Just The Caffeine Talking

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. 

Today's Menu

This year's Thanksgiving feast was an epic one. Five adults, including one teenage boy, means we can paint on a large canvas. The menu:

Oyster Patties

Cremant d'Alsace

Shrimp and Oyster Gumbo with Rice

Turkey Breast Sous Vide with Herbs — Turkey Breast Sous Vide with Harissa

Cote de Roussillon 2014

Cornbread and Oyster Dressing — Gravy

Cranberry Relish — Jellied Cranberry Sauce en Boite

Stuffed Mirlitons — Green Beans Amandine — Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Shaved Carrot Salad

Pecan Pie — Apple Pie

Coffee

Assorted Cheeses

Port

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Ancient Recipes

Very interesting BBC Travel story about re-creating ancient Mesopotamian recipes. Read it here. They include a lamb stew which sounds worth trying. 

The only surprising thing, really, is that anyone should be surprised that people living nearly 4000 years ago ate much the same things their modern descendants do. Food is a bedrock of culture — it's transmitted by families, not governments or schools; it reflects not only the traditions of the people but the land and its products; and foods seldom become obsolete. (I say seldom because it does seem that a lot of people in the Old World cheerfully gave up on turnips once they got their hands on potatoes.) Few regimes in history have been so totalitarian as to attempt to control how their subjects cook (though sadly more than a few have managed to prevent their subjects from getting any food at all).

If I do get around to trying the recipe, I'll write up an after-action report. If anyone else cares to tackle it, please share your results!

Vacation in Prague: Day 7

Over the past forty years of travel I've learned that one should always build in one or two unscheduled days when planning a trip. That way, if something's closed, or it's pouring rain, or someone gets a kidney stone, you have a little cushion so there's still time for all the things you wanted to do. And if there are no problems, then you've got a bonus day to spend as you wish.

Saturday the 20th was our bonus day.

In the morning Diane and I went out to a Farmers' Market, which was a bit disappointing. The food on display was lovely and impeccably clean, but all of it was obviously grown far from Bohemia, and it was all packaged for immediate consumption. No ingredients. I have no doubt that there is an actual farmers' market in Prague (probably several), but I expect it's out in the periphery someplace, easier for farm trucks to reach but probably much less scenic.

We did get some fruit for breakfast and took it back to the flat, along with some croissants from a bakery we passed along the way. After eating and showering the three of us set out a couple of hours later with two vague goals: find a thumb drive for Diane to use at the biology conference which was the whole reason we came to Prague, and possibly look in at the cinema museum.

Our course took us southeast, toward Wenceslaus Square (which is really a boulevard) and the more modern, trendy part of Prague. En route we stopped for lunch at a restaurant/pub called "Lokal" which has apparently been serving up the same hearty grub and beer since the 1920s (to judge by the decor). It has the "beloved and unchanging local institution" feel of a classic diner or a Southern cafeteria. Dumplings were had.

We gave up on the cinema museum, after determining that none of us was really enthusiastic about the plan. After that we just sort of wandered, looking for a thumb drive. In the U.S., one can find them for sale at most office-supply shops, department stores, and supermarkets, but apparently the Czechs only sell them at dedicated electronics stores. I don't know if there's not as much demand, or whether Czech computer users are more devoted to "cloud storage." It's not the sort of question one can ask easily.

We did see some lovely interwar department store buildings, with glass roofs and Art Deco sculptures. It appears that independence and the triumph of Modernism don't seem to have put a damper on Czech architects' love of putting statues on buildings, it just made the results more streamlined.

With a drive in hand we navigated homeward by dead reckoning, stopping along the way to get the gloppiest Prague treat: Trdelniks filled with ice cream. Trdelniks are a kind of cake or brioche wrapped around a cylinder and cooked over an open fire. I've found a couple of Web sites angrily asserting that they're not a traditional Czech dish but rather some rank imposture from Slovakia. Anyway, they're pretty good plain, and when filled with soft-serve they're . . . pretty messy. Imagine a giant ice-cream cone with a big hole in the bottom ineffectually plugged by a small cookie.

And that's about it for our trip. We spent the evening packing and getting checked in for our flight home. Robert and I handed all our spare Kroners to Diane to use during the week-long biology conference, and the next morning he and I got a cab to the airport. Sixteen hours later we were home.

Next Time: Impressions and Reflections.

