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Swedish Thai Chili Surprise

How nice it feels to kill two birds with one stone.

Finally, I’ve made right on my promise to challenge Shopsin’s Burrito French Toast. Remember that mad creation? Mushed up bananas wrapped in a tortilla burrito style, egg glaze, coated in corn flakes, deep fried, and covered in cinnamon and sugar. After one look at this thing, I flipped full rotation and cooking changed. I refuse to look back at my past blog entries to see what time frame I gave myself, because I know it took me longer than I expected, but I vowed to make something as crazy, and I think I may have finally done it. You, dear reader, will have to judge whether or not my creation was as crazy as Shopsin’s, and I won’t be heartbroken if you don’t think it was, just be square with me, you know?

Now, how was this two stones and what was this creation? This Sunday, neighbor Heather celebrated her birthday with a chili cook off. For whatever reason, I heard the words chili and I thought root vegetables and from then on it was a race to see what kind of root vegetable chili could take the grand prize at this friendly contest. Hence, crazy thing, chili cook off, one dish, two birds, bird murder.

Before throwing together a bunch of root vegetables, I had to figure out how to make this concoction at least resemble chili. The answer to this call came in the form of old, reliable bacon. Yea, bacon and a bunch of roots, that sounds sort of like chili. To add more chunk, and to find an excuse to use beer in the recipe, sausage would have to make a cameo as well. Yes, yes, bacon, sausage, and root chili – a masterpiece in the making.

Here’s how it all went down.

I browned up some bacon, set it aside, and kept a bit of grease in the pan. Next, browned up some pork sausage, set aside, and kept yet more grease in the pan. The pan was looking nice and greasy, this much was certain. Flavor floated in front of me in its sly and slimy way. Right. Yea I actually poured most of the grease into a corner in our backyard, but I kept enough to keep the flavor, flavor, flavor. Flavor.

In this pan of double flavor I caramelized a bunch of onions, browning as they may and gathering tang over the course of about forty five minutes.

While caramelizing, I roasted up a bunch of diced vegetables, including: carrots, garlic, fennel, leeks, rutabaga, turnips, parsnips, celery root and squash. Once roasted, I combined all the stuff in a pot – the meat, the onions, and all the roasted vegetables. To goop it all up, I tossed in some tomato paste, a bunch of veg stock, some Lagunitas IPA, and a can of coconut milk. Season with some lemongrass, curry powder, salt and pepper and this thing was good to go. It had a nice orange color and my house was smelling like fall.

In my mind there is no other more easily identifiable scent of a season than that of Fall coming from its vegetables. Turnip soup, squash soup, pumpkin stuff, oranges, whites, hmmmmmm. As this chili cooked down, the house filled with the grab bag of all those aromas combined with the smoky bite of bacon and the fatty elbow to the side of sausage.

I went to the backyard to have a cigarette as I waited for the chili to cook down. As I sat there, I took in the beauty of our garden. Actually, our garden is not all that beautiful to the untrained eye. But for those of us in the know, our garden is a symbol of perseverance, persistence, and sustainable urban life. Basically we have potatoes back there from one day over a year ago when I threw a sack of purple heirlooms against the fence. As I sat there waiting for my pot to boil down, it hit me – I had to dig up some of our purple potatoes, grate them, grate some gruyere (which I had bought to use somewhere in this dish), combine the potatoes and gruyere, and make a topping to bake over the chili in the oven. Genius, yes genius! What’s better than an orange vegetable chili than an orange chili covered in a purple cheesy top?

Over at Heather’s, I found myself not very reluctantly answering a lot of questions. Yes, yes, that is the color purple. Yes, gruyere, it’s fuckin European, heard of it? What do you have - beans? While I enjoyed talking up my colorful thing in a roomful of reddish brown goop, the test was on and bragging rights would be decided not by fancy ingredients but on satisfaction delivery.

Unfortunately, the purple and gruyere top was sunk by rising chili juices. I expected the juices to flow over the side of the pot, but inside they flew inwards, dooming the top to nothing more than a mixer inner. I removed the chili, mixed her up, and took my tour of the other offerings, all the while keeping one ear on my orange surprise.

