Topics include: Cooking (recipes, techniques & equipment); Beverages (appreciating & making your favorites); Food Philosophy, and various books, articles, blogs, and related discussions.
hiram wrote:I like the idea of the onion relish ... somewhat similar to a mignonette.
Don't you mean a "vinaigrette"?
hiram wrote:... the flour serves as an irritant, which causes the bivalves to expell any grit/sand they're holding. In other words, it encourages them to purge ...
I never buy fresh mussels up to 3 days after a heavy storm passed over the mussel growing banks. I always wait at least 4 days after the storm has passed to allow the mussels enough time to spit out any accumulated sand before they're being collected for sale. And I check the collection date.
"Moules au gratin", mussels in the half shell with garlic butter and grated cheese, cooked in the oven, is a quite delicious dish too.
But wait till tomorrow (WET), I'll surprise you with a culinary discovery!
hiram wrote:I like the idea of the onion relish ... somewhat similar to a mignonette.
Don't you mean a "vinaigrette"?
Nope. Recipe follows.
Sauce, Mignonette
My version of a classic French garnish for oysters on the half shell, and raw or scalded clams. Makes approx 1 ½ cups, which is plenty for a large party - more than enough for several dozen oysters.
Amt Ingredient
¾ cup Shallot, minced v.fine
½ cup Parsley, minced v.fine
1/3 cup Lemon juice or rice vinegar
¼ cup CPEV Olive Oil
½ tsp Simple Syrup
1/8 tsp Black or White Pepper
Assemble, stir, and let rest in fridge for 1-2 hours, until lemon juice marries & tenderizes the mixture into a semi-thickened salsa-like consistency. Wait until after the 1-2 hour rest before adjusting for consistency and flavor.
Today, Sunday, we've had barbecue for lunch.
As appetizer I made barbecued blue mussels. The preparation is a chore, that's why it's just an appetizer: 24 mussels for 2 - 4 persons.
1. Bind the mussels with iron wire
2. put them in a trout grilling clamp (picture taken after cooking, half of them already eaten)
3. and then cook them on the barbecue, without any vegetables or seasoning. They're ready when the shells stop producing bubbles from their seams.
I have a real dichotomous (good WOTD candidate, eh ?) response to/about mussels.
I grew up on beaches in an area where mussels are such an omnipresent encrustation of beaches, dock pilings and boats, etc. that I experience the uncontrolled response of "oh, so they finally got around to cleaning their dock (or scraping their boat)" whereas out-of-towners think "haute cuisine". As someone who writes about food and food-related experiences, it's an odd feeling to express, much less successfully relate to others who havent felt it. None the less, there you have it ... unless they're served smoked in a fancy salad, or steamed with white wine, shallots, and a garlic-goatcheese buerre blanc sauce sauce, by a certified professional chef no less, and with garlic crostini on the side, it's harsh blue-collar inedible.
Lobsters used to have the same connotation 100 years ago, but made the leap to culinary white colar.
Clams and oysters are ok, and are white-collar by breeding.
Breakfast: 2-cheese faux-egg omlet with sriracha chili sauce.
Lunch: plain lowfat yogurt, jazzed up with a dash of simple syrup, sliced plantain, and ground flax seeds.
Dinner: grated summer squash sauteed in browned butter, with chopped walnuts, served over angel hair pasta with several dashes of fish sauce. Fast and easy.
I generally find supermarket chicken breast to be utterly boring (unless prepared with considerable skill or potent saucing) ... however, they're more interesting if they're a heritage breed raised on decent forage. As a result, unless it's a really good chicken, I almost always gravitate towards the darker and/or bonier parts of the bird. Give me a plate of wings, necks, backs, or crispy skin and liver, or (if all else fails) legs, and I'm happy.
Ok, I was stir crazy tonite, and whenever I'm stir crazy, I tend to cook.
One of the things I've always been meaning to get around to, but hadn't yet, was learning how to work with fresh artichokes. A quick trip to the local market earlier turned up an inexpensive package of baby artichokes (9 for $3.50 USD). I already had a small tub of goat chevre and cream cheese I'd blended at home (digression: I find straight chevre a bit tart, so I sometimes cut it with cream cheese, and season it with pepper and herbs), as well as a chunk of grana cheese, so I girded my loins for culinary battle, grabbed the chokes in a choke hold, and headed home.
After skimming the internet for a general sense of direction, I bodged together the following recipe, from what I had on hand:
Hiram's Chokehold Artichoke Dip (yeilds just under 3 cups)
9 fresh baby artichokes
3 tbsp lemon juice (or any variety of white or rice vinegar)
2 large cloves garlic, freshly microplane grated
4 oz cream cheese
4 oz fresh goat cheese (chevre) << if you dont have any handy, substitute 2 oz of mayo or sour cream, and 2 oz of whatever other cheese that's handy ... asiago, cheddar, parm, etc.
