New Foods

I tried a new food combination today, chicken & waffles.

I rather liked the textural combination of the fluffy waffle and the crisp skin off the chicken as well as the juxtaposition of the sweet syrup (real maple syrup next time) and savory/salty chicken.

Eating out was a bit of a challenge, fried chicken is best eaten with the hands and waffles and syrup is certainly fork and knife territory. (The wings were a particular challenge.)

I actually googled how to best eat chicken & waffles before ordering.

I enjoyed the culinary combination, and I would recommend it.

I'm not entirely sure of its origins, but I get the sense that hung over musicians played a significant roll in the origins of the dish.

An Interesting Take on Pommes Frites

Natalie came across a french fry recipe online.

First, you pickle them in brine before you fry them up.

After a week or so, open the jar and rinse the fries off and then pat dry.

Fry up as you would normal fries, and add salt immediately after cooking is done, and put on paper towels to drain the oil.

Some notes:

• Rinse very thoroughly.
• The fries turn brown much faster than regular fries, well before they are done.  I think that some of the starches are converted to simple  sugars.
• They are a lot like salt and vinegar potato chips.

I rather liked them.

I Revisit One of My Earliest Posts

In the Pan


Close-up Showing Non Stick Properties and Crust

The month that I started my blog, I posted my recipe for baked spaghetti and cheese.

I referred to it as the The Ultimate Comfort Food.

On a lark, I decided to try cooking it in a preheated (350°F, heated in the oven) cast iron pan.

It turned out marvelously well.

I used two pans, one of which had a slightly less robust seasoning.

There was a small amount of sticking, but only in a few places, but the outside crust was glorious.

My basic technique was to heat the pans in a 350°F oven, and cook the spaghetti to very al dente/slightly underdone.

You then rinse the pasta in cold water to stop the cooking.

While this was all going on, I was making the melted cheese mixture (see above link).

Once the pasta and sauce was done, I mixed them together using the mark-1 human hand (with gloves, because otherwise this will be under your fingernails for a week).

I then took the pans out of the oven, sprayed with some oil , and put in the pasta/cheese mixture and pressed it down until it was flat and at the level of the edge of the pan.  (There is some rather satisfying sizzling)

Cook at 450°F for 30-45 minutes. (Yes, it cooks a bit faster)

Unlike the aforementioned recipe, there is no need to cook covered, and then uncover.

I love playing with cast iron.

You might also want to do this in a dutch oven.

Trial By Fire Recap

As I mentioned yesterday, I participated in a historical cooking competition Trial by Fire.

The basic rules are that the medieval dishes must be prepared under camping conditions.

Unfortunately, because the prep took longer than I thought, I could only complete one dish (the apple pastys)
in the 4 hours available, though I did complete all the dishes in the 2 hours following.

Note to self:  I am never going to do two baked dishes in Trial by Fire again.  Camping ovens turn out to be a choke point, and my camp oven was balky, so between the two of these, I ran out of time.

All the recipes turned out well, though.

Recipes are below
Pastys are made with a shortcrust (non-rising) dough, and is the core of any pasty recipe.

Shortcrust Dough

500 g	strong bread flour
120 g	solid fat (shortening, lard, suet, or schmaltz)
25 g	unsalted margarine or butter
5 g	salt
175 g	cold water (important, because you want little bits of fat to make the dough flaky and tender)

Mix salt and flour, and then grate the frozen fat and margarine into the flour, and work until it resembles coarse cookie crumbs.

Slowly add the ice cold water, and work the dough until it pulls together enough to pull off the walls of the mixing container.

Place dough in a cold place (cooler or refrigerator) for at least an hour tightly wrapped so that it can come together.

Making multiple batches instead of making larger batches unless you are using an industrial strength stand mixer, it gets unmanagable

Beef Filling

450 g	quality beef (skirt steak is preferred)
450 g	red potato
250 g	Swede (Rutabaga)
4 tsp	chopped garlic

salt and pepper to taste

Slice ingredients to about a ⅛" thickness by ½" x ½".

Roll out he dough into 4 equal balls, and then flatten into disks about ⅛"-¼" thick, and then add filling by layering, from bottom to top, with Swede, beef, potato, onion, and garlic, putting salt and pepper on each layer as you lay them out.

Seal with an egg wash , and crimp along the side (Cornish) or along the top (Devonian), cut vent holes, and then paint the top side of the pasty with an egg wash.

Bake at 400°F for hour, until the pastry is a golden brown, and shiny from the egg wash.
Allow to rest for at least 10 minutes before eating. Otherwise, you will likely burn your mouth.
It is traditional to eat with a hot English mustard, both this and a Dijon are next to the pasties.

