yeschef

Eeny Meeny Chili Beanie

14 Apr 2013 1 Comment

by yeschef in beans, leftovers and lunches, on hand, wild turkey

There was one other thing in the pork marinade: ginger. Normally, for something like this, I’d use fresh ginger, but I didn’t have any and I didn’t buy any during last Saturday’s shopathon. What I do have, however, is ginger syrup (and, sometimes, crystallized ginger that’s a by-product of the syrup), so I used that, and didn’t put any extra sugar in the marinade. I used the same basic marinade last night, with some wild turkey breast, and it was awesome. The changes: all chicken broth and no wine, plus more sage.

What this made me think about, though, is how to stock one’s fridge and pantry–and I realized that I may not be able to give anyone very much advice about it. A few of the things I have on hand–tamarind paste, anyone?–I purchased for a very specific purpose (in this case, pad thai, though I have used it for other things), and it continues to hang around. It’s probably not going to go bad, even if it isn’t in its absolutely ideal state, and I might use it again sometime, so I keep it. I have a few spices like that, too.

What I can say, though, is that the thing that most helps me is having things on hand, and the thing that can be the enemy is anything that requires timing. Thus, yesterday’s Bean Extravaganza. I have used canned beans quite happily for most of my life–there are some decent brands out there, and you can get low-sodium versions or can rinse off the canned beans. Canned beans aren’t going to go bad, so I would stock up when they were on sale. Lately, though, I’ve been experimenting with dried beans (years later than the rest of the world . . .), and they’re a perfect example of something that requires both time and timing. Ideally, they should be soaked for 6 to 8 hours, which means if I want to cook beans I need to put them to soak the night before, or first thing in the morning, if I’m going to be cooking later in the day. They then need to cook for awhile before I can put them in anything else.

My solution to this is to just cook a lot of beans, and then freeze what I don’t use immediately. Thus, yesterday I cooked garbanzos, white beans, and black beans, as well as some green lentils to use with the garbanzos for that dish I linked to last post. The black beans will go in some chili later today, along with some wild turkey, and a bunch of the beans will go in the freezer. I think the garbanzos that didn’t go in the lentl and garbanzo thing will go in the freezer.

And the white beans–oh, the white beans–they are awesome. I cooked a couple of cloves of garlic and some chopped fresh sage in some olive oil, on relatively modest heat, until the garlic had softened, and then mushed it up a bit til it was barely golden. I scraped the beans–maybe two cups cooked?–and the garlic, sage, and olive oil, and a sprinkle of salt into the food processor, and turned it into a bean dip. It is extremely tasty. And the rest of the white beans? Into the freezer, until I get around to making some more of the tomato and bean thing. The upshot of it is that I will have the equivalent of 5 or 6 cans of beans in the freezer.

There’s one last thing–I needed lemon juice, but not lemon peel and I hate wasting lemon peel. I cut the peels off and scraped away the pith, and I will eventually candy it, but meanwhile I just put the peels in some water until I can get to that. The principle is the same as with the ginger and the beans. Rather than just trying to make “enough” for a given meal, I make batches of things, extra, knowing that it will eventually pay off. It expands what I have available on hand, and it reduces waste.

Meanwhile, though, it’s time to make the chili.

When You Have Lemons

07 Apr 2013 Leave a comment

by yeschef in baking, on hand, pork, wild turkey

Remember all that cooking I said I was going to do? Remember with what the road to hell is paved? Yeah. That.

A lot of the weekend was spent in preparation for cooking more than actual cooking, and the things I did do in the kitchen were an object lesson in how my mind works, i.e., having one thing on hand led to using up something else. There was a massive errand adventure yesterday, including to the grocery store, where I stocked up on dried legumes of various sorts (white beans, garbanzos, and french green lentils, to be used for, respectively, white bean, garlic and sage dip, hummus, and this recipe, which sounded awesome and useful for lunches). I also ended up with a bag of lemons–partly because of this purple potato recipe (yes, I do like a lot of Deb’s recipes, at least as a starting point), which I intended for last night’s dinner, because I cut off the rest of the parsley from my window boxes and that seemed like a good use for it, and I knew I had some shallots from the farm share that wouldn’t last much longer.

As a result of the lemons on hand, I made a quick pistachio cake from one of my Moosewood cookbooks, though I subbed honey for sugar in both the cake and the syrup, and I used sour cream instead of yogurt, because I had purchased sour cream for the cake I’m making tomorrow. I picked the pistachio cake to use up a bunch of the pistachios that were hanging around in the fridge, and I liked the cake well enough that I’ll use up the rest of the pistachios, and more lemons, with another round of the cake.