To summarize, comments ranged from, “I’m not eating this, this is not chili” to the more straightforward, “this one kind of creeps me out.” The thing is, orange is a beautiful color, and roots are great too. But when people are surrounded by chili color, topping bars, and cornbread, they don’t feel the beauty of cooking with “Swedes” and coconut milk. Punks.

So I lost the chili challenge. Maybe I lost the Shopsin’s challenge too. But I won my own challenge – the challenge of life. And I had plenty of scraps leftover to make more veg stock. So there you go birds, you’ve been stoned with half a stone each. My eyes are drooping. It’s time for bed.

The Star of Deathblow Becomes a Model

Remember that dashing lad in Deathblow? The one who delivered the most poignant line in the movie, "I say we wait for an hour then take a lap." Well, Conor, the EVO and Belgrove 5-4-1 alum is now a male model. Check him out.

The Burger Mentality

This post was going to be called “Anticipating a Burger,” but when I got home and decided to read on the couch and dilly dally before dinner instead of writing on this thing, well, the burger slipped into the past tense and all of a sudden future food writing had to wait. Now we’re in The Burger Mentality.

I’m not sure why burger cravings set in and became so significant. I think it might be simply because I ate so many of them. My dad makes a terrific burger, and growing up I fell into the habit of ordering them all the time at restaurants. Later in life when playing with fire met cooking and barbequing became my first foray into independent eating, the burger, predictably, took the seat at the top of the hierarchy (on top of only the hot dog, but below nothing). The burger habit didn’t die, and when I found myself living two blocks from Street, home of the greatest burger in San Francisco (I haven’t had Zuni’s yet, but fuck that place), the habit only got worse.

Today I trudged back from our Monday meeting, wondering what the hell the big whoop was about pretty much everything we discussed. When I checked my email to find Steve’s idea to go to Street that night, my Monday bitterness withered and in its place the craving for the burger set in. I promptly replied, stating my promise to myself to eat early and lightly, preferably vegetables (there’s nothing worse than eating a burger for lunch only to be invited to Street later in the afternoon. Their burgers are not as good when you’ve already had a burger for lunch, no matter how obsessed you are with ground beef). I wound up having a bowl of pasta (pappardelle with sausage, tomatoes, and peppers in a light white wine sauce) and a green salad at 11:45 am.

By two I was hungry, and lucky me got some cookies dropped off at my desk (uncontrollable me ate all of them, only to get not really reprimanded but more of a shocked reaction from my boss, the guy who wanted one later in the day). By six I was starving and wondering if I should get a banana on the way home. The plan was to eat at 8:30, after Monday Night Football. No, even a banana was going to be too much. I got home, ate nothing, read my book, talked to Big James, and eventually at quarter past eight we set off for Street.

As we approached the darkened restaurant, heartbreak ensued. God damn. I knew that Street was closed on Mondays. I’d had this happen at least half a dozen times. What the hell. Polker’s was going to have to do.

While Street had been a regular hangout in the Hyde Street days, Polker’s came first. It was our Seinfeld restaurant, a place where we went to talk about nothing. The curly fries had a nice seasoning, the burgers were unexciting but gussied up, and that was all we needed. The void Street left in my stomach was quickly forgotten as I ordered the Western Burger at Polker’s. It was good. That’s it. Polker’s burgers do not incite oohs and ahhs. There are no stories told about Polker’s burgers.

It was good. Some adjectives are just brutal. Weird, depressing, good, bad, and nice come to mind. But eating this burger was not about how tasty it was, and certainly not about describing it in any hardcore food terms.

Salt

As anyone who has ever cooked knows, many many recipes end with the line: season with salt and pepper to taste. For those of us accustomed to exact instructions, this last bit of advice can seem a bit frustrating. How are we supposed to know what tastes right? These last words are almost like spelling out a recipe before adding one last instruction – know how to cook.