Chicken Filling

As per the beef filling, except for brining the1 lb of chicken strips for 30 min to 2 hours.

2 cups	water
1 tbsp	kosher salt (half that if table salt)
1½ tbsp	brown sugar
¼ tsp	oragano
½ tsp	marjoram

Fruit Dessert Pastys

It's pretty much the same as the meat pastys, except that you divide the shortcrust dough into 8 rather than 4 to make smaller pasties.

Also, sprinkle granulated sugar on the top of the pastys before cutting vents in the pastys and check at about 45 minutes, as it cooks faster.

Apple filling

1	Granny Smith apples, peeled and cut thin
1 tsp	lemon juice
1 tsp	crushed ginger (can also use 1 cube of the frozen)
½ tsp	cinnamon
1 tsp	arrowroot
1	small pinch kosher salt

Mix lemon juice, salt, and arrowroot thoroughly, and then toss with the rest of ingredients and allow to marinate.

Blackberry filling

½ cup	blackberries
1 tsp	lemon juice
1 tsp	crushed ginger (can also use 1 cube of the frozen)
1 tsp	arrowroot
1	small pinch kosher salt

Have a Recipe

I give you 3 minute microwave meringues:



Note that Icing Sugar = Confectioners Sugar = Powdered Sugar, which is not a part of the largely allergic to corn Saroff family, as everyone in the house but the cats and me are allergic to corn, but you could use glazing sugar, which is corn free, or make powdered sugar in a blender, which seems to work better than a food processor.

It's dead simple: Egg whites and powdered sugar which is then nuked until done.

I am a F&@#ing Moron

The Cornish pastys did not cook properly last night.

They just were not getting done.

This morning, it hit me:  the recipe called for them to be cooked at 210° (165° with a convection oven).

Only the recipe is METRIC, not English, so 210°/165° C is 410°/330° F.

So I will be taking my not particularly cooked pastys from the fridge and putting it in the oven at the appropriate temperature.

Posted via mobile.

Trying New Things………

Cornish (Devonian) pastys just went into the oven.

First time I've ever tried them.

I used a very basic recipe (PDF).

To the Americans out there, "Swede" is Rutabaga.

We will see how it goes.

Filling (beef, swede, potatoes, and onions with salt and pepper) seems pretty simple, but I am concerned about the theoretically but not really as simple crust (flour, water, various fats, salt).

As an FYI, the oldest record of a pasty is in neighboring Devon, not Cornwall, so, notwithstanding the EU's Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) designation of the savory pastry.

Memorial Day Cookout Blogging

We came back from the SCA event yesterday, an we were concerned about whether the chicken we brought there, but did not cook, was good.

We (actually Sharon) looked at it and adjudged it not lethal, but as a precaution, I marinated it, because the high acidity will kill anything lurking there.

So, last night, I made a marinade of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, soy sauce, mustard, cayenne pepper, some unsweetened cocoa, brown sugar, molasses, garlic, ginger, and some other herbs and spices I can not recall as I write this.

I let it all marinade over night, and then I put the chicken in the bullet smoker (the one pictured is much higher end than what I use) and used the marinade in the water pan to add some flavor.

Once the chicken was done, I took the contents of the water pan, now marinade and drippings, and reduced it to sauce consistency.

I then put the sauce on the chicken, and caramelized it under the broiler.

It got fairly good reviews from the family.

Tofu Fingers

Whenever I do tofu stir-fry, a common dish at Chez Saroff, I find it hard to get a proper crust on the it.

The extremely high water content of bean curd makes it tough to brown, at least not without one of those huge stove burners that you find in Chinese restaurants.

I have come up with a solution:  Instead of cubing the tofu, I cut it into fish-stick sized pieces, which meant that they could be laid flat against a screaming hot skillet.

The greater surface area allows for proper browning.

Making Latkes for Thanksgivukah

Latkes from scratch at my mother-in-law's.  (THANK GOD FOR FOOD PROCESSORS)

Unfortunately, because this is a collaborative cooking experience, there is a shortage of pans, so I am relegated to a tiny pan which can only handle 3 latkes at a time.

Chanukah in Thanksgiving, gotta love it.

No specific recipe for the latkes, just potatoes, onions, eggs, matzoh meal, salt, and pepper in proportions dictated by my gut.

My only specific advice is to grate the onions first, because the onions have a chemical that prevents the grated potatoes from changing color in the air.

Posted via mobile.