Dinner was pretty awesome, actually. I made the beer-braised cabbage with mustard (another cabbage down!), but I used chicken stock instead of beer because we were having wine with dinner. The purple potatoes were also quite good. Finally, I still had two pork chops in the freezer, from last year’s farmers’ market; one of the vendors at the small Sunday market near me gets a pig from a farmer and then does all the butchering and rendering, and he made awesome pork products. I marinated the chops in a mix of about a cup of chicken broth, plus 3 tablespoons or so of soy sauce, some lemon juice, chopped garlic (lots of that), a little white wine, and some chopped sage–because I had the sage on hand. The chops were very thick, so they took awhile to cook through, and, after I got a good sear on the meat, I ended up adding the marinade and a bunch of white wine, a little at a time, to the pan so it wouldn’t burn. (I had intended to reduce the marinade and use it as a sauce anyway, but the meat really needed some moisture to cook.)

The reduced marinade-plus-wine also enabled me to scrape up all the fond for a sauce (mmmm . . . . fond . . .). The sauce was extremely tasty, and I think I’m going to do it again next week, except with a wild turkey breast. Wild turkey is quite good, though you can really only eat the breast as is; the legs have way too much sinew and connective tissue to eat like a drumstick, but if you cook them in a slow cooker (which I don’t have, but the friend who hunts the turkeys does have), you can separate out the meat pretty easily, and the dark meat is great for chilis and stews. The breast meat is denser than we’re used to eating–these are truly wild turkeys, after all, so that should not be a surprise–and it’s flavorful, and I think it will work well with the marinade/sauce.

I didn’t do any cooking today, in part because I simply didn’t feel like it, but in part because I hadn’t soaked any of the beans and figured I’d just do it all next weekend. What I did do was clean some crap out of the fridge while I did the laundry. (I live in a condo, and we have a shared laundry room, which I like because I can do multiple loads at once.) It’s one of those tasks that’s perfectly suited to the 35 or 40 minutes between times when you have to do something with the laundry.

One thing you maybe need to know about me is that I regard expiration dates as . . . modest suggestions. Most of the time the stuff is still perfectly useable. Obviously if it has mold on it or has gone off or sour in some way, or if it’s a nut or an oil (or even a whole-grain flour) that has gone rancid, then no. (It’s a good reason to keep nuts, oils, and whole grain flours in the freezer or fridge.) If it’s a bulging can, then also no. But if the item isn’t bad or sour, then I don’t care what the date on the container says, especially if I’m cooking with it rather than, say, eating it as is.

However.

It turns out that tahini (sesame paste) really does NOT stay good for 13 years. I know–what a surprise! So that got thrown out. There were some scraps of things that didn’t smell bad, but that even I thought perhaps should be tossed. And now there’s more room in the fridge, which is a good thing, because next Saturday is the cheese drop. No, it’s not a parachute drop of cheese. Another of the farmers’ market vendors has a mailing list, and once a month or so they let you order cheese, and a week later they show up at the spot where the market is in the summer and hand over the cheese from the back of a van. It always makes me think of Lou Reed–“Waitin’ for the Man”–except instead of a bunch of junkies waiting for a drug dealer it’s a bunch of middle-aged people waiting for the cheese guy.

The Freezer Emptying Project

04 Apr 2013 3 Comments

by yeschef in CSA, leftovers and lunches

Hello my lovelies! I haven’t forgotten about you–it’s been a combination of a very busy life outside the blogosphere plus not actually doing much in the kitchen. There have been scraps of baking, and fragments of cooking, but mostly I’ve been trying to eat the things already in the freezer to prepare for the coming bounty. And the freezer report is encouraging:

Carrot soup: gone!
Chili: nearly gone!
Carrots: still not gone, but I’ve been eating hummus for lunch, and carrots make a fabulous vehicle.
Pizza crusts and bolognese sauce: almost gone!
Beets: gone!
Tomato-and-white-beans-thing: a few of those left, but I’ll finish them off in the next two weeks.
Turnips: not gone! (or, more accurately, NEVER @#$%ING GONE!) But I’m going to make chili this weekend to use up the last of the wild turkey, and I’ll dump some turnips into that mix. Can’t taste them as much, and it adds some veggies to the pot.

I still have multiple jars of tomatos, and I still have some meat–pork chops and some sausage from last summer’s farmers’ market; they’re mostly vacuum-sealed, so they could stay in the freezer longer, but some of that will be used this weekend. I have a couple of loaves of bread, but those will likely migrate to central Wisconsin for turkey hunting season. I bought two more whole chickens, but, again, they’ll keep just fine. There are two cabbages, at least one of which is slated to become sauerkraut. The onions and garlic that remain won’t last much longer, I think.