1/2+ cup freshly microplane grated parm or grana
salt & pepper to taste
* Add 1-2 qts cold water to a non-reactive bowl, and add 3 tbsp lemon juice or white vinegar (prevents browning)
* One by one, peel off & discard outer leaves of baby chokes until tender yellow inner body if exposed, with only 1/3 of a pale green tip. Lop off & discard pale green tip. Peel off & discard outer skin of stem. Halve choke lengthwise. Baby chokes lack a fuzzy inner 'choke', and dont need to be scooped out - toss the peeled and halved chokes into the acidulated water and repeat the peeling process with all the other chokes.
* In a 2-3 qt sauce pan, bring 2 pints lightly salted water (or enough to just cover the chokes) to boil, drain & add peeled chokes, return to boil, cover, and simmer 12-15 mins or until fork tender.
* Drain & discard liquid, and let chokes cook until lukewarm.
* Remove and discard any remaining outer leaves that are too tough to eat, until only tender flesh remains. Transfer to food processor.
* Add all remaining ingredients, pulse until creamy, and then add additional grated cheese to thicken. Adjust salt and pepper to taste.
* VARIATIONS: If desired, add pignoli nuts to thicken further ... or if already too thick, loosen slightly with CPEV olive oil, until consistency resembles soft serve ice cream. Additional optional ingredients might include, say, a little freshly sweated baby spinach, for extra color and flavor, and/or some microplane grated lemon zest.
Have you too thought of avocado instead of artichoke?
BTW. I think that, a few hundred years ago, the lack of *precise and cheap* kitchen scales caused people to invent more or less standard measures to describe amounts; measures like tablespoon, teaspoon, cup and such.
I think this system with spoons and cups is complicated and quite obsolete.
Nowadays, digital kitchen/letter/baby scales are dirt cheap and certainly precise enough. http://shuurl.com/Y6408 (redirects to amazon.com)
Maybe one exception: where recipe amounts depend on the size of the chicken egg(s), half the shell of the egg is a good approximate measuring tool.
</rant>
Yes, all of the above links you provided are relevant.
As for using weight instead of volume measures ... you're preeching to the choir, EPS. Nearly all of my recipes in my culinary log have been converted to grams and proper fluid measure. The only reasons I left the above recipe in the "English" system (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc) are that (a) on this side of the atlantic pond, it's still what 85%+ of the general public uses, and I'm still in the habit of developing recipes in English before refining and converting them to their final metric (European) form; and (b) in general, for small measures of partial teaspoons and sometimes tablespoons, many inexpensive gram and postage scales are not quite accurate enough (being only precise to +/- 1 or 2 grams). Good luck, for instance, trying to measure 1/16th tsp clove for a cookie recipe on a postal scale.
Anyway, it's all good. Thank you for posting the helpful links for the benefit of onlookers.
hiram wrote:... Good luck, for instance, trying to measure 1/16th tsp clove for a cookie recipe on a postal scale.
That's easy.
Assume my scale is accurate to 2 grams.
I require 0.2 grams of some powdery substance (the active ingredient).
I dilute 4 grams of the active powder with 76 grams of some inert taste-neutral powder.
I mix *very* thoroughly.
The resulting concentration of active substance is 0.05 grams per gram of mixture.
I measure 4 grams of the mixture, this amount contains 0.2 grams active substance.
The rest of the mixture is useful for future preparations.
The same trick works with liquids too.
The exception is saffron, of course. You don't weigh it, instead you count the number of threads required.
That's perfectly fine and standard practice when working with chemicals and solutions in a laboratory where high precision is required ... but for the setting of a home kitchen where casual speed and convenience rule, I'm ok with just using a 'pinch' or the tip of a knife or a small spoon to eyeball quantities in the vicinity of 1/16th tsp, and where accuracies of +/- 50% are well tolerated.
I do have, and use regularly, a Salter 6055 digital scale. Highly recommended. It's good up to 11 lbs, and has 1 gram precision. I think it cost me like $60 USD when I bought it a few years ago. The photo below is from Amazon ...
Tip: I also have a dremel engraving tool - I recently etched the tare weight onto the underside of all my steel pots and work bowls.
Dinner tonite - for a nice end of summer meal, my wife & I fired up the gas grill with our 15x18" cast iron griddle insert installed, and did the following:
* Tandoori marinated chicken wings and upper-wing 'drumlets' (trimmed of excess skin, but not skinless, the latter gashed deeply on both sides).
* Foil pouch diced new potatoes, with onions, chicken stock, rosemary, salt, pepper, mustard oil, and chipped butter.
* Foil pouch diced green and yellow squash, with chicken stock, w.wine, fish sauce, salt, pepper, butter.
Dessert was frozen pina coladas
* 1 can coco lopez cream of coconut (or 1 can coconut milk and 4 oz simple syrup)
* 4 fl oz white rum
* 8 fl oz pineapple juice, pre-chilled
* 3-4 cups crushed ice
* Frappe (in pre-chilled blender flask) until smooth and thick.
Not exactly a diet meal, but satisfying.
Last edited by Darb on Thu Sep 17, 2009 8:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Did some marinated salmon (peppers, lime etc) and rösti (mixed with carrot, spring onions, thyme and parmesan cheese) yesterday. Turned out quite well, but I think a few cloves of garlic just might freshen up the potatocakes.
