4 posts tagged “cooking”
It seems, in addition to identifying trends, the Times is good for delicious recipes.
I came across a piece last week that peeked my interest greatly. The recipe, by Mark Bittman, who is my new favorite person, is a shrimp ragu centering on the idea that shrimp shells are full of flavor, and tossing them out is a big mistake. Unfortunately, cooking shrimp in the shells causes major annoyance when it comes time to, you know, eat them. The solution here is to boil the shells in water to create a stock, and then use that to make the sauce.
(I stupidly forgot to grab the permalink to this piece all last week, but here it is in the archive. You have to pay for it now, which sucks. My fault, guys.)
When I first found this piece, I watched the accompanying instructional video about 40 times, the first handful of which I did on an empty stomach, both a terrible and unavoidable decision. I was sufficiently affected and decided to give it a try. I usually don't follow recipes, but in this case the dish looked delish, so I ran with it. Last Tuesday I resolved to undertake the endeavor. Wendy had returned that day from a harrowing trip to LA and it seemed an appropriate time, despite Wendy's assertion that "You don't have to make me a fancy ragu."
The first problem was buying shrimp. I went to the supermarket after work, having no knowledge of the whereabouts of my local fish market, and completely dispossessed of the desire to wander the streets of Albany looking for one. The recipe calls for shrimp "as fresh as you can get them," but I'm not some wide-eyed innocent; I know that, at the supermarket, they just open up the bags of frozen shrimp and put them out with the fresh fish. This is a concession I had decided to make. It is my cross to bear.
This, sadly, turned out to be just the beginning of the thing. The extent of my knowledge about shrimp, outside of this article about the shells, comes from an episode of Good Eats I caught one time like two years ago. I meant to cook something with shrimp ever since, but never got around to it. So there I was, faced with different sized shrimp, sure, but also shrimp that were differentiated using some bizarre numbering system (fractions? does anyone know what these mean?) for which I was not prepared. I picked ones that looked like they were the same size as the ones in the video. The kid working the fish counter then informed me that the shrimp on display are slightly more frozen than the ones in the bags, and I should get those. I felt so guilty, and decided, if I ever meet Mark Bittman, I'm not going to tell him.
After the selection process, the hardest part was over. This is an impressive looking meal that is dead easy to make. I shelled the shrimp and boiled the shells for like ten minutes with cayenne pepper and salt. Meanwhile, I started the skillet with olive oil (basis for life) and onions. Chopping onions is a huge problem for me, as I apparently have sensitive eyes, but Wendy uncovered a secret: if you light candles around where you're chopping, it cuts down on the effect. Where did she get this information? You guessed it: Martha Stewart.
My one major deviation from the original recipe was the omission of carrots. I hate carrots in cooking. In fact, when someone has one of those bags of carrots, I'll always want to eat one, and then when I do, I end up thinking, "Why am I doing this? It tastes like crunchy water." I subbed in an orange bell pepper to maintain the color, and it gave the sauce a sort of crisp sweetness that was great. From there it was just a matter of combining everything. I added a cup of the stock (and froze the rest for making risotto next week, you damn well better believe), diced tomatoes, fresh oregano. Then I chopped up most of the shrimp, which creates sort of a paste-like situation which will be the bulk of the sauce. Everything gets fried for just like ten minutes, then I added the remaining whole shrimp, which acts as sort of a garnish.
The problem with this particular meal was two-fold: one, Stephanie came over, and, being a strict vegetarian, doesn't eat shrimp, and two, the whole time I was cooking, she and Wendy were watching Top Chef. But, no pressure, of course.
I ended up improvising Stephanie's portion of pasta with a bunch of butter, some lemon pepper, and wheat germ. Steph and Wendy are crazy for wheat germ. They have a hand motion for it. I was impressed with my own minimalism, but Steph ended up going to the kitchen for some "more spicing." I can't blame her, I had enormous guilt about her dish as it was.
I hope it won't sound immodest to say that the meal was excellent, and I hope it won't come as a surprise to anyone that it was really not that good for lunch the next day.
You remember how high-concept my last Adventures in Cooking entry was? This is the exact opposite of that.
Last night I went to Bombers for Trivia Night (traumatic) with Mackey and, after an hour of waiting for a table, decided to just go downstairs and eat. We were both wearing awesome new shirts of my own design which caught the attention of the girl at the register. So, clearly, when the girl found herself with two useless orders of barbecue tofu fries (made for vegans but accidentally with cheese), she offered them to us. I absolutely love their tofu fries, and thought this to be a most fortuitous circumstance. Having already ordered dinner, I saved them for lunch.