I think the difficult thing for many of us is just keeping track of all of this. On one hand, I find it useful to set aside a weekend day, often a couple of weekends in a row, and just cook up a bunch of stuff. Into the freezer it goes, and out a portion comes every day for lunch. Easy enough–as long as I remember what I have on hand, and remember to use the stuff that’s in there. The beets, for example, got added to carrot soup and/or spinach, mostly to use them up. I didn’t have other plans for them at the time, though I could easily have saved them for the Festival of Salad that is likely to be part of the spring farm share.

And, really, it’s just me. I’m neither feeding nor keeping track of food for multiple others, and that simplifies things immensely. Of course, I also don’t have help with the cooking or the cleaning up, so I suppose that’s part of the trade-off.

Meanwhile, the Loaner Cat is reminding me that I promised we could watch hockey tonight, so I have to go provide a lap. My goal is to center a lot of these posts around what I do with the farm share, but I’m more than happy to throw other info into the mix; feel free to make requests and suggestions.

What do I do with THAT?

13 Mar 2013 1 Comment

by yeschef in baking, CSA, leftovers and lunches

Once again, one of my experiments has (a) turned out as I hoped, but (b) left me with a bit of the raw ingredients left over, where “bit” = “I could have made half as much as I did and still have had some left.”

In this case, I made miniature pumpkin cheesecake pies, because tomorrow is Pi(e) Day–i.e., 3.14–and I wanted to bring some to work. I started off with a double batch of the whole wheat crust in the KAF Whole Grain Baking Book (have you gone out and bought that book yet?), substituting vodka from the freezer and room temp water for the ice water and orange juice. (Vodka is for flakiness, and I didn’t have any OJ.) I mixed up the crust last night, because I’m finding that letting anything made with whole grains sit for awhile improves the crumb and the flavor; the extra time sitting helps hydrate it and both deepens and mellows the flavor.

Then I started with a double version of this recipe. There were sundry alterations–half of the cream cheese was 1/3 reduced fat; I used sweetened condensed milk and no sugar instead of evaporated milk or cream and sugar; I used a total of five eggs. They seem to have come out okay, so that’s pretty exciting.

But I had no interest in making another batch of pie dough, so now I’m left with about a third to a half of the cream cheese mixture and at least half of the pumpkin mixture. I didn’t feel like baking anything else tonight, so I put it all in the fridge and I’ll deal with it this weekend; despite the raw eggs, it’ll last 48 hours. I’m thinking some kind of pumpkin breakfast muffins, perhaps with a splooge of the cream cheese filling in the middle or something. The pumpkin mixture is basically milk, sugar, and eggs, so it’s a simple matter to add some flour, leavening, and maybe some dried fruit.

It does point to a problem that sometimes arises, though: I think I’ll need this much or that much of something, and actually I need about 2/3 of what I thought I’d need. Part of this is because I would always rather have too much than not enough, at least when I’m cooking and baking. It’s annoying to get to the last two cupcakes and not have enough frosting, but it’s rather enjoyable–a perk for the cook, really–when there is frosting left over. And who ever complained about having too much chocolate ganache left over? How would that ever be a problem.

The one exception, of course, is turnips, because it really doesn’t take very many for me to reach the “enough” stage. Luckily I managed to give some away, but the spring farm share starts in a few weeks, and I suspect the turnips will reappear. This week’s share is basic–carrots, spinach, beets, and another jar of tomatoes–and most of that will store very well. I think it’s time to get some white beans and make another batch of Something Featuring Tomatoes and Beans.

Speaking of the farm share, for those of you who have farm shares and are finding yourself looking at a vegetable and wondering what you can do with it, feel free to leave a comment.

Tastes Like Chicken

05 Mar 2013 1 Comment

by yeschef in Uncategorized

At my workplace, we only have one microwave, and it only has one hamster on a wheel to power it (or so it seems), so heating one’s lunch can be a bit of an adventure. It’s also down two hallways and a flight of stairs from my cube, so my heated lunch usually passes several other people on its trip back to my space. The most frequent comment I get is, “That looks healthy!” This past week, for example, my lunch for two days running was some of the carrot soup mixed with a little milk; a wad of spinach from the farm share; some mushroom risotto that a coworker brought for me; and some cheese (because cheese goes with everything, IMHO)–all mixed up together, with the cheese kind of melty on top. The resulting mix was bright green and bright orange, and it did, in fact, look “healthy,” and it tasted pretty awesome. Another day I substituted frozen squash gnocchi with kale from a month or so ago for the risotto, and that was good, too. Today it was spinach, carrot soup, and some leftover carrots, roasted beets, and onions from Saturday’s dinner, with some gruyere. (It was supposed to have a homemade whole wheat soft pretzel, too, but I got hungry and ate that before lunchtime.)

