coffee corner

There have been a couple of comments raised since I started this run of foodblogging that have stuck with me, and I want to take some space to address them here.

A couple of posts ago, Geoff asked me if I had turned to the dark side:

Instant Jasmine Rice? It sounds like an abomination and doubtless very bad for the environment. Please say that you haven’t sold out like Delia?

Rest assured, instant rice isn’t part of my normal repertoire. In fact, I’ve blogged about the two times I’ve used instant/minute rices on this blog - a previous foray into instant brown rice (curse you, Uncle Ben!) and this move to boil-in-a-bag jasmine rice. The brown rice is passable for a quick lunch, the jasmine rice came out much nicer. Time permitting, or serving this to other guests, I’m much more likely to make the rice from scratch.

I did some digging, and couldn’t find any environmental concerns regarding instant rice. According to McGee [1],

Quick-cooking rice is manufactured by cooking white, brown, or parboiled rice, thus disrupting its cell walls and gelating its starch, then fissuring the grain in order to speed the infiltration of hot water when the consumer cooks it, and finally drying it. The fissuring may be accomplished with dry heat, rolling, microwave treatments, or freeze-drying.

In plain English, unless I miss the mark, this means that it is cooked some to tease the starch out of the rice kernel, cracked open so water can soak into the rice faster when finally cooked, then dried for preservation. Aside from basic process concerns - what to do with the water from cooking the rice, where to get the energy involved in fissuring and drying the rice, etc - I don’t see any particular environmental impact to quick-cooking rice.

However, I did turn up some other interesting information during the research, and some useful resources. The Cereal Knowledge Bank, provided in collaboration by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), is an excellent source of information about the growing, harvesting, and science that really goes into rice production. This includes information on environmental concerns, real facts about the rice shortages and skyrocketing prices of food among much much more. It surprised me to see such a think tank exist for a basic, almost commodity grain, until I recalled something Paul Collier (an economics professor at Oxford University) said in a comment on a piece by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times:

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies.

(The rest of the comment is excellent. Originally spotted it at Marginal Revolution.) There really is a lot of science that goes in to modern agriculture - my big "duh!" moment - but also a strong need to promote (and popularize) the adoption of scientific advancement in farms on a global scale. While I’m in support of raising awareness for improved conditions for growers such as Fair Trade initiatives that promise a living wage to be paid to coffee growers (and sidestepping any economic debate about price floors or how this actually affects supply and demand), it is just as important to realize that we can improve on these practices and make better use of available farmland.

The second point I’ve been thinking about is a statement I made in a post in January, when I kicked off this food blogging effort:

I believe mainly in classical preparations and food that has an evocative history or culture over modern adaptations or replications.

The Blurker Gone Bad called me out for a better explanation of what I meant. I’ve been working on answering that question since then, and still lack some real crisp sound bite that explains it, so please bear with me for a slightly verbose explanation.

Let’s start with an example. Choucroute Garnie. Here’s the Wikipedia entry - it’ll do as well as any recipe for this purpose, and I’ve not made it at home, only had it at restaurants. Essentially it’s a hot bowl of sauerkraut, pork in all its glorious forms, and potato, all boiled together, served with a hot mustard and a crisp glass of dry Riesling. Done properly, when you taste this, you can close your eyes and see the banks of the Rhine river from a steep mountainside covered in vineyards where they make Riesling.

By contrast, tell me what images are conjured up by, say, this recipe for frank ‘n beans?

Okay, maybe not the most fair comparison, but hopefully an illustrative one. I have a similar problem with fusion cuisine at times. I’ve been to some fantastic fusion restaurants (Dekxels leaps to mind) and had some wonderful food, but it’s more of an intellectual exercise rather than something I can emotionally connect with. It is interesting to see how two normally unconnected cuisines can come together and complement each other, but I get no sense of … identity, I suppose … about the meal.

Think for a moment of the housewife one to two hundred years ago - let’s go with nineteenth century. Exotic foods were not nearly as readily available as they are today. Neither is there an abundance of knowledge of, say, wok technique in northern France. The farmer’s wife kept her family fed with the materials and ingredients locally available, and with ingenuity - braising can make the toughest meat into a mouthwatering meal, for example. These combinations of flavors and seasonings have stood the test of time and strongly evoke a region or locality when brought together.