Earlier today, my Wife and I first singled out and then chased down and landed two large and delightfully meaty/juicy locally grown late-summer tomatoes that were sunning themselves in a nearby outdoor organic produce stand. Cackling fiendishly, we dragged them off to our lair, and mercilessly sliced them into finger-thick gleaming slabs of glistening lycopene-laden flesh. Savoring the meal to come, I next preheated my gas grill, and fired off a generous portion of sliced hardwood smoked bacon on my 15x18" cast iron griddle insert. Next, after slathering 4 slices of arnold 12 grain bread generously with mayo, and viciously grinding at least a dozen innocent peppercorns to a horrible horrible death, and scattering their powdered remains atop the afore mentioned bread, we slid the gleaming slabs of tomato and crispy pig belly flesh into place, pressed lightly, and then ... THEN ... at long last, after a long long wait through an endless winter, spring and summer of bland, boring and mealy supermarket tomatoes that were wholly unworthy of the blood money we'd paid, we bared our fangs and gleefully sank face first into our gory dripping repast.
Darb wrote:Earlier today, my Wife and I first singled out and then chased down and landed two large and delightfully meaty/juicy locally grown late-summer tomatoes that were sunning themselves in a nearby outdoor organic produce stand. Cackling fiendishly, we dragged them off to our lair, and mercilessly sliced them into finger-thick gleaming slabs of glistening lycopene-laden flesh. (....) and viciously grinding at least a dozen innocent peppercorns to a horrible horrible death, (....) we bared our fangs and gleefully sank face first into our gory dripping repast.
How, but HOW could you do, with such alacrity, so horrible a deed to poor innocent vegetables, who only wanted to live their quiet life without bothering anyone! Shame on you for being so efficacious in this infamy, shame!!!!!
Human is as human does....Animals don't weep, Nine
Dinner tonite was going to be some tandoori marinated wings and drumettes, done on my cast iron griddle, but the wifey brought home a pizza, so I'll fire them off tomorrow. A little extra marinating time is probably a good thing.
Dinner tonite was:
* Some baby bok choy, quartered, then wok'd with shaved ginger, garlic, a thai chilie, and some sake and fish sauce ... and then covered and sweated with some thinly shaved fermented sopressatta (a stand-in for a little minced dried asian sausage)
* Starch/dessert was a pair of roasted acorn squash - halved, cored, scored, and roasted with butter and honey for an hour at 400F in 1/4" water, until fork tender ... then skinned and coarsely mashed and served in coffee mugs.
We had guests for dinner tonite, so on a whim I cooked equatorial fusion: for apps I did tortilla chips with homemade guacamole, salsa and homemade chimichurri (finely pulsed cilantro, parsley, mint, cpevo, onion, garlic, lime, rice vinegar, salt and pepper), homemade smoked paprika and garlic popcorn, and sparkling cava. For entree, I'd already browned and braised a pair of halved pork shoulders in my slow cooker overnight (two nights in advance - before I knew we were having guests), with some mirepoix and browned onions, turned the result into pulled pork and a brown pork stock, and used that to make a pulled pork and taro stew with tamarind, summer squash and fresh herbs (parsley, cilantro and mint), which I served over fluffed basmati rice. It was fun, and well received (our guests were thrilled), but a slightly imperfect improvization (according to my standards anyway). I think some tostones and fresh flat bread, and a little less onion and mint, and perhaps some slightly more polynesian or carribean flavors would have done the trick.
Dinner was a vertically roasted chicken rubbed with rosemary and kosher salt, along with some homemade pizza dough that I used to make faux-naan on my cast iron flat top.
I also started a 3 gal pot of turkey stock, using 7 lbs of turkey necks and drumsticks (and the leftover chicken bones), a bulb of fennel, and half the contents of my vegetable drawer, which eventually yeilded 7 qts of finished stock. I could have made more if I'd done a remoulage, but I was tired and my back was hurting. Half the finished stock (and meat) will be used tomorrow to make a few days worth of turkey and barley soup, and the rest will be frozen.
Breakfast was eggwhite matzohbrei with vanilla, lime zest and chiffonade of mint, cooked in browned butter, and served with local wildflower honey (not shown in photo).
I was stir crazy today (being largely cooped inside for months on end will do that), and I also had a craving for flat bread, so I thawed a pair of homemade pizza doughs, divided each in half, rolled them out into flat breads and seared them outdoors on my cast iron flat top griddle.
Here's one of the four ...
And some homemade chimichurri for dipping ...
I'm planning to have a 2' x 4' remnant slab of engineered stone cut and delivered to my garage soon, which I'll use (as my back permits) for making homemade breads and pasta. I've always wanted to learn to hand stretch and toss pizza dough, and being able to do it outside (where I can cleanup with a leaf blower) instead of trashing my kitchen, will make things fun and easy.
Homemade bread is so easy, and satisfying ... it's a primal thing. Too many people focus on the superficialities of cooking, whereas I like to zero in on the things that really touch deep on the act of making and sharing something delicious and hand-crafted.