It wasn’t what we’re taught to think of as a meal, though–it was cobbled together from what I had around, either in the fridge or the freezer, and it featured bits and pieces of this and that. These lunch piles often make me wonder how much of people’s eating habits are determined by expectations. If, in your head, lunch = a sandwich, or lunch = a portion of last night’s dinner, or a bowl of soup, or a sub sandwich, or a frozen entree of some kind, or tacos, or whatever else, then my piles of veggies and leftovers and cheese aren’t going to look like lunch to you–though it may well look “healthy”–and it won’t satisfy your lunch desires.

The reverse is true, too. Lunch, for me, is the aforementioned pile, so a bag of fast food holds no appeal. And I’ve been puzzling over that for awhile. It’s not that I’m a morally or culinarily superior being, and, really, the very last thing I want to do is give the impression that I think I am. This article, though, helped crystalize some of what I’ve been thinking, and, as a result, I blame my mother. In a good way.

The article is fascinating, but hardly surprising: the people who sell packaged foods find ways to encourage people to eat more of it, by engineering the sugar, salt, and fat content, as well as the appearance and “experience” of eating it. Or, in the case of the pre-packaged lunch things, the experience of both the person–kid–eating it and the person buying it, likely the mother. When I was a kid (in the 1960s and 1970s), a lot of this stuff didn’t exist yet, but my mother wouldn’t have purchased it if it did. She thought that stuff was not terribly good for us–high in salt, sugar, nitrates, etc., and low in nutritional value. (She even looked for packaged bread that had fewer additives.) In addition, my mother can stretch a dollar well past what you thought was its breaking point: we would buy fruit and vegetables in bulk during the summer and then can and freeze them, or my mother would buy meat when it was on sale and then freeze it. We had a separate standing freezer, and my mother made very good use of it.

We also didn’t have a lot of junk food. We might have cookies, pretzels, or potato chips around, but not much of it, and we almost never had soda around. When we did, it was A-Treat brand, not from the big soda manufacturers. We drank milk at dinner, or iced tea in the summer, brewed in a beige and dark brown pottery pitcher. The point is, I didn’t develop the taste for the salt/sugar/fat concoctions that would make me regard them fondly. My food memories are of home-cooked meals. I suppose that means it’s not surprising that packaged foods don’t have much appeal for me, or that a pile of vegetables and leftovers looks more like lunch to me than does a pile of french fries and a fast-food sandwich.

I’ve also tried to unpack the social, cultural, political, and economic parts (and privileges) as best I can, and I can see at least a few of the pieces that go into it. I’m not going to put them all in this post, but I’ll pick them apart in some upcoming posts.

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a vision of Saturday night’s dinner, nearly all of which was grown locally, in Wisconsin: garlic chicken; brown rice; and a vegetable medley of roasted beets, onions, and carrots. Basically, everything except the rice, olive oil, salt, and butter came from the CSA farm, and the butter might have been from Wisconsin as well. (The chicken was a separate purchase rather than part of the share, but it was from the farm.) The chicken was based in part on this recipe, but (a) I took the skin off of some of the meat but not all of it, (b) I got impatient and didn’t remember the recipe, so I cooked the chicken in some of the liquid, and (c) I didn’t sear the meat enough for my tastes. When I make it again–and oh, I will–I will remove all of the skin, sear the meat a bit more, and be a little more patient, but the softened garlic was mush-able and spreadable, and was just awesome. And? It actually tasted like chicken. Really good, really garlicky chicken.

Carrot Day

18 Feb 2013 1 Comment

by yeschef in carrots, CSA

And here you thought today was Monday–maybe even a holiday, as it was for me. What it really was, however, was Do Something with All the Damn Carrots in the Refrigerator Day. As with so many things, the answer is “soup.”

So, along with the 6.5 pounds of carrots (yes, you read that right, and that was AFTER peeling and trimming them), I included lots of onions, some candied ginger that was sitting around in sugar syrup in the fridge, a wad of garlic (about a head), a bit of candied orange peel, about three-quarters of a cup of pumpkin (180 grams, if you care) left over from the brioche experiment, some chicken broth and wild turkey broth, and some spices–salt, pepper, garam masala, powdered ginger, and some powdered mustard. The one thing I did that was a major extra step was roasting the carrots after I sliced them. I thought the roasting would improve and deepen the flavor, and it likely did. I more or less pureed the whole thing (I used my stick blender, but I left it somewhat chunky). I think I’m going to eat it with some of the spinach from the farm share as well–I’m hoping the astringency of the spinach will work with the sweetness of the carrots.

The other thing that likely will help is perhaps a dollop of sour cream mixed in. I intended to freeze most of this in lunch packages, and I don’t like to freeze cream-based soups, but that’s easy enough to add when I heat it. Some milk, or even some rice milk or almond milk would probably work well, too, or I could make up another batch of horchata and use some of that, just make it less sweet.

