Today’s Rave: Cooking Away

Since I’ve been living at home I’ve been cooking meals for my folks and me a couple of night a week, and I’m really enjoying it. I’ve never made a habit of cooking much, but as virtually every recipe is a step of logical steps to follow, provided that the recipe does not have any techniques that have to be learned, I can generally cook with success.

The thing that’s cool is that there are a multitude advantages to making something that I have a craving for myself rather than to going out and buying it. First of all, there’s precision. I know precisely what ingredients go in, so if I want a particular flavor in a dish, I know what to put in. It’s also cheaper. But perhaps the best part is calorie control – it’s much easier to lose weight or stay steady state when you cook yourself. It’s healthier to make yourself a hamburger than buy one at McDonald’s.

Now, I’m not a health nut by a long shot. I love eating out and I like eating lots of food on occasion. Yum. But in terms of working out a way that I can eat what I feel like and yet lose weight, cooking yourself has plenty of advantages, and the only drawback is time. Lucky for me, I have some of that, and it’s true what they say: there’s no better meal than the one you cook yourself. Plus I can finally learn to cook Indian food. Woohoo! Up to this point I’ve made North Carolina-style Pulled Pork and Coleslaw, Rogan Josh (Lamb Curry), Chicken Parmigiana, Coq Au Vin, Grilled Fish Tacos, Jambalaya, Turkey Meatloaf and scads of others I can’t even remember. What’s cool is that I can have practically any kind of food I want – as long as I learn to make it.

Bon appetit!

Speed Screed: Specialty Restaraunts

In Japan, there is a curious culinary phenomenon that is partially influenced by Zen philosophy: restaurants that only serve one type of food. And I don’t they only serve Chinese food, or Indian food, for example. I mean this restaurant only serves tempura. Or eel.

The idea is this: A place that serves only tempura will necessarily serve better tempura than a place that serves tempura along with other items. This idea is logically true first and foremost on an economic basis; if a place only serves one kind of item, then people will only go to that restaurant for that item, and it’s success would logically be predicated on whether better tempura is available anywhere else, including other more general restaurants. Since it’s a sink or swim proposition, they have to make good tempura to succeed. We’re used to this phenomenon in the States mostly in the form of sushi bars. Hell, in real sushi bars you don’t even get to pick what you want; the chef just gives you what he wants, or what he thinks you’ll like.

The Zen part comes in with the “doing one thing to the point of mastery” idea. That’s the philosophy behind the Zen tea ceremony, for example. The actual performance of a tea ceremony, in terms of formal steps, is relatively simple. But the ability to do something perfectly and yet naturally is the heart of learning any discipline, including martial arts. You may think the analogy somewhat far-fetched, but this can even be applied to cuisine. Some guy who has been making tempura for 30 years is going to turn out perfect tempura every time. And perfect tempura every time is how one keeps a tempura-only restaurant going. As well as how one keeps it profitable; after all, if you’re dropping twenty bucks for a couple pieces of tempura, you’ll be happy to do it if it’s amazingly good, and quite pissed off if it isn’t. Such is the delicate balance these specialty restaurants maintain.

Speed Screed: Childrens’ “Menus”

In America, we tend to like variety in our restaurants. Limited menus tend mostly to be found at bars, and usually the selection is limited to nachos, wings, burgers, and other classic Americanized pub food. But one thing we like in America is the family-style restaurant. And that tends to imply variety.

Kids are picky, so these sorts of restaurants compensate with that sometimes applauded, oft-denigrated children’s menu: now your kid can have chicken nuggets whether he’s at a Mexican restaurant or a Chinese restaurant or wherever the hell you end up going. Why expand your horizons when you can have the same deep-fried thing everywhere you go?

I’m still half-kicking myself for missed opportunities as a kid – I could have had real food and instead I got something incredibly boring because I was either lazy or afraid of eating something even moderately different. I can’t remember what I used to get, probably chicken nuggets or something, but my brother would often get a corn dog. Not that corn dogs aren’t good (and if I recall Acapulco actually made them halfway decent) but what the hell are you doing getting
a corn dog at a Mexican place? Sigh.

Of course, now he and I will eat anything that’s not stapled to the table. By that terrible hyperbole I mean that we seek out food we’ve never had before. I’ve even had relatively obscure cuisines like Ethiopian, Persian and Morrocan. All delicious.

On the flip-side though, I’ve also read that parents are relieved by children’s menus because their kids are really, really picky about food and they don’t want to turn every time they go out to dinner into an argument. Some more nutritionally minded parents will just split an entree with their kid, since they usually give you too much food at a restaurant (not for the cost, but in terms of calories for a single meal). It seems if you use the psychology of  “grown-ups like it” or even “only grown-ups get to eat it” then you can probably get your kid to eat and like (or pretend to like) anything.