To say that knowing how to use salt and taste for it is the same as knowing how to cook is not a huge exaggeration. This last instruction recognizes that recipes are not perfect and that you, the cook, have got to be able to figure things out for yourself. Once you’ve figured out how to use salt properly, you can take it as a sign that you’ve got the cook’s instincts, you’ve learned how to toy with flavor, and that you are in charge of the recipe instead of the recipe being in charge of you.

In my first two classes at Tante Marie, the use of salt has been the most important lesson and it’s been one that’s already made my food better. Let’s take the first example: caramelized onions.

The first dish I chose to make was a caramelized onion, nicoise olive, and anchovy tart. I chose it for two reasons: I wanted to make dough and I wanted to caramelize onions. I read an essay by Jeffery Steingarten about making bread. The essay reinforced the idea that mastering cooking comes from the simplest of concepts (Yea, bread seems simple, right? Well, Julia Child’s recipe for whatever-the-French-words-are-for-classic-naturally-leavened-bread is nineteen pages long. Yes, a nineteen page bread recipe. Simple = complicated). In this case, I felt that making dough would be a good step towards getting through the basics, and I think that it was, but use of salt may be an even more fundamental skill. At some point, I’d like to interview some cooks about what they think the most fundamental skills in cooking are. Remind me.

For the past year or so I’ve made caramelized onions at every opportunity. Having had the perfect burger at the Martini House, and caramelized onions being an integral part of that perfect burger, I started making onions literally every time we barbequed. For whatever reason, I could never get close. My onions just lacked the tang that perfect onions have. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong and I asked many cooks how they did theirs. Invariably, they’d have some response about how they'd just threo them on some heat, stir occasionally, and an hour later they’d be fine. None of them had any useful insight.

When our teacher, Jen, advised me to douse my onions in salt right after I put them in the pan, I instantly became excited that this might be the step that would set these onions apart from the onions I’d been making at home. After about forty minutes, they were looking good. We tasted them together, and she had one piece of advise: more salt. We kept adding salt until the flavor went from a bland, cooked sort of sweetness to a tangy, powerful zip that would stand out among other strong flavors. Salt had done the trick. I was amazed and my conceptual palate instantly expanded. I had underestimated salt’s ability to extract flavors.

The next night I had on my hands half a roasted pumpkin. I pureed it and prepared to mix it in with a bread pudding I was making. Taking a taste of the pumpkin, it was just a bit bland. There’s no surprise here, but adding salt took the taste from a mushy deadness to the taste of pumpkin that the canned stuff tries to replicate. Mind you, the pumpkin did not taste salty, it merely tasted more flavorful. Understanding salt as something that enhances flavors without turning the flavor salty was a big part of this new step.

The new salt tricks go on and on, and every dish is getting better and better. It amazes me that it took this long to finally figure out how to season to taste. It also amazes me that the countless people I’d asked for instructions over the years never seemed to mention salt. Like the recipes in a book, they subconsciously left it up to me. Never did anybody say, “season with x amount of salt,” but rather they all just advised me simply to season.

I’m not sure that cooking is a big enough deal for the can’t be taught vs. can be taught debate like they have about leadership in The Office, but salt seems reserved for intuition, no matter how long it takes for that intuition to kick in.

Women and Men, Cooking and Cooking

On my first day at Tante Marie, I walked in the door, said hello to the other people milling about, and turned towards the table where I was to grab my recipes, a towel, and an apron. An apron. I slung the thing over my neck, looped the strings back around, tied them in the front on my stomach, and took a look down at myself.

I sat down in my seat across from Sharon and Sally. We chit chatted about what we liked to cook and why we were taking the class. Soon enough, Laura joined the conversation, offering that she was taking the class as she didn’t know how to spend all her time now that she’d gotten pregnant and quit her job. Turns out, Sally was in a similar predicament, though she’d already given birth and had a real live kid. Sharon had no children and wasn’t married. I think she’s just really into cooking.

There were two other men in the class: Take and Peter. Take was two months into his three month culinary tour of the United States. He runs the cafeteria for Toyota back in Japan and his bosses decided they wanted more Western cuisine. In both classes Take has made soup, so I suppose they can expect to get some soup there at the Toyota plant when he gets home. Not the soups he made here, no, but soup. He can’t make the soups he made here because they don’t have squash in Japan and bouillabaisse is too expensive.