For dinner tonight, I made poulet au pot - a poached chicken with some vegetables in a broth. The broth was seasoned with thyme, black pepper, leeks, parsley - all things I equate with northwestern Europe (NW France/Germany). If I had changed out, say, parsley for oregano and brought in some garlic, I’d suddenly be in the Mediterranean. Pull it all out and go with garlic, ginger, and mushrooms, and I think of China. These flavor combinations [2] are a means to connect with a food’s history and identity. I have a problem with modern cookbooks that promote replacing butter with miniscule amounts of olive oil and masking the switch with large amounts of garlic or crushed red pepper. It may be perfectly fine and even delicious, but soul-destroying all the same.

At the same time, family traditions and personal signature dishes are also part of the joy of cooking. I make (Christine’s recipe) a stroganoff with tomato juice, egg noodles, and ground beef that bears only a passing resemblance to any stroganoff I’ve come across, yet remains a family favorite. I have a recipe tucked away for headless gingerbread men [3]. These stories and familiar things are part of family life, and equally important. These are things that have been imbued with a soul or identity because of these common experiences, something that say "home". I’m not trying to say that we should all cook like turn-of-the-century French housewives, although there’s a LOT of good stuff in there. However, I don’t hold bastardized low-fat low-carb low-calorie low-everything food movements in anything close to the same regard.

Okay, folks, this post has taken nearly two hours and most of my Macbook battery life to come together. I need to be asleep. For the moment, I’ll put in a skeleton of today’s recipe and come back and flesh it out later. This is what I made for dinner tonight, nice and light and generally good for you.

Poulet au pot (Chicken in a pot)
Serves 4-6

• 1 chicken, about 3.5-4 lb.
• 8 carrots, trimmed and cut into chunks
• 6 small white potatoes, halved
• chicken broth and water, enough to cover all of this in a pot not much larger than the ingredients themselves.

Put everything in the pot over medium-high heat and bring towards a boil. Just before rolling boil, cut the heat to low and simmer gently for 45-60 minutes until the chicken has reached safe temperature (165-170 in the thigh, I believe - FDA guidelines)

Remove the chicken from the pot, draining as much liquid as you can back into the broth. Carve the chicken. Serve slices of the chicken in a bowl with vegetables, a ladle of broth, and coarse salt passed at the table.

[1] - McGee, Harold. On Food And Cooking. New York: Scribner, 2004. p. 474
[2] - Disclaimer; these regional assignments are based on my current understanding, and I really need to go back and brush up on the regions of France, Germany, and Spain before making more declarative statements about the herbs and spices used in each region, so take that all with a grain of salt.
[3] - One year, growing up, we decorated the gingerbread men at Christmas with little silver decorative balls. Then Mom discovered they were inedible. So, we beheaded all of the gingerbread men, and served them in a particularly morbid display at the big annual Christmas Wassail party.

Most of the time, the food I use to flex my cooking muscles is prepared over the weekend. Last night, Christine was out meeting with a client and Jason and I were at home to fend for ourselves. I do most of the grocery shopping just-in-time, getting what I need as I need it - it means more trips to the grocery store (I’m now considered a "regular" at two grocery stores) but it has cut out what used to be wasteful spending.

For quick fix meals, stir fry can’t really be beat. A little more prep time to get everything chopped and ready to go in the pot is more than offset by the fast cooking time over high heat. Growing up, "stir fry" meant that Dad pulled out the cast iron dutch oven to cook with and became extremely focused on food while Joseph and I stood at the kitchen doorway like the ballboys at Wimbledon, our only purpose to react whenever Dad said anything (who, at this point, was so focused that he whispered instead of his usual booming self). Fortunately, when you’re making up a stir-fry on the fly there’s nothing to forget so there’s little stress involved.

I did use another boil-in-a-bag instant rice this time. If I had more time or more energy, I would have made the jasmine rice from scratch. As it is, the boil-in-a-bag rice was great for a stir fry like this. It was a little more soft/wet and starchy than I would have liked by itself, but in a stir fry these qualities help hold the whole thing together. Play with this recipe - change up the protein, mix up the vegetables - this is a basic starting ground that can go in many different directions. Next time, for example, I’ll finish with some toasted almond slivers and torn basil…

And I’d be hard pressed to recommend a better breakfast than cold leftover fried rice. Eat and enjoy.