It tastes fine–it’ll be good with a hunk of bread of some kind, and whatever additional veggies and/or liquid I put in it. It wasn’t completely exactly what I had in mind, but I was kind of vague about what I wanted to do. I think I was fantasizing about a creamy soup, and I think my proposed additions above will get me there. We’ll see.

I also made a triple batch (!!) of the Amazing Crackers yesterday, some of which are slated for a friend’s house. He made a special request, as cheese, crackers, and venison summer sausage is his favorite evening snack-instead-of-dinner meal.

But I could not, simply could not, motivate myself to do anything else in the kitchen. (Oh, wait; I refreshed the starter and took out the garbage; does that count?) I contemplated baking some cookies today, but could not get past the contemplation stage.

Then again, I think of days like today–when I sit around, work out a bit, read a bunch, make some soup, scritch the cat behind the ears–as my payoff for the other long days in the kitchen. I know I have enough lunch packages in the freezer to go without cooking for several weeks, and I don’t have much of the farm share sitting around to be used (except canned tomatos, frozen squash, cabbages, spinach that will get eaten this week, some turnips, and one unused bag of carrots). What is sitting around is in a form that will not rot, so it’s all good, and I could take today to be lazy-esque without either running out of lunches or having raw ingredients rotting in my fridge.

I’m sorry–none of this is particularly exciting, is it? Apparently today is also Boring Day–but, as it was a day off of work as well, I can live with that.

Help Me, Rondo

12 Feb 2013 Leave a comment

by yeschef in bakery, baking

So last night I settled in to watch “It’s Complicated,” which I had not seen. (I will watch Meryl Streep in just about anything except possibly that ABBA movie.) I liked it quite a bit, but that’s not why I’m here today. (Mild spoilers if you haven’t seen it.)

At one point, Meryl makes chocolate croissants for Steve. The great part about this scene is the two-way dough sheeter that makes a guest appearance. I worked one of these (the rondomat is probably closest to the model I used) every day for two years, and it was entertaining to see someone using one in a movie (okay, to see Meryl Streep using one in a movie!). You do, in fact, use that machine to laminate your croissant dough (you use it for many other things as well, but that’s its primary use).

Another thing that was awesome was when she showed him how to roll up the dough. It really does take a certain touch, and it takes more time to get that right than you would think, though I suspect I could still do it in my sleep, despite not having done it in five years (has it really been that long?).

But. (You knew that was coming, didn’t you?)

Two quibbles. First, the whole process was WAY too short. She pops into the bakery and whips up some croissants? In order for that to happen, she would have had to have had some dough already fermented and ready for lamination–which is possible, of course; a high-production bakery likely would be making the dough nearly every day, so some would be around for the next day’s production. The lamination process would still take a considerable amount of time, however, because the dough needs to be cold enough when you start such that the butter doesn’t just melt into it (and the butter needs to be pounded out and shaped, and also cold enough for lamination), and the dough really needs to rest between folds. The whole process of lamination and folding would be several hours. It was already night when they got to the bakery, so we’re talking the wee hours of the morning just to get it laminated. Then it has to proof. To the movie makers’ credit, they did show her putting the croissants in a proof box, but that part also takes time. In short, what is portrayed as a kind of spur-of-the-moment maybe-hour-or-two process would, in actuality take more like four or five hours, with a bunch of that spent sitting around waiting for something to get cold or waiting for the yeast to do their thing.

The second quibble is that the chocolate croissants were made in a crescent shape. No. Just no. The crescent shape is for plain croissants. Google “pain au chocolat” under images and see what you get. There are a few crescent shapes there, but by and large? No. Or “non,” as the case may be.

All that said, I liked the movie and I particularly liked that the croissant scene was even in there, and even made nods to verisimilitude, even if there were mistakes (mistakes, I tell you!!).

At the moment, I am sitting around waiting for yeast to do its thing (the brioche for tomorrow), so I am perhaps a bit sensitive on this subject. What I would much prefer is baking the damn things and getting ready for bed, but that is not going to happen soon. The yeast will take as long as it takes.

226 Grams of Butter

10 Feb 2013 Leave a comment

by yeschef in baking, bread, resources

I don’t really have much to report yet. I made the brioche starter and biga, and I subbed some pumpkin for some of the butter (though it’s still 20% butter), but I’m not going to mix the dough until tomorrow night. I rolled out the cookie dough–this time I rolled it between two silpats, so I didn’t have to use any extra flour. I also used about half whole wheat flour, and the cookies came out just fine. Not quite sweet enough, if you can imagine such a thing, but I’m going to put icing on them, so it will be fine. I was going to make more Amazing Crackers, but I’m ordering some sunflower oil from my farm share people (along with a chicken! they’ve started doing chickens, delivering them frozen), and I think that might make a better cracker even than the olive oil, so I’ll make them next weekend instead. All of that said, today’s topic is that 20% up there.