LINKAGE

•  Breast Cancer in Young Women with Prolonged Contact between Their Breasts and Their Cellular Phones (Case Reports in Medicine) If you carry your cell phone in your bra, stop, or use a Madonna style bra for shielding.
• Schumer: Boehner 'A Puppet -- With Ted Cruz Pulling The Strings' (TPM)
• Fresh Ginger Syrup ((David Lebovitz) Lots of great recipes on the site.
• Superman’s Shop Floor: An Inquiry into Charter School Labor in Philadelphia (View­point Mag­a­zine)
   

This is too funny for words:

Linkage

• Fried chicken recipe. (New York Times)
• Oldest European cookbook found. (IO9)
• How Damon Runyon Would Have Explained Jon Corzine. (Brad Hicks)
• Scientific proof that cats are better than dogs. (Buzzfeed)

Below is a recent video of the proto-Punk group Death.

This group (some of the guys on stage in the vid are the sons of the original members) were from Detroit in the 1970s.

They predated the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones, and the Dead Kennedys, and the Clash by a few years.

As I've noted earlier, it does make you wonder how much the emergence of Punk was more of a societal trend than it was a

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

Celebrated by having a turkey dinner with my wife's mom, aunt, and uncle.

We had a good time, and we discovered that Agave nectar is a good substitute for corn syrup in pecan pie.

This its a good thing, because Sharon, Natalie, and Charlie all have various levels of allergies to corn, but everyone can eat this variant.

I have been off my laptop all day, snag I am not turning it on now.

Posted via mobile.

What I Had for Dinner

Well, Sharon^* got some Tuna steaks on sale at at the grocery store, and we cooked them. It was dead nuts simple, I dusted it with my curry spice rub, let it sit for about 10 minutes for the spices to mingle, and then seared each side for about 5 minutes in a hot pan with a bit of olive oil, and served.

There was just a bit of pink in the middle, and it turned out very nicely.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Stock

Well, this Friday, we finally had accumulated enough veal bones to make some stock.

I just got it done and into the freezer yesterday.

Took the bones, along with some onions and celery, and got it to a low simmer and kept it there for about 3 days.

Some notes on stock:

• It's easy to make, just low heat.
• Do not add spices. Stock is a flavoring agent of its own, not a food. Stock with spices is "soup".
• You can add some onions and celery, and we do. The leafy bits of the celery, which one does not normally eat, is good for this.
  
• Add the gristle. It has some flavor and the collagin adds a nice mouth feel and some flavor.
  
• There is a trick to seeing if you have gotten all the "goodness" out of everything. Stock does not have much flavor at all unless you add salt, so take a spoonful, add a shake of salt to some stock in the spoon, and taste.
• Finally, and most importantly, if you are freezing it, do it in small containers. Last time I did this, I had to use a hammer and screw driver to use some.

What you get will give you wonderful flavor and mouth feel for a sauce.

Culinary Adventures: Chicken and Seaweed

We needed to make dinner, and my wife doubted that we had enough left over chicken to feed us all, but I had a solution.

We had a pack of udon noodles, so I got the water boiling for them, and put a about 3 cups of stock in a pot and started to boil it.

I took about 4 sheets of nori (Japanese sushi seaweed), shredded them, and put them in the stock, and brought it all to a simmer, then added the chicken and remaining gravy, some oriental vegetables (broccoli, snap peas, water chestnuts, etc.), and a few chicken wings from the freezer, which took no time at all in simmering broth..

Boiled the noodles for 8 minutes, and then rinsed with cold water to stop the cooking, and when the wings were good and done (even frozen, not that long), put the chicken and veggies on top of the udon.

The seaweed added a lot of umami^* to the broth flavor, and even my son, who is a notoriously finicky eater^† loved it.

^*Umami, from the Japanese word or "meatiness" is the 5th flavor, along with salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. The actual taste bud receptor, for glutamates present in animal proteins, was determined in 2002, though it has been a part of oriental cookery for centuties, and the great Brillat-Savarin's concept of osmazome a very similar concept of meat flavor.
^†Finicky eating habits is a classic symptom of conditions on the Autism spectrum

Culinary Crashing and Burning

Well, yesterday was a small SCA event^* called Trial By Fire. It's a cooking competition.

The idea is that people present dishes in a number of categories that are prepared on site under Pennsic War^†, and to prepare them in a 4 hour period, along with accompanying documentation of their use in the years covered by the SCA^‡.

Well, I went with two, or maybe two and a half recipes. The first was a chocolate recipe, which was translated from the 1631 Spanish treatise into English in 1652, called Chocolate, an Indian Drinke. Which has the oldest, at least the oldest that I could find, recorded chocolate recipe.