As for me, well, any kid of mine is going to have downright cosmopolitan taste buds if I have anything to say about it. Chicken tandoori in their lunch box, I say. How will I go about doing that? A man can dream, can’t he?

Speed Screed: The Vegetarian Test

I’ve never actually quartered a chicken by hand before. Until today.

When confronted with nearly the full corpse of an animal that you are going to cook and consume, I reflected on the impermanence of all life, and the transient nature of existence.

And then I started hacking away at the ligaments.

Well, not hacking as such. Sawing. But the point is, I was never somehow overcome with disgust at my (or our) horrible flesh-eating ways. Fact is, humans are omnivores by design (genetic design, to be clear). We can eat vegetables, fruits, meats, seeds, tubers, roots, insects, and pretty much anything we can get out mitts on. Confronting the raw bird in whole form was more of a perplexing puzzle of how to get the bird to break down into KFC-bucket size pieces than an exercise in moral outrage.

Luckily for me, I’d seen Alton Brown disassemble a chicken on Good Eats and had some vague idea of what I was supposed to do. For my first efforts from memory, I was relatively pleased with myself. I did ultimately leave a little breast meat behind but I’ll brush up on my technique for next time. My only real regret of the whole exercise is that I did the chicken a disservice by not managing to get all the meat off it I could.

Other than the paranoia I get from handling most kinds of raw meat, it’s clear that I won’t be converting to vegetarianism anytime soon. I’ve often thought of doing it as a kind of challenge, and as an impetus to get me to cook more Indian food, since they do vegetarian dishes the best. But I think my love of hamburgers and barbecue would pull me back to the dark side soon enough.

The thing that’s so ridiculous about the “moral obligation” argument is that it ignores the facts that humans are animals, supposed “rationality” aside. Animals eat other animals. A lion doesn’t think twice when jumping a gazelle. It needs to eat. It’s the way life has evolved. So suddenly a bunch of hominids manage to scrabble together a few brain cells and suddenly we understand that mother nature has been wrong this whole time? I think not.

On the other hand, since we are omnivores, it’s important not to overdo the meat angle. As it turns out, Americans on average eat way more meat in one day than almost any another developed country (we may be at the top now, I’m not sure). In fact, if I would say there is an American cuisine, it would probably be barbecue. Big hunks of meat roasted slowly in a smoky pit. Mmmm. We love our meat here. It’s true.

With the rising popularity of organic farms and so forth, there is probably going to be an overall increase in the humane treatment of animals we eventually eat. This is definitely a good thing.

Anyway, some meat-related musings. Have a good Wednesday. I know I will. It’s Coq Au Vin tonight.

Today’s Rave: Rise of the Gastropub

Funny name, eh? Gastropub? The name even sounds snooty. No tavern for me, thank you, I’m off to the gastropub. Hmmm, let’s put the name aside for the moment and focus on the facts.

Generally speaking, people have implicitly associated beer with food, although with usual domestic suspects it tended to be barbecue and the like. Have a Bud with your burger, a Pabst with your potato salad, and a Coors with your coleslaw. And this was all well and good. Because barbecue is good; beer is good; therefore an ice-cold lager on a hot summer day with a couple of grilled-up hot dogs is doubleplusgood.

So the association is there. But as people started sipping on brews of more complexity, and in this case I mean a lot of complexity (think Belgians, i.e. Rodenbach Gran Cru, Triple Karmeliet, Brother Thelonius) suddenly a hamburger was not an appropriate accompaniment. Or perhaps it was, but only if they make it out of ostrich, put some sort of rare blue cheese on it, add some bitter greens, and some needlessly complex vinaigrette. You see what I’m getting at? People wanted, nay, expected, classier food to go with their classier beer.

The gastopub has risen to answer this call.

My friend Ron has introduced me to a place here in LA (in Santa Monica, actually) called Father’s Office, which is quite similar to my favorite bar in Chicago, The Hopleaf, for a number of reasons. They have an astounding number of microbrewed local and international beers on tap (though they don’t carry more than a handful a Belgians and lack a bottled beer menu), and they serve very good food, including one of the best burgers I’ve had on the west coast. But this burger, once again, is gourmet. It’s on some sort of kaiser roll and his basically an oval rather than a circle. It is piled high with arugula and a sort of caramelized onion/bacon compote. And it’s good. The meat is tender and really juicy, and the whole thing has this sort of awesome chemistry. It’s really rich, so it goes great with a hoppy beer to cut it a bit.