Vacation in Prague: Day 6

Another late start on Friday the 19th — didn't leave the flat until past 11 a.m. The adventurers crossed the river again and braved the Prague light-rail transit system for the first time. Since most of our previous explorations had been within the rail-less Old Town section, we hadn't bothered. One purchases tickets at tobacconist shops and then use a scanner aboard the tram to activate them. This is a common system in Europe; in Naples one can only get subway tickets at the tobacco stand even inside the main train station. We managed to work out how to use the scanner on the tram with the help of a young Czech couple with a cute baby and matching hairstyles (kind of a Mohawk gathered into a ponytail). The young woman even gave up her seat to this aged tourist, so you can be sure I took the opportunity to yield it back at the next stop to the first even slightly middle-aged looking lady who boarded.

Our tram route involved a longish detour with a hairpin bend and a curve around to the north of Prague Castle, because of course streetcars don't handle steep inclines well. Our destination was actually off to the southwest of the castle: Strahov Monastery.

What with locating a tobacconist's shop and figuring out the tram system, we didn't reach the monastery until noon, which is when it closed for an hour so that the monks could celebrate Mass in the chapel. So we had a leisurely lunch at the restaurant next door. Bread dumplings were present.

The monastery had two main attractions we were hot to see. There is Yet Another Baroque Library Hall — two of them, in fact, one all dark wood, the other plasterwork and gilding. Gorgeous. As at the Klementinum, visitors could only look in at the doorway because a thousand people a day breathing on the books would turn the whole place into a mess of mildew in short order.

The other draw is the Cabinet of Wonders. This is a little museum of curiosities, mostly from the 17th and 18th Centuries. It's a mix of natural history, anthropology, and art. They've got some Egyptian statuary and a sarcophagus (sadly most of the Egyptiana was off-exhibit), a few Chinese porcelain figures and bronzes, a suit of chain mail from someplace, and a small cannon. The natural-history collection has lots of shells, a narwhal horn, two "elephant trunks" which our reproductive-physiology expert identified as whale penises, lots of fish skins, a couple of crocodiles, and some interesting rocks.

It's not really worthwhile as a museum itself; but as a historical exhibit about what an early private museum would have been like it's wonderful. Between the Cabinet of Wonders and the two gonzo libraries, the Strahov Monastery is the perfect lair for a fantasy-novel wizard or school of magic.

We decided to stroll back rather than take the tram, as it was all downhill and we wanted to see more of the left bank of the Vltava. That plan was interrupted by rain almost as soon as we got out of the monastery, so we took refuge in a cafe long enough to have dessert and wait out the worst of the downpour.

Our route back took us across the Charles Bridge, which is one of Prague's most popular sights. I don't know why. It's a nice old bridge with lovely statues of saints and the life of Christ — but you can't really look at the statues or the bridge, or admire the view from the bridge because at any given time there's something like two thousand other people on the bridge taking selfies and complaining about how crowded the bridge is.

At the Old Town end of the bridge we did see a gentleman showing off his big boa constrictors. One was simply big but the other was immense — five meters long, at least. Both snakes got a lot of attention, and the biggest one definitely seemed to be posing for the cameras.

Napped at our flat again — I heartily recommend a mid-afternoon nap while traveling; it breaks the day up into two distinct phases and keeps you from dragging around and snapping at one another. In the evening we had a ramble about the square and stopped at one of the open-air cafes to share a plate of salmon sandwiches and drink a glass of wine.

A note about drinks: Prague is famous for beer, but I'm not one of those people who can discourse for hours about the differences among porter, ale, and stout. The beer was good, even the stuff our local contacts disparaged. My beer tastes were formed in America in the 1980s — the last gasp of the regional German-name breweries in the U.S. before the rise of craft brews and hipsters going on about hops. The Czech brews reminded me a lot of those beers (it's no coincidence that "Budweiser" is named for a town in Bohemia), and that was fine with me.

With wine I can be a bit of a snob. I did my best to stick to locally-grown wine while we were in Prague. Czech wines are sweeter than the western European and New World vintages I normally drink (I don't know why wines get sweeter as you go east), but they were pretty good. Or at least the white wines were; since it was hot summer weather we didn't really want any reds. If I ever go back to Prague I may try to work in a visit to some local wineries, to get a better sense of what Czech growers are doing. But if you go, I recommend trying the local product.

Next time: Not Much!