The second was a recipe for a meat pie from a history/cook book called A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews, which uses records of the inquisition, which frequently used food as evidence that people were secretly practiced Judaism.

I actually combined two recipes, one for sausage, and one for pie, because the filling for the pie combined meat and milk, and my deliberate use with my wife's cookware would result in a serious case of acute heavy metal poisoning^§.

I had done the sausage, though not the pie before, and I did a test run of the chocolate drink in our percolator about two weeks prior, so I thought that it would turn out OK, but I was unduly optimistic.

With the chocolate, I made a small but significant change at Trial by Fire, I toasted the cacao nibs before grinding, which made the cocoa butter flow out of the nibs, so when I packed it into the basket of the percolator, it created a wax-like structure that the hot water did not effectively penetrate, so I ended up with weakly flavored sweet water.

As to the pie, the the sausage was fine, as was the filling that was made from it, but due to time constraints and poor fire management, I attempted to fry them at too low a temperature, and they became oil sponges.

On the brighter side, my wife^€, won best dessert with her sage fritters, which were quite yummy.

My recipes:
Chocolate Drinke

• Cacao Nibs 1.5 cups
  
• Cinnamon, 2 tsp (about two small sticks)
• Chile Pepper, 2 TBSP
• Anise Seed, 1 TBSP
• 12 Almonds
• 12 Hazel Nuts
• Roses of Alexandria, 1 tbl (Apothicary Roses, I just use 1/4 cup rose water, available from any middle eastern food store, instead)
• ½ cup white sugar
• Vanilla de Campeche, (Vanilla) One bean
• Achiote, ¾ tsp. (More commonly called Anatto)

Grind everything up but the pepper and vanilla, which you mince, and put in a pot with about 12-16 cups of water (including the rose water) and boil until it is the color of Coffee with about 1 cream in it. One caveat, the author claims that among its health benefits is:

It vehemently Incites to Venus, and causeth Conception in women, hastens and facilitates their Delivery.

As such the I maintain no responsibility for romantic entanglements, pregnancies, general soreness of body parts, goofy smiles, or intemperate marriage.

Sausage Pie
To make the Sausage:

• 1 pound ground lamb
  
• 2 eggs, beaten

Spice Mixture

• 1 tsp grains of paradise
  
• ½ tsp fenugreek
  
• 1 tsp caraway seeds
  
• 1 tsp salt
  
• 1 clove garlic
  
• 2-3 tsp chopped fresh rosemary
  
• 3-4 tsp chopped fresh oregano
  
• 2 TBSP pine nuts

Place the lamb in a medium bowl. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

Grind all of the spice mixture, except for the caraway and pine nuts ingredients together in a grinder or mortar. Add the spice mixture, including the caraway and pine nuts to the lamb and mix thoroughly.

Allow the flavors to meld for two hours.

To make the filling:
Finely chop two onions, and sweat in a skillet until just translucent with a pinch of kosher salt, then add the sausage, and cook until done (about 3-4 minutes) stirring to keep a consistency of a Sloppy Joe.

To make the pie dough:

• 1/3 cup water
  
• Pinch of salt
  
• 1/3 cup olive oil
  
• 1½ cups unsifted flour
  
• 2-4 TBSP olive oil
  

Bring the 1/3 cup water, oil, and salt to a boil in a medium pan. Remove from heat.

When the liquid is tepid, add the flour all at once to the water mixture. Stir until all is well mixed.

Place an egg-size lump of dough on a lightly floured bread board. With a rolling pin, shape it into a 1/3 inch thick oval.

Place 1 tablespoon of meat mixture onto a piece of dough. Fold and pinch the fold to seal the pie.

Fry the pies in a skillet with about 2 tbsp of oil.


^*Truth be told, it's not an official SCA event, and as SCA, Inc. has no connection to, or liability arising from, this event.
^†Basically, imagine camping conditions, where there is no electricity, but water from a garden hose.
^‡About 450 C.E. to 1650 C.E.
^§My wife would shoot me.
^€Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

My Spice Rub Has Been Upgraded to Dietary Supplement

I have a Curry Spice Rub. In addition to being great on Lamb, Veal, Chicken and Beef, it now turns out that it may combat Alzheimer's:

"Dr Milan Fiala of the University of California Los Angeles and colleagues note in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they'd already shown that curcumin 'may affect the brain cells of Alzheimer's patients', but wanted to pinpoint the 'precise factor' responsible."

I'm feeling so virtuous right now. If I try it on fish, with the Omega 3s, it may be the fountain of bloody youth.