What that means is 20% of the weight of the flour. I have learned two different versions of this method of calculation, and they’re functionally very similar. It’s in reference to something called baker’s percentages. I’m going to leave it as an exercise for you to operate the Google, if you’re interested, to follow the links that appear, but both the King Arthur website and the Wikipedia entry have extensive overviews. (It is my understanding that Europeans use weights rather than volume, and American recipes increasingly include weights, but it’s still not that common.) In essence, bakers think of the flour as the main ingredient, and everything else is expressed as a percentage of the flour. Thus, if you’re using 500 grams of flour, the “20% butter” identified above would be 100 grams, or 20% of the weight of the flour. You will also see this in terms of hydration of bread dough (or sourdough starter): 100% hydration means you use an equal weight of liquid and flour.

Let’s go with an example. My sourdough starter was originally 100% hydration. Whenver I fed/refreshed it, I would throw out (or use) all except 100 grams of the starter. To that, I would add 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water. Thus, the flour and water were always in equal proportions (because the starter was also originally 100 grams of each). Peter Reinhart uses 75% hydration for his starters, so I changed mine, too: when I feed it, for every 100 grams of starter, I add 100 grams of flour and 75 grams of water.

When I was in pastry school, though, we calculated so that the ingredients were proportional to each other and always added up to 100%. In the above example, if you had 500 grams of flour, 500 grams of water, and 200 grams of butter (and I doubt you would), the flour is 500/1200, or 41.67% of the total recipe, the water is also 41.67% of the total, and the butter is the remaining 17%. This method is particularly useful when there isn’t any flour in your formula, and, frankly, I prefer it. Most of the recipes I see use the flour-based calculation, though–Reinhart does, in his book, and that’s what we used at the bakery as well. (The real challenge at the bakery is that they still used pounds and ounces rather than grams, and it was a complete pain in the ass to do those calculations.)

There are two major advantages to these methods. For one thing, scaling recipes is much, much (much) easier. Instead of fiddling with odd measurements of cups, you just do the math. It’s particularly useful if you’re not doing an even scaling–i.e., you want 2.5 times the recipe, not simply double. The second advantage is that weights are more precise than measures. Depending on humidity, how you scoop something, how you level something, etc., the weight of the ingredient can vary pretty widely. That doesn’t always matter, of course, but it often does matter in baking. Little by little, I’ve been making notes in my cookbooks and recipes; many ingredients have the weight/volume exchange on the package, and you can use that to alter what you do. For example, 1/4 cup of flour is 30 grams, according to my KAF flours; thus, a cup is 120 grams. Whenever something calls for x cups of flour, I do the math to convert it to weight.

These methods are useful in cooking, too, especially if you’re trying to either maintain proportions of some kind in a recipe or if you’re trying to calculate the nutritional profile of something. Think of the last time you cubed squash or carrots: were your cubes the same size as mine? Or the same size as the author of the cookbook? How would you know? So, get yourself a kitchen scale–you can get one that goes up to 11 pounds for less than $50–and start making notes of your own.

Anyway. Tomorrow after work I’ll mix the brioche dough, then shape it, then it needs to rise for several hours before I bake it. I think I’m going to add cranberries and candied orange peel, as well, to give it a more festive air, and I have colored sugar (gold, green, and purple) for the decoration. All of which is probably a bit amusing, given that Fat Tuesday is a Catholic event, and I was raised by atheists.

Then again, my father’s dictum holds with regard to food, too. I once asked him why we celebrated Christmas if we didn’t believe in Christ, to which he replied, “We celebrate Hallowe’en and we don’t believe in ghosts; why give up a perfectly good holiday?” The same holds true for holiday-specific foods, at least in my kitchen.

I Say Tomato

06 Feb 2013 1 Comment

by yeschef in beans, cookies, leftovers and lunches, tomatos, venison

The “chili” I made this weekend is a perfect example of cooking from your refrigerator (and pantry). I have “chili” in quotes there because I included some black beans, and I know that, for some people, it is heretical to put beans in one’s chili. I, on the other hand, like to have something other than wads of meat, and beans are one way to do that. In addition, I had about a cup and a half of dried black beans in the pantry, and I wanted to use them before they got old, so I put them to soak on Saturday evening, plus I mixed up another batch of Awesome Crackers, because I go through nearly a batch a week, especially if I share them. All of the cooking happened on Sunday.

