if she simply transcribed a handwritten recipe jotted down by someone reconstructing it from memory.

Anyway, now that I have the basic concept down, I may experiment a little. I have the idea that this would make an excellent seafood dish, using some gummy fish like cod for the spackle, and filling it with crabmeat and shrimp, or maybe a chopped lobster tail. The vegetable puree sauce is very much like my father's recipe for Crawfish Alla Nantua, so I think it would do well with crustaceans.

Now that Passover is approaching, Diane has taken over the kitchen, and after the big Seder meal we'll be dining off leftovers for a while. My next big cooking experiment probably won't be for two or three weeks. Watch this space.

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 2

Saturday the 18th was a light-duty day for me, which meant I got to enjoy the con as a member rather than as one of the dancing monkeys. 

Still fighting off my cold, I slept in on Saturday morning, starting my day by having brunch with my CSFW colleague Alexander Jablokow at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Many things of great import were discussed, though I can't quite recall any of them at the moment.

In early afternoon I sat in on a Meetup for gamemasters, discussing techniques, best practices, and resources. I had hoped to find some other gamers from western Massachusetts, but no luck. 

After that I took a turn about the dealer room and the Art Show. The quality of the artwork on display at Arisia is the highest I've seen at any convention since the Worldcon I attended in the summer of 2018.

In the late afternoon I watched a fascinating talk by David Shaw about the future of food. Unlike most studies of this topic, which focus on production, he concentrated on how new technologies and methods are affecting the art of cooking. Nor was this just theory: the talk was illustrated by slides of amazing dishes he himself had prepared. 

Following that I met with author Walter Hunt, chiefly in order to gush about his new novel Harmony in Light, and hear super-secret details of the upcoming sequel. 

After a rest to recharge my batteries, I put on my dancing-monkey costume and led a meetup for writers at 10:00 p.m. They were a great bunch, and I hope to see some of the works-in-progress they talked about during the session. 

And then off to bed and out like a snuffed candle.

 

A secret order of wizards rules the world. One man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate by James L. Cambias is coming to a bookstore near you February 4.