Shrimp and Broccoli Stir Fry (serves 4-6, or two hungry guys with leftovers for breakfast)

• 1/2 lb mushroom, sliced
• 1/2 - 3/4 lb broccoli florets, cut to bite-size pieces
• 1 lb shrimp, raw, shelled
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 - 4 tbsp grapeseed oil
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 bags Succeed instant jasmine rice

Cook rice per manufacturer instructions. Drain and spread on plate to cool and hold.

Heat oil on high heat until shimmering, about to smoke. Add mushrooms and broccoli. Cook until mushrooms begin to color and give off liquid, 5-10 minutes.

Add shrimp and cook until pink and cooked through, about 3 minutes.

Add rice and soy sauce and heat through. Serve immediately.

Well, I certainly didn’t intend to be out of commission for quite this long. Between Jason’s spring break, Christine traveling for work, and my job kicking into a burst of high gear, the pattern has been to realise Tuesday at lunch that I hadn’t written a post yet, and subsequently have no time to devote. Much of that time has been eating out or utility eating - eating just to get it out of the way - and not interesting (or always healthy, either). Boy, do I have some updates for you.

My 30th birthday was Saturday, the 5th. As I joked the week before, I figured I was leaving the Roaring Twenties and headed for the Great Depression. Little did I know that my wife, superstar that she is, had organized some surprises for me for the weekend. My best friend from college flew in from Seattle. My brother flew in from Seattle. And my parents drove down from Kentucky. Three times in 36 hours I was floored by these surprises - I’m touched that everybody came in for it. We threw a big part on Saturday night, with more out of town guests (my college roommate came in from Austin, another close friend of ours came in from Austin) and a slew of people in town came out to celebrate in real style, which I’m still recovering from. A big huge Thank You! to everybody for being a part of it.

One gift out of many worth mentioning here that I wanted to highlight was a copy of Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements Of Cooking. I’m about ten pages into it, but that and a quick through has told me that this belongs in any intermediate and above cook’s kitchen. It’s an analog of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, but aimed at cooks instead of writers. Run, don’t walk, and pick a copy of this up - it will improve your cooking.

So, in the spirit of big celebrations, I have more of a story than a recipe this week. I decided back in December that I wanted to try my hand at duck confit. Confit is a preserving technique where meat is salt-cured then slowly cooked in fat until tender, then chilled in the cooking fat. (For a much better definition, see the aforementioned The Elements Of Cooking - I think I’m going to be referring to that a lot on this blog.) The actual confit process is amazingly straightforward and doesn’t require many steps, but does require spacing out those steps over a few days. I left the duck legs to cure in the cooking fat until February or March, I think, and decided to tackle making dinner with them one night when I had the house to myself.

Using duck confit is easy - heat it enough to get the legs out of the encasing fat, heat through on a skillet (it’s already cooked), and go to town. Which I did - making fresh pasta dough from scratch, caramelized onions, and the duck confit to make a homemade ravioli. Really, once the duck is done, the rest is assembly - cook sliced onion in a pot with 1 Tbsp butter per onion until it browns, make pasta dough as below, stuff, cook (I toasted in a skillet, should have boiled briefly first then toasted). Highlights:

• Pasta dough - 100g flour (about half a pound) and 1 egg per portion. Don’t forget to let it rest in the fridge before trying to roll it out.
• I will never roll out pasta dough for ravioli by hand again. Much of my time in the kitchen that night was spent doing pushups on a rolling pin trying to get the pasta dough thin enough. It didn’t work, in the end - the ravioli were still too chewy. Next time, I’m borrowing a pasta machine.
• Warm duck confit is nearly impossible not to devour while cooking.
• Warm duck confit shredded with caramelized onions is even harder to resist while cooking.
• Charge the camera batteries. I have many pictures of this process, which I may edit in at a later date. The picture I’m missing is of the final dish of toasted ravioli with buttered leeks and a red wine sauce - the camera battery died and I had no idea where to find another camera or battery.
• It’s just as well that the camera was out. The ravioli came out too thick and doughy, and the red wine sauce broke while I was scrambling to find a working camera, reducing a deep red delicious sauce to a bitter mix of red wine bits in butter. I pulled out a few tricks to try and save it, or prepare another in record time - and summarily decided that I need to work more on my sauces.

Try making a confit one weekend - it’s actually easy to do, and the results are well worth the time and effort.

• Batman has Robin. (Actually, three - Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake)
• Captain America had Bucky.
• Superman has Jimmy Olsen.
• Green Arrow has Connor Hawke and Speedy.
• The Flash has Impulse.
• Dr. Strange has Wong.
• Deadpool has Weasel.
• The whole JLA had Snapper Carr.