I cooked the beans while I was doing laundry–you don’t really need to do anything to beans while they’re cooking, so they’re a fine candidate for multi-tasking. When I set about making the chili, I chopped up a bunch of onions, including some purple ones; I don’t use the purple ones much in other things, because the color can make the whole dish look kind of grey and muddy. It doesn’t affect the flavor at all, but grey and muddy isn’t really an appetizing prospect for anyone. In chili, though, that wouldn’t make the least bit of difference. I also chopped up a whole head of garlic and a bunch of carrots–I have wads of both from the farm share, and the carrots especially keep for quite awhile. Those got thrown in with the onions. For the spicy part, I had some arbol chilis from a previous attempt (I used the Cooks Illustrated recipe for a batch at one point, and they included multiple kinds of chilis, but the only kind left in the pantry were the arbols), coriander seeds, and cumin seeds, plus those little red chilis from McCormick’s maybe?, and put them all in the extra coffee grinder that I use only for spices. I wore plastic gloves while I was doing all this, I should add.

Once it was all ground up, I threw it in with the onions and mushed it around a bit. I put all of it in the bottom of the stock pot I was using for the chili, and then browned about a pound of ground venison in the same saute pan. That got dumped in with the onions, along with about 8 ounces of wild turkey leg and thigh meat, about three ounces of leftover chicken from my dinner on Friday, a container of cooked turnips from a few weeks ago that I had not gotten around to eating (see above regarding the purple onions: it was a sufficiently large batch of chili that the turnips would just blend in), and a small container of leftover sauce (a combo of vegetarian tomato sauce and venison bolognese sauce), the rest of which had been used to make pizzas on Saturday night. On top of it I dumped two quart jars of tomatos from the farm share, and I dumped in some cocoa powder and a bloop of molasses (both were in the Cooks recipe, though I didn’t measure it out in this case). I stirred it all up and let it simmer very gently for a few hours. I ended up stirring it pretty frequently, because my stock pot is deep rather than wide, which actually wasn’t ideal for this task, but the heat was low enough that the risk of burning was pretty low, especially because I was in the kitchen most of the time anyway. It came out really well–especially with some good 4-year-old cheddar crumbled into it. Most of it got frozen into lunch-sized packages. I suspect it would work well for nachos, too, if you like those.

You will notice that I included leftovers from three different meals in this extravaganza–a very useful kind of recycling. None of the leftovers was of sufficient quantity to make much of a meal itself, and all of the leftovers could be thrown into the pot without affecting the overall flavor of the chili. A few other types of chilis would have deepened and broadened the flavor a bit–it had some heat, but was kind of one-note–but it was still good, and could easily have absorbed some tabasco or other hot sauce for people who like that.

The other use of tomatos also started with onions. (I have a lot of onions sitting around, too.) These I sliced very thin instead of chopping, and cooked them in a little olive oil and butter (the chili onions were only in a little olive oil). Again, I added a whole head of garlic, though I added it earlier in this batch. Then I threw in more carrots, because why not, and some herbs from the window sill (parsley, basil, and a tiny bit of sage; I had envisioned (enflavored?) more sage, but the window box is being taken over by basil left over from the summer, and catnip, but not sage so much), chopped, and a drained can of white beans that had been sitting around forever. I am now completely out of beans, which was another of my intentions for this adventure. And–another two jars of tomatos. This simmered for a few hours, too, as I puttered around doing other chores, and this, too, ended up in lunch-sized packages in the freezer. I had some of this today, heated up with leftover greens (kale and turnip greens, though spinach would be even more awesome, as would chard) and some asiago cheese. It was quite tasty, and I realized the tomato thing is soupy enough that it could go over pasta or farro, or would go nicely with a grilled-cheese-on-whole-wheat-sourdough-bread sandwich, were we to suddenly get a panini maker at work. (I am not holding my breath on that one.)

Even with giving some away, I ended up with at least 12 lunches, and way fewer scraps of stuff.

A glance at the calendar shows that next week includes both Fat Tuesday and Valentine’s Day. I have been known to make “blood”-spattered heart-shaped sugar cookies (actually splashed red food coloring) for VD, and, if my ambition is up to it, that could happen this weekend. Cookies would keep until Thursday. Tuesday I was contemplating a twist on king’s cake. The most common recipes I’ve seen for this include enough sugar to choke a large mammal, a wad of filling of some kind, and enough fat to require an on-the-spot angioplasty. While I am not unilaterally opposed to all of this, I have come to enjoy it less over time, so I’ve been contemplating alternatives. The current lead runner in this race is, indeed, a brioche dough, but one made with 20% butter or so (we’ll discuss baker’s percentages again . . .), and an addition of some pumpkin, which I would expect to augment the moistness and add a lovely color while not necessarily changing the flavor much. And I can sprinkle gold, purple, and green sugar on top to my heart’s content. We’ll see how ambitious I get this weekend.

Crackers and Cookies and Ranting, Oh My!