Consider also the economics of the situation. People who are willing to drop $7 for a beer (albeit a beer with four times the alcohol content of a $2 Bud Lite) are probably not going to be the sort of people who are looking for 25 cent wing night, at least, not on the same night. As such, bar owners if they want to serve food are almost certainly going to up the ante because it will a) attract clientele who don’t mind spending the extra dollar for quality and b) increase their profit margins because the fancier food is, the more you can price it up without people complaining.

All of this makes good sense, and for people like me, who loves really good beer, and really good food (that was a stupid statement) it’s heaven. Places like these will always have a special place in my heart, because the fastest way to my heart is through my stomach. Peace.

Speed Screed: Unapologetic Snobbery

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of a snob about beer. Of course, merely turning your nose up at the mass produced domestic “beer” in the U.S.A. does not qualify you as a snob. Merely as a person with taste buds. (Ouch. Sorry.) But my love of craft-brewed beer has gotten to the extent where I regard Bass, Newcastle, Guiness, or even Harp Lager in a category where I will drink it if I must, but I’d rather have something else. As opposed to Budweiser, which I would rather not drink at all.

The point is, even halfway decent beer will get not credit from me for being anything other than halfway decent. I find it difficult to get excited about Sam Adams these days, except for a few really exceptional brews in their lineup. But credit where credit’s due: Sam Adams is just about the only big name in beer in the US that deserves respect. It’s just about the best mass-produced domestic here. Anyone who can wean themselves off of the barley juice with added alcohol and onto Sam, an honest to god beer, is doing pretty good in my book.

That said, I have a personality somewhat predisposed to arrogance (big surprise there, right?) so I have left snob behind and am nearing asshole status, albeit unintentionally. It’s just when my brother is raving about how great some moderately decent beer is, I can’t bring myself to share in the enthusiasm. Then he looks at me like I must be insane. I’ll be poring over the selection at BevMo, looking to see if any obscure microbrew is going to pay off, and ultimately we just end up getting Sam again.

If there were fewer options, I wouldn’t mind so much. But given the thousands of tiny little breweries in America coupled with the fact that we can actually get some of these obscure beers means, at least to me, that your dollar is better spent trying to find a few really good beers for you. And this will require experimentation. Want a real stout? You won’t find it in Guiness. You won’t find it in Guiness Extra Stout, though at least that’s a genuine stout. You want a porter? Good luck. Start with Anchor Steam and work outwards.

I guess in a really roundabout fashion I’m simply trying to say that we have the luxury of picking a beer that suits us, like the clothes we wear or the music we listen to. And if we’re all willing to concede that such things make a statement about our personality and interests, why not let what we drink follow the same rubric? Offering a guest a really absurdly hoppy IPA from Three Floyd’s brewery in Indiana or a Flag Porter, the recipe for which was extracted from a barrel found in a sunken galleon from the mid-1700’s…well, it just says that I look for excitement wherever I can get it, and I’m simply not content to settle for what everyone else drinks.

It’s also my bohemian nature. Whatever you can set yourself apart with, take pains to get it.

Today’s Rave: All-You-Can-Eat Sushi

Alright, well, my brief voluntary hiatus/vacation is over, and luckily I’ve accrued some material for many an entry since the move back to California. So expect the entries to come hard and fast, as long as I have the wherewithal to remember what the hell it was I was going to write about.

In this case, it won’t be hard.

I love sushi. I know many people who claim it’s their favorite food. It’s certainly one of my favorites, but I somehow feel like saying one particular food is my absolute favorite is doing a disservice to all the other things I like. But let it be known, sushi, or at least good sushi, is really damn high up on the list.

Which is problematic for a penniless layabout like myself, since good sushi is nothing if not expensive. I think I may have gotten it a grand total of twice while in Chicago, and even then I probably got less of it than I would have liked to avoid spending forty dollars on a single meal.

As a result, the time I usually get sushi is when I have the good fortune to be going to dinner with my parents. However, the valley here harbors one of the most outrageously great deals on sushi that I have ever had the fortune to run across. Most places that have all-you-can-eat sushi are generally of pretty poor quality, and overpriced at any rate. But Midori, a small chain of high-quality sushi bars here in LA, offers up an all-you-can-eat for one hour deal for a staggering $26.

This includes everything: appetizers, specialty rolls, nigiri, temaki, salads. About the only thing they don’t have is desert, not that you would need it. If you eat sushi, you know that it would be an extremely easy feat to spend $26 without batting an eyelash. A couple of rolls and you’ve done it already. One specialty roll can be 8 or 9 dollars to start. The point is that here you can go totally nuts, as long as you eat it all (they charge you for uneaten sushi, and you have to eat the rice too, you can’t pick the fish off) and save a boatload of cash while doing it. When me, my friend Mike, and my brother went there on a previous visit to California, we calculated that we had eaten about $225 of sushi total for a total cost of $75. As I said, this deal is insane. The quality is very high, the service is great, and an hour is more than enough time to stuff yourself with your favorite fish.

