foodie douche bag

The first bite of this didn’t blow me away, but around bite four or five I realized how really solid this recipe is.

The intro to the recipe reads:

Skirt steak has a deep beefy flavor that can really stand up to bold spices, so I take this inexpensive , easy-to-find cut and hit it with lots of garlic and a little honey to rev up the carmelization

That’s a good intro, but it fails to note the citrusy flavors which also really work.

The marinade is

• crushed red pepper rehydrated in boiling water
• orange juice
• lime juice
• honey
• soy sauce
• white onion
• 10 garlic cloves
• salt
• cumin
• oregano

I trimmed the steaks a bit, then put them in the marinade for 24 hours (though the recipe says just 1-3).

The steaks are removed from the marinade, patted dry, then rubbed with

• ancho chile powder
• garlic salt
• black pepper
• lemon pepper (I used dried lemon peel)

The steaks are then cooked on the griddle for 2 minutes each side, removed, and dredged in

• butter
• cilantro
• lemon juice
• worchestire sauce
• garlic
• red pepper flakes
• oil

…and then returned to the griddle.

Mmmm.

A. Maybe even A+.

We made marinated ribeye steaks and grilled vegetables. I forget where the recipe came from.

A- as I recall. Because, honestly: rib-eye!

The stand-out cooking event of the last few weeks was clearly the mousaka, dolmades, and tzatziki from The Parthenon Cookbook.

This dinner almost killed us. I think I started cooking around 5pm one day and at around 8:30 we decided to put it all on hold and grab a pizza.

Again we had the fractal recipes situation that we’ve run into once or twice before.

The mousaka is like Greek lasagna, with the role of the pasta played the fried slices of eggplant.

So we peel and slice the eggplant, then soak it in water for an hour to remove the bitterness. Then we fry the eggplant – in small batches, so we don’t drop the oil temperature too much. The eggplant gets layered in a caserole with a meat mixture (sub recipe #1 …or is it 2?). Ground beef and lamb are browned with onion and garlic and spices. Also layered into the caserole is a Greek goat cheese. Splashed over the whole thing we have a Greek red sauce (using tomato paste instead of canned tomatoes…interesting). Then a mornay sauce (inexactly called a bechemal sauce) goes on top.

After that’s assembled it cooks in the oven for an hour or so.

Along side all of this I was making dolmades, which are beef and lamb meatballs (with lots of freshly ground spices, milk, onions, rice, etc.) wrapped in grape leaves, then simmered for an hour in water. Some of the cloudy water is reserved and used to make a whipped-egg-white / lemon juice foam sauce. Tons of work: soaking the grape leaves, unrolling them one by one, portioning out each amount of mix, wrapping in the leaves, making the sauce by seperating eggs, whipping the whites, folding the yolks in, etc. To do that much work and have a result which is bland in taste and offputting in texture is quite frustrating.

I give the mousaka an A, maybe an A+. Very filling, very solid, perfectly spiced.

I give the dolmades a C- at best. Very flat tasting and uninteresting. A ton of work.

The tzatziki, which is like most other recipes but has red wine vinegar, was good. An A-.

We’ve been cooking a lot of big-chunks-of-meat recently.

The beef skewers with piquillo steak sauce (Bobby Flay’s recipe in Food & Wine’s Best of the Best 12 ) got an A-, and that’s even with me shortening the marinade time to less than half an hour.

The marinade of sherry, garlic, mustard, horseradish, honey and mollasses wasn’t magic, but it was good.

From Food & Wine’s Best of the Best Cook Recipes vol 13(or as I call it “BOB 13″), I made chorizo sliders with potato sticks and apricot-ketchup sauce.

Meh.

It was like Mexican sloppy joes.

“Oooh, I know, let’s add two kinds of paprika to some ground meat, that’ll make it Mexican!”

If I was stuck standing in line at the supermarket while the old pensioner ahead of me was trying to figure out how many Canadian nickels add up to one American dollar, saw “Cosmo” and a headline article “24 new things to do to your man with your tongue”, looked around, saw a disproving school marm behind me, and instead picked up Redbook, or Better Homes and Gardens, or some such soccer mom swill, I wouldn’t be shocked to find this recipe there, and after I cooked it I’d be inclined to say “Not bad…for Redbook” with condescension dripping from the last word.

But Food & Wine?

WT*, man?

Apparently it’s an excerpt from this book: Simply Mexican by Lourdes Castro.