31 Jan 2013 Leave a comment

by yeschef in baking, cookies, CSA, food rants

So. The crackers. The flavor really is the best so far, in very subtle ways, but the dough was MUCH harder to handle: it didn’t roll out nicely (it kind of fell apart), and it was way too sticky. I think the problem was likely the sugar content, which might have affected the way the moisture in the dough worked, and an additional problem might have been the barley flakes; they don’t have much gluten in them, which means any dough is going to be lacking in tensile strength if the barley content is too high. This, however, demonstrates what happens when you change too many factors at once: I don’t really know whether it was the pumpkin seed praline or the barley that caused the handling difficulties. On the flip side, given that I want both ingredients in the mix, I will more likely just try to adjust from here rather than removing one ingredient and seeing what happens.

It is by no means a scientific approach; hell, it’s not even a methodical approach. The results are very tasty, though, so I don’t much care. It’s one thing to end up with something that sucks–you don’t know which of your changes caused the suckage–but if something is imperfect in one dimension (ease of production) but still tastes good, it’s no big tragedy to work your way through the suckage.

The cookies are awesome, just to complete the report on the weekend’s efforts. I doubt I’ll be able to reproduce them (although I did try to take a few notes after the fact), but even getting in the neighborhood will work just fine.

That brings me to another point: while reproducibility can be desireable–very desireable, actually–it’s not the only virtue, outside of a production environment. As I noted below, if you’re serving food in a restaurant, or if you’re making products in a bakery–if you’re selling your product–you want your customers to be confident about the quality and the flavor and every other damn thing. They’re purchasing an experience in some ways–a flavor experience, if you will–and they want that experience every time.

Truth be told, there are times when I want to reproduce something, too–lots of times. There are any number of recipes I use frequently, sometimes even making the exact same changes, because I know I’ll get the results I have in mind when I do that. There are also techniques–e.g., for canning or storing food–that need to be followed for food-safety reasons, and getting lax in those dimensions could kill you. In a less dire frame of mind, I do not by any means want to discourage anyone from using recipes or techniques that produce the results you want every time.

However, I wonder if the availability of predictable results in the food we purchase to consume also makes us think that we really do have to always use a recipe, or always do something the same way. That approach also means we end up with little scraps of unused bits–a handful of leftovers, a scrap of some ingredient–and no clear way to use the stuff. The leftovers get thrown out; the ingredient is left to disintegrate, or we go buy more, just to use up the old stuff.

The cookies are a perfect example. They had some malted milk sugar in them. I had bought malted milk powder from KAF, and I like the flavor, but the product basically hardened into a lump in my cabinet. I tried grating it, which worked, but only very very slowly, and I tried chopping it, which didn’t really work at all. I tried hammering it, which sort of worked, but ended up sending bits of solidified malted milk powder flying around the kitchen, sticking to the floor, which wasn’t what I had in mind. They suggested I microwave it to soften it, which I did, but I still ended up with chunks, and it would re-solidify. I have picked away at it, with the above methods, and still had a lump of it.

So Sunday I microwaved it (a bit too long) and then quickly chopped it while it was soft. I chopped it on top of the chopped chocolate for the recipe, so it melted the chocolate and combined with it, mostly, while still keeping mini lumps of malted milk stuff intact. It was perfect for the cookies, and I think I have another lump in the cabinet, though I doubt I’ll buy it again. Well, maybe.

The point is, the product was tasty–i.e., good in one dimension–but a pain to store, i.e., problematic in a different dimension. I found a way to use it that took advantage of its good dimension and meant that I didn’t have to throw it away, which is awesome, but what I ended up doing may not be reproducible, as it was largely a method aimed at using up a product that was problematic in the aforementioned storage dimension. Leftovers are similar: sometimes I’ll have a little something left over from some other meal or use, and I’ll just throw it into whatever I’m making, just so it doesn’t go to waste.

At heart, these efforts are really contrary to both the idea of recipes and the idea of mass-produced food, both of which conspire, in both good and bad ways, to get us to desire consistency and sameness in what we eat. The good end of that spectrum is having some spectacular dish, in a restaurant, say, and taking a friend back a month later and the dish is still spectacular and still tastes more or less the same. The bad end of the spectrum encompasses fast “food” (which is really just industrial fuel, but that’s a different rant)–but I would argue that the bad end of the spectrum is also our own belief that we have to follow recipes exactly and what we produce at home should taste the way the recipe intends or taste the same way every time, no matter what the availability of ingredients happens to be.

Speaking of the availability of ingredients, this week’s farm share will include onions, garlic, carrots, spinach, tomato juice, AND a jar of tomatoes. I now have way too many tomatoes in jars, so one of this weekend’s projects needs to include using tomatoes. I don’t have any ideas yet, but I’ll work on that.

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