Yup. Today’s post is about sidekicks. While the main characters get center stage, these armies of culinary Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns do their part to complete the picture and fill out the experience. Over the past few weeks, while I talk about the main dish, I’ve often photographed finished plates along with sides. These have generated enough noise in comments and emails to me, that it’s time to let the sidekicks have the stage.

(Note: The pedantic among us will certainly have reason to quarrel with my short list above. For example, what about Batman and Oracle? Or Krypto, Supergirl, and Lois Lane? And really - Snapper Carr? Seriously? This is not meant as an exhaustive list but as an illustrative one. Run with it. Think of it as Earth-3, if that makes you feel better.)

Grilled Romaine Salad (serves 2)
First Apperance: Steak au Poivre

• 1 romaine heart
• olive oil
• 2 lemons, juiced
• 1 tbsp shallot, minced
• vegetable oil, to 3:1 oil-acid ratio
• 1 tbsp parmesan cheese, grated
• salt, to taste

Wash the lettuce. Trim the core but do not remove completely. Slice in half lengthwise. Drizzle olive oil over the cut sides and grill, cut side down, until charred and lightly smoking.

Combine lemon juice, vegetable oil, salt, and shallots in cruet or dressing bottle and shake vigorously to combine.

Season the lettuce lightly with salt, dress, and top with grated parmesan cheese.

Carrots Etuvée (serves 2)
First appearance: Poulet en Cocotte

• 8 oz carrots, chopped on bias
• 1 teasp sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1/2 lemon, juiced
• 1 tbsp parsley, finely chopped

Bring all ingredients except parsley and lemon juice to a boil.

Cook covered about 30 minutes or until tender.

Uncover and reduce any remaining liquid to a glaze.

Toss with parsley and lemon juice and serve.

Note - Adjust water to suit the carrots. Tender, fresh carrots need half as much water; older, tougher carrots may need half again as much.

A cold front moved through town yesterday, changing our weather from upper 70s to just above freezing. My desk in the study at home sits at the front of the house, right next to a window. You’d think I’d learn to put on socks or something - brr!

Cold weather always takes me towards soups, braises, and slow-cooked hearty goodness. However, under major deadlines at work last week, and covering for Christine at the art market over the weekend, I’ve had little or no time to do any real cooking since I’ve been back. That should all change tonight… but that’s for another post.

Many of you (okay, two - statistically many) have asked about the salad in the steak au poivre post below. I’ve got a writeup waiting in the wings on side dishes, but this one is easy. It’s grilled romaine salad. Halve a romaine heart, brush with a bit of olive oil, and grill cut side down until the lettuce begins to char and smoke. Salt, pepper, dress, and top with shredded parmesan.

Today, we go Greek. This isn’t exactly chicken noodle soup, but it’s a bracingly crisp and warming soup nonetheless, equally at home on a cold winter day or on a warm spring afternoon. The flavors are simply chicken and lemon, thickened by the egg and cooked with rice to add some body. This is a tart, almost sour soup, but in a really clean and good way. I’d post pictures, but the last batch came out white - in a white bowl - on a white countertop - you get the idea. This is a quick soup for a weeknight or even a weekday lunch at home. Enjoy.

Avgolemono (serves 4)

• 2 lemons, juiced
• 2 eggs, separated
• 4 cups chicken stock
• 1/2 cup white rice
• salt and pepper, to taste

Boil the rice in chicken stock for about 20 minutes.

Whisk the egg whites to medium peak. Gently whisk egg yolks and lemon juice into egg whites.

Temper egg mixture with hot soup. Whisk egg mixture into soup and return to heat. Cook gently until thick (do NOT boil). Adjust seasonings and serve.

NOTE: We are working with eggs here, and trying very hard not to overcook them. However, it’s worth noting that there is a way to still handle the eggs safely and avoid any risks of uncooked eggs. Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking, one of the best texts out there for understanding what happens to your foot, notes that if we cook eggs to 140 degrees F for 5 min, or 160 degrees F for 1 minute, we’ll kill any unsavory bacteria in the eggs (page 83). The soup thickens at around 180 degrees, although I do recommend having a candy thermometer on hand if you can to watch the temperature. Regardless, once it thickens and reaches temperature, make sure to hold it for a minute or two so any bacteria are killed.