Two points:

1) Never trust a skinny cook. [ Oooh, I just wrote a really funny paragraph here but then I had to delete it. Because, you know, rule four. ]

2) Actually, BOB 13 claims that this isn’t even a recipe from the book, but a Food & Wine exclusive. I can picture the scene: this poor woman has worked her butt off over three years to midwife the book to the finish line, and just when she’s about done Food & Wine calls up and says “hey, we’ll give your book an extra boost by featuring it to all our foodie consumers, but you’ve gotta write an exclusive recipe for us.” And she’s all “what? I just took 12 aspirin and half a bottle of Jack to celebrate slash recuperate, and – oh, wait, you said publicity? OK, try this !@#$ on for size: it’s a hamburger…um…with paprika. And – get this – the French fries – uh, I mean, pomme frites – they’re on the inside. Also…um….apricot sauce. Yeah, that’s it. Hey, are you still on the line? OK, send over a courier. This mother-!@#$ing bottle went empty, and I need a new one. …and make sure that little !@#$ is hot! I’m talking California-pool-boy hot!”

That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

Anyway. B. Casas y Gardenias, man.

Also: roasted eggplant with tahini. From Food and Wine Best of the …um … BOB 12.

Meh.

Not bad.

Another B.

I liked the tahini flavor, but there was no complexity there. It was sorta yummy, but if you got served this at a Mediterranean restaurant, you’d tell your friends “tastes like they’re cooking recipes out of Redbook”.

Thank you very much. Tip your servers. I’m here all week!

Jennifer wanted to have some more Moroccan, specifically lamb, so I went back to Mourad and flipped through the index. Four or five lamb recipes to choose from, but we didn’t want to get too spendy, so we picked one that called from ground lamb.

The recipe was “grilled kefta”, which are kebabs that hold grapes and spiced mini-beef/lamb meatballs (recipe #1: p 139).

The meatballs have

• beef
• lamb
• salt
• paprika
• cumin
• white pepper
• cayenne
• onion
• parsley’s
• cilantro
• tarragon
• garlic
• egg yolk

As I’ve gotten foody-er and douchy-er over the past few years I’ve moved to buying and keeping more of my spices in whole form and only grinding them by hand with a mortar and pestle as they’re needed. Yes, I can tell the difference. No, it’s not too much more. No, the tools aren’t expensive (I use this granite one which cost me less than $20 and is stunningly robust.

The grilled kefta is served with a salad of julienned cucumbers and red bell pepper (recipe #2: p 140).

The salad is relatively simple:

• cucumbers, peeled and seeded, then julienned
• red bell pepper, seeded, then julienned
• tossed with dressing
• sesame seeds

The dressing (recipe #3: p 141) consists of

• cilantro
• parser
• olive oil
• red wine vinegar
• champagne vinegar
• salt
• cumin
• black pepper
• cayenne
• sugar
• garlic puree (recipe #4: p 360)
• toasted sesame oil

No fancy technique, just your normal emulsion.

No, I didn’t have to shop for any of this, yes, I do have multiple varieties of vinegar on hand.

The salad was quite good – it reminded me of a more earthy version of your typical Japanese restaurant seaweed salad. The cumin, sesame oil, and sesame seeds worked great together.

The garlic puree is just mushed up garlic confit which I prepared in advance:

• 3 cups of garlic cloves, simmered in
• 2 cups of olive oil

The salad, the dressing, and the skewers are all served on a plate together, with a garnish of pickled pearl onions (recipe #5: p 363) and Harrissa sauce (recipe #6: p 83).

The pearl onions are pickled in a brine made with

• sugar
• champagne vinegar
• cinnamon sticks
• water
• pink peppercorns
• star anise
• licorice root
• green cardamom pods
• black cardamom pods
• tellicherry peppercorns
• chiles de arbol
• mace
• cloves
• bay leaf

Bring the brine to a boil, then cool, pour over the onions, and let rest for a day or a month.

The onions were interesting. A strange flavor combination (the licorice like taste really brought home the foreignness), but I liked it.

The harrissa sauce is a tomato or pepper based sauce (I went with the tomato version) that’s cooked then stored:

• tomatoes
• water
• cumin
• salt
• black pepper
• cayenne
• paprika
• sugar
• champagne vinegar
• garlic
• parsley
• cilantro
• olive oil

Nice and spicy! Jennifer had just a bit, but I slathered it on. It was not entirely unlike a really earthy sriracha sauce. Yum.