Come lunch time today, Katie called and asked if I wanted to hang and I told her to meet me at the house, as I had leftovers to heat. She ended up having other lunch plans after our meeting, which alleviated any pressure I might have felt to prepare anything presentable.
I was headed to the microwave with the fries when Katie suggested that, for optimum deliciousness, I might want to heat them in a skillet. I had to agree.
For those uninitiated among us, the Bombers barbecue tofu fries are a miraculous creation consisting of rice, fries, tofu, cheese, and barbecue sauce. It is, in the words of one of the cooks working in the kitchen last night, "Everything tofu is not supposed to be. It's awesome."
When I had buttered a skillet ("Yeah sure, why not?" says Katie. "What isn't good to grease up?") I tried -- I want to emphasize that word, tried -- to put the fries in. I turned the cardboard bowl upside down, and the concoction stuck to it. I started trying to pry it out and ended up with a motion that is much more akin to peeling the bowl off. It landed in the skillet in one large brick.
As Katie and I poked at the brick with plastic spoons, we mused on the force that could possibly have fused the ingredients together in such a manner. Katie wondered if it was frozen, but since it was only in the refrigerator, and only overnight, this seemed a remote possibility. I was slightly disturbed when we realized that the only real explanation was that it was the cheese that was holding everything together so tightly.
Being as I was on a schedule, I had to settle for an only partially broken-down form of the meal. Many small chunks of fries remained, but I figured it wasn't the end of the world.
The real problem is that you can't reheat fries; you can't really reheat any potatoes, for that matter. When you do, it has to be in the oven, spread out on a tray, baked, because the best you can hope for is crispiness. You will never be able to preserve the integrity of an originally soft french fry.
Unfortunately, I couldn't bake the fries in this situation, as it would dry out the sauce and possibly even burn the cheese, and anyway there was no time. The resulting flavor was less than stellar. At best, it was passable. Everything was dry and sort of flavorless, and the fries themselves had that weird sogginess that's really more like floppiness.
The moral here is simple: you can't reheat fries, you certainly can't reheat fries with a whole bunch of other stuff on them. It's a delicate balance that has been struck between ingredients here, and it's beyond your power to maintain it.
I guess if this had to happen, it's good that they were free, but I don't know, it seems like an awful waste of a lucky break.
Following my first "Adventures in Cooking" entry, I found myself faced with the problem of any talented young writer: hype. Fernando's enthusiastic love of the entry was both unexpected and flattering, but it created a probably unnecessary pressure in my mind to continue to write interesting entries in this series. If not for this, I would have probably kept writing about sandwiches and stuff forever.
As things stand, I didn't know what to do. I made my usual meat stew last week, which Wendy said was among my best, but it wasn't anything I could write about. It would probably be at least a little interesting to other people, but to me, it was same old same old. Despite Wendy's encouragement, I felt struck down.
The following day, I hatched a plan to create my most ambitious meal to date. I would execute it on Friday.
When Friday came along, I phoned Wendy to see what she was planning for dinner. This would usually be just a formality, as Wendy doesn't ever make plans for dinner until she talks to me. In this case, however, Wendy informed me that she had already eaten a bowl of cereal, and she would really be fine for the evening. I was distraught. Upon hearing that I had been planning a dinner for three days, Wendy amended her previous statement, assuring me she would be totally hungry for dinner.
Slightly discouraged but way too determined, I stopped at the supermarket and made my way home. The meal would consist of breaded salmon, spaghetti, and cream sauce, which was the real highlight.
First I handled the salmon, which was probably a bad idea, because it didn't need that long to cook and I didn't anticipate the preparation time of the sauce. This is always my biggest problem when cooking. I wasn't fooled by the farm-raised salmon, which cost three times as much for considerably smaller pieces, and, you know, is raised on corn. I squeezed a lemon over them (totally had time this time) and then added a light layer of mayonnaise to hold the bread. Then I sprinkled a bit of rosemary and added the bread crumbs, which were themselves seasoned (which I'm not necessarily crazy about, but it does save some time). I popped them in the oven and was on to the sauce.
The sauce was the main result of my blogging insecurities. I'm kind of adept at tomato sauces, but who cares? I decided to go to the other end of the spectrum. I started the thing out with heavy cream, not milk, cause I don't fuck around. I added some butter and proceed to stir confusedly.