Sometime after we’d finished cooking (I made a caramelized onion, nicoise olive, and anchovy tart – more on that later), I found myself on the outskirts of conversation. My belly full and entranced by my glass of Burgundy, I hardly noticed as Sally, Sharon, and Laura ventured into a mode of femininity that I’d never seen before. When they asked me what I thought about woman choosing careers or kids, taking time off or not taking time off, staying at home or working part time, I was taken aback. My gut reaction was to make a joke of the question, as I thought it was completely impossible that they’d ask me, a 24 year old guy who’s nowhere close to even getting a dog, what he thought about this.

“I uh, ha, hu, ha, I uh, well that’s just, you know, your department,” I mumbled in a blend between the Dude’s voice and either Beavis or Butthead. Only when I stopped talking and they kept right along with the conversation did I realize that they were serious.

Where were the knives? The flaming grills? The chef’s coats? The people with scars up and down their arms? This was not that kind of kitchen. This was a kitchen where we shared our experiences with our chosen recipes as we ate dessert.

I’m not really sure where else there’s this kind of schism. Depending on who you ask, cooking is either a fiercely masculine, testosterone driven exercise (Anthony Bourdain) or an effeminate, domesticated pastime (Paula Deen). Both masculine and feminine, swashbuckling and demure, the kitchen runs these hormones right up against eachother.

Poached Meringue Don't Fail Me Now

I’m in trouble because I’ve over beaten eggs. And I thought I knew something about cooking.

Tonight’s Wednesday Night Club considered three factors: we were drunk from our tour of Anchor Steam (which extended itself far, far beyond the normal tour. It helps to work for a company that serves their beer. It helps to have a girl with you from that company who’s friendly with everybody and, well, encourages the brewers to make fools of themselves with the kissing of the hand and the forehead and the ideas for what to do with the phone numbers they’ve dished out. “Call me, let’s go out!”), we had two people arrive with prepared bits of standup comedy (and enough booze in the others to motivate some serious improving. Mine? Lewd and crude.), and we had with us a professional cook, Heath, and very few ingredients. The consequences of such a formula seem inevitable. Drunk. Comedy, some good, a lot…amateurish? And a botched batch of poached meringue.

Yea, I know, poached meringue doesn’t exactly seem like the answer to any sentence that involves “inevitable,” but believe me, it was. We had milk, eggs, and sugar. That was it. What to do when you want to cook and that’s what you’ve got? Poached meringue.

Heath asked me what role I wanted to play in this process. I told him that the charge was his and to tell me what to do. He said to beat the whites into soft peaks, add a half cup of sugar, and beat them to stiff peaks.

I beat like I have many times before. When I lifted the beaters out, I said, “soft peaks?” Heath took a look and told me that I’d gone too far. Yes, I had, they were medium peaks. To be honest, of all the recipes I’ve made that involved peaks of varying stiffness, I’ve never paid that much attention. I’ve aimed for whatever peaks they’ve asked for, but never cared if I was a bit off. I wouldn’t have cared in this situation either, but Heath did.

I poured in the sugar and he added a little vanilla and some Bailey’s Irish Cream. I reinserted the beaters. I beat. For about thirty seconds. I pulled the beaters out and drooooooooooooooop, the peaks fell, the eggs were liquidy, I called out for attention and was promptly told to stop. I’d soon learn that I’d overbeaten the whites.

You see, the problem with overbeating is this: when you drop a dollop of beaten whites into the bath of milk and water to poach them, they need to hold. If overbeaten, they don’t stick together enough. Since I’d never seen poached meringue before, I couldn’t tell that these meringues were doomed. But when we gave up on poaching and decided to bake them, I could see plainly that these deflated armadillos of whites were not the meringues anybody had envisioned.

Sometimes the whites get pulverized and the cooks get peeved. But at least, you know, we were talking about God and keeping it real and everything, even if it was in joke form, and even if the jokes were bad, you know?