Just The Caffeine Talking

Christmas Menu

Menu for this year's Christmas dinner:

Oyster Patties    Cremant de Bourgogne

Cold Poached Salmon

Onion Soup    Sourdough Rolls

Roast Goose    Chateau Les Grands Sillons 2010

Chestnut Rice    Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Salad

Christmas Pudding    Apple Pie    Ice Cream

Overall it was quite delicious. The pudding will rate its own post soon. The only real flaw was that we planned this dinner for six people, but only three were available to eat it thanks to the Dread Virus. That means we're going to be eating leftovers for the rest of the year. 

Right now the goose skin is rendering for goose fat, the rest of the carcass is simmering for stock, and my son is passed out in a food coma upstairs.

Merry Christmas!

 

A Curious Omission

Dr. Kelly and I went to see Denis Villeneuve's new version of Dune a couple of weeks ago. It was good — the director has shown himself in the past to be a skilled and faithful adapter of science fiction stories to the screen. Good acting, beautiful visuals, a good score . . . 

But no food! It's a little astonishing that a movie made by a Frenchman, set on a planet famed for its spice production, doesn't have any memorable food scenes. We see Paul and his mother eat breakfast in one scene, but not what they're eating. This production won't give Andrew Rea anything to re-create for a Binging With Babish video.

It's particularly disappointing to me because it means the film leaves out one of my favorite scenes from the book: the banquet in Arrakeen. I know why the scene was cut — it's talky, it's full of minor characters who don't play much part in the bigger story, and it's part of a sub-plot the director decided to drop from the screenplay.

Still, it's a pity because we miss the only dishes actually named in the book: langues de lapin de garenne, roast desert hare in sauce cepeda, aplomage sirian, chukka under glass, and "a true pot-au-oie." Translations: lapin de garenne is simply rabbit (odd to have both rabbit and desert hare in the same meal); sauce cepeda sounds like a mushroom sauce but I can't find a reference to it outside of the novel, aplomage may be an extraterrestrial creature — likely from a planet orbiting Sirius — the word to me looks like a kind of featherless bird; chukka is another fictional food; and a pot-au-oie would be potted goose (probably some kind of confit). The rabbit tongues are a particularly decadent-sounding dish, reminiscent of the Roman fondness for parrot tongues in garum. To me, the meal comes across as unpleasantly rich — suitable for a winter feast in a cold climate, but far too heavy for a hot desert setting.

Either Mr. Herbert was trying to convey that the dinner was a display by the Duke, with costly imported food that will impress the rubes; or he was showing that the Atreides have just come from a very different world and their preferred foods are out of place; or he just made up some cool-sounding dishes. My money's on the last option. 

Were I to write that scene, I'd have done things a little differently. For one thing, this is a society in which the nobility are paranoid about poison, which suggests the entrees should all be big common-pot dishes: soups, stews, maybe big baked pasta or rice dishes. Cactus dishes seem appropriate, as would dates. Make a big rabbit pie as the first course, followed by cactus soup, game birds with dates served over couscous, and fresh off-world fruit to inspire awe among the desert planet inhabitants.

Now I have to go start making dinner.

 

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 . . .