All in all, rating for this meal: A, verging on A+.

Because we’d done so much prep in the days ahead (making the harrissa, the pickled pearl onions, and the garlic confit) we were able to start cooking as soon as I got home from work at 7:30pm and be eating by 8:30.

Proper Prior Planning, etc. !

…is coming along.

The second rise begins now.

I’ve blogged about my primary spice rack, which holds 63 different spices, and about the second spice rack I built, which holds another 30 jars.

…but then there’s also the pull out drawer in the pantry which holds all of the overstock.

Back when I didn’t cook much I’d buy a jar of cinnamon and it would still be around a decade later.

…but when you cook a ton, you end up saying things like “are we out of fennel seed already? It seems like I bought this jar just last month!”

So I now buy spices in bulk and refill my jars as they run empty.

…and here’s the collection.

Note that it’s not yet in TJIC-approved-OCD-style: it’s not alphabetical, there are no dividers, I want to build a low-walled box with a central strip to keep the rows from sloshing together, etc.

For a week or two I’ve been taking it easy in the kitchen: cooking old standards, but not doing much new.

This week we’re getting back to exploring new stuff.

Tomorrow we’re making a cod-and-potato based chowder that Jennifer learned in a Revolutionary-era historical cooking reenacting class a while back.

To go with that we thought a dark rye might be nice.

I love the “NYT no-knead bread” recipe, and checked out the inventor’s book today while on a coffee run. His rye bread is the same exact recipe, except substituting 3/4 of a cup of wheat flour for rye. I’ll pick up his book at some point but I wasn’t feeling particularly pecunious today. I like my rye bread like I like my men – wait, no, that’s not right.

Anyway, I do like dark rye bread, so I added two tablespoons of mollasses to the mix.

Tomorrow for dinner we’re going to have grilled kefta (small grilled beef-and-lamb meatballs) from Mourad. This recipe is fractal. To start, it’s got three parts: the kefta, a cucumber salad, and a cilantro dressing.

Then the parts have parts. One part calls for galic confit, and another for pickled pearl onions.

So Jennifer and I smashed six or seven heads of garlic, then peeled each of the cloves.

I’ve had some success with this method

in the past, but today I only had two small bowls (all of my large mixing bowls were in use) and it didn’t work too well.

Anyway, three or so cups of peeled garlic got covered with olive oil, then simmered for a bit shy of half an hour.

The next fractal recipe subcomponent was the pickled pearl onions.

I brought to a boil

• champagne vinegar
• water
• sugar
• cinnamon
• pink peppercorns (didn’t have; skipped)
• star anise
• licorice root (didn’t have; used fennel)
• caradmom pods (didn’t have; used cadamom)
• tellicherry peppercorns
• chiles de arbol
• mace
• cloves
• bay leaves

then cooled the mixture, then poured it over the onions.

Whew!

The next fractal sub-sub-recipe is the harrissa – our choice of either “smoky” or “quick”. Quick, being the easier recipe, has only 13 ingredients.

The apparently better tasting recipe, the “smoky” harrissa, has more.

After I get the harrissa made sometime tomorrow we’ll be all set…to make the three recipes that make up dinner.

Whew!

Made from scratch:

• Pulled pork
• BBQ sauce
• white bread
• cole slaw
• pickles

The only way this could have gotten more back-to-the-land is if we raised the pig and harvested the wheat ourselves!

Pork: a 6 lb shoulder and a cup or two of water in a crockpot for 24 hours, with BBQ sauce added a few hours before dinner.

BBQ sauce: A few garlic cloves minced and browned in oil, then ketchup, cider vinegar, chili powder, chipotle pepper, and smoked hot Hungarian paprika

White bread: the no-knead recipe, sliced and toasted under a broiler

cole slaw: from Joy of Cooking: cabbage sliced on the deli slicer, then mayo, vinegar, dill seed, caraway seed, and celery seed

pickles: don’t know – Jennifer made these. Maybe she’ll leave a comment.

Ratings:

• Pulled pork: B+
• BBQ sauce: A-
• white bread: A
• cole slaw: A
• pickles: A

There was nothing wrong with the pulled pork – B+ is a seriously good grade. It just failed to be the utter best pulled pork I’ve ever had in my life. Personally, I think that for a very first try, and making it in a crock pot, B+ is a stunningly good grade.

Anyway, the meal as a whole ROCKED. Will make again.