I have this thing when I cook: I always forget one main element. It seems ridiculous when it's pointed out, but in the moment I truly have no idea what I'm missing. In this case, the sauce was staying a liquid and I was getting agitated. I imagine that it would have been a pretty hilarious sight when I exasperatedly ran over to the fridge and threw what was left of the stick of butter into the sauce, which was ultimately a really good idea.
When I called Wendy in for assistance, of course what it turned out I had been missing was a thickening agent of some kind. I added in a bit of flour and was back on track. I had Wendy stir, and also add just a bit of parmesan shaky-cheese, while I diced up the herbs. I used fresh chives, oregano, and parsley, but when I say fresh I mean from the supermarket, which, once again, eh.
Once I added those I was almost home. I sprinkled some lemon pepper in and turned the heat down to simmer. Once again, I did this whole thing out of order, because I should have been boiling the water for spaghetti this whole time. I kept the sauce on low heat, kept stirring, and it was fine in the end, but it should have really been done maybe ten or fifteen minutes earlier.
When I served the dinner, it was decidedly more impressive looking than anything I'd ever made. It was an amazingly rich taste, probably resulting from the extra butter, but it worked magnificently. Insecurities met and demolished, I headed out for an evening of rock and roll which I previously described.
For the next installment, I'll lower the bar again by making a sandwich or something.
Inspired in no small part by the bacon blog maintained by Chris Onstad, creator of Achewood, I have decided to document some of my kitchen experiments here in the blog. Where this will go, and how much people will want to read it, is difficult to see.
Since Wendy and I moved in to the Pinnacle last year, I have started doing some serious research into cooking. My mother is a master chef of the old-country style: everything she cooks is amazing, and she either didn't notice or doesn't care to tell you how she made it. After years of begging her, she finally taught me how to make a simple meat stew, and my success with that encouraged her to teach me the most complicated dishes in the catalog, like okra stew and, the mother of all Arabic cooking, dijaj souba, chicken so distinctive that it's named after our obscure ethno-religious group. After I was able to make that my mom pretty much turned me loose to fill in everything in the middle. I still call her for details, but I've taken to just figuring stuff out on my own.
Today's installment is pretty mundane, but, you know, it happened today, so, whatever. I ran home on my lunch break to post a MySpace bulletin about a show tonight, and then had to figure out lunch in ten minutes. I opened the fridge and was greeted by week-old bean dip which had not been lidded in any way, fruit salad, and similarly useless items. With certainly no time to defrost meats or even make pasta, I started to panic. Then I remembered the sardines.
A few weeks ago, much to Wendy's protestation, I picked up a tin of King Oscar sardines in water. My grandmother seems to subsist purely on sardines and eggs, and the prospect always intrigued me. Aside from their reference in one of my favorite Radiohead songs, I didn't have much context for them. But I was fascinated, and at $1.19 I couldn't really pass up the chance to try -- if nothing else, the cats would love to eat them. Plus, can you think of a more aesthetically pleasantly packaged food item? It looks like something out of Tintin. Despite Wendy's marked disapproval and facial expression to match, I left the store with sardines.
During the intervening time, Wendy asked a few times if I planned to eat them, I think more because she didn't like knowing they were in the pantry than anything else. But I was waiting for the right time. Today, I knew that time had come.
I threw some toast in the toaster and cracked open the tin. It wasn't the prettiest sight, but fish never really is. I had to stay focused; the seal was broken and I didn't have time to wish-wash. I started a frying pan with some olive oil and salt and unloaded the sardines. I gave one to the Rev, to sort of thank him for hanging out in the kitchen with me while this was going on.
I fried the fish for a couple of minutes with a mysterious spice that is called in Arabic sum'ag and in English your guess is as good as mine. It's a tangy spice, good for chicken but most often used in fish. It's more of a table garnish, but I wanted to see if I could catch some of its flavor in the cooking. I didn't labor the point, much as my grandmother does speak highly of a nice crispy sardine, as, once again, I had to get back to work. I rushed to shut everything down and started constructing myself a sandwich. I used a touch more sum'ag, sliced a tomato, and, bereft of lemon juice and in no mood to slice a lemon, topped the whole thing with some lime juice. And let me tell you something, friends: it was glorious.
Aside from the sweet knowledge that I was right, I was imbued with a world of possibilities: if sardines are this good alone, what else can you do with them? Though I prefer to figure things out on my own (and don't really have the attention span to stick to instructions), I do frequently look up recipes to get some starting ideas. Behold the vast expanses of potential sardine-centric meals! I am practically giddy.
I toyed with the idea of digging in to a glass of Marques de Caceres Rioja Crianza, but decided that it was bad enough to go back to work smelling like fish.