It’s about the only place where I’ve felt guilty about eating there; no matter how I stretch my imagination, I simply can’t see how they make money on this deal. I realize that buying whole fish fresh and filleting them yourself saves money, and in bulk you can save more money, but even so very fresh fish isn’t cheap. And even if they rely on most people having a couple drinks with their meal, I don’t think the profit margin is so great on their drinks that they can subsidize the losses I assume they would have to take.

However, I’m clearly wrong. This sushi bar has been doing great for years and branches are continuing to open. But finally it’s a place where poor people like me can eat like a shogun for less than the cost of a tank of gas.

I know that comparison doesn’t have the weight it used to. Ah well.

Today’s Rave: Bake That Bread

I remember being at the store the other day, and reaching for my favorite bread. It was one of the fancier kinds, Brownberry, aka Orowheat on the west coast. I then glanced down at the price tag. It was like $4. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Now perhaps I am pulling an old-timer thing here and am simply astounded by the fact that things are more expensive than they used to be. And they did say that food prices would be going up, although it has been a minor change as far as I can tell. But really this all began when I started making my own pizza dough about a year and a half ago.

The cold hard fact is, bread is one of the cheapest foods you can make. At Costco, you can buy a 50 pound bag of flour for about 20 bucks. That’s about 400 cups of flour, and since one pizza crust takes about a cup of flour (and a few cents of sugar, salt, yeast, and olive oil) that comes out to around 10 goddamn cents per pizza crust. Mike and I have probably made about 50 pizzas between us at this point. Mike also realized that if we could make pizza dough with such contemptuous ease, all bets were off. The other day he cranked out two very respectable loaves of rosemary bread for less than 25 cents a loaf. I just made a stack of 8 pita breads today for something like 15 cents.

Yeah, you have to mix ingredients, apply some elbow grease for kneading, and let the dough rise. But once you get used to it, it’s an incredibly fast process. The actual amount of labor it takes for me to go from ingredients->dough left to rise is about 10 minutes tops, and that includes kneading.

So why the 1200% markup on a loaf of fairly decent sandwich bread at the store? When the cost of bread goes up but the cost of flour does not, I suspect the issue is (as it often is) logistics. These national bakeries have to ship their bread all over the country, and of course that takes plenty of good old fashioned gasoline. The cost of baking the bread has not gone up, but the cost of zooming it to your local market has. This is something we can expect to see continue. All the more reason to bake your own bread.

Perhaps the most important thing about this whole rigmarole is the flavor. As you probably already know, there is nothing as delicious as freshly baked bread, and when you make it yourself you have that literally all the time. You also know precisely what is going into your bread. And you don’t need space-age preservatives and packaging because you only bake as much as you need and can use it immediately. I tell you it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread…err..nevermind.

If you’re the lazy type, you could even buy a breadmaker. It does all the work for you, and believe me, it will pay for itself pretty fast.

I know it sounds ridiculous for me to be teaching home economics, but I assure you that only half the reason is saving money; the other half is just that it tastes great. It does take a little extra time out of your day but the rewards are well worth it. The only thing that really takes time is rising and you can be doing something else the entire time.

So give it a try. Find a basic white bread recipe, bake yourself a loaf of bread and see that you can make this staple food with minimal effort and maximal results. And the sky’s the limit. As soon as you can make the basic white bread dough, everything from pizza dough, to naan, to homemade donuts are just a few minutes away.

By the way, homemade donuts rock. Ron and I (Ron used to share an apartment in Chicago with me) fried some up a couple of times. All I can say is, they really were the best donuts I’d ever had. And they’re so easy to make.

Mmmm…donuts.

Today’s Rave: The Italian Beef

Well, I’m tired of politics so I’m going to talk about food. I’m in fact going to write a silly poem about the Beef, a delicious food native to Chicago and distant relative of the Philly Cheesesteak. Vegatarians may want to look away.

Imagine, if you will, a pot full of paper-thinly sliced, tender beef, marinating in delicious beef juice. Mmm. Take a heaping helping of this and slam it down on a fresh-baked french roll. Take the whole damn sandwich and dunk it back into the pot of juice. Then throw on some hot giardinera (a spicy crunchy relish that is very common in Chicago, it’s delicious) and wrap it up in paper. Simplicity. Deliciosity. The Beef.

To what form could a cow aspire
That possibly could be much higher
Than that mighty sandwich Beef
Brings your hunger quick relief

A sturdy french roll has its use:
Withstands immersion in au jus
In which I’d surely love to drown
Just drink some more to wash it down

My arteries won’t thank me, true,
But I’ll write them an IOU
And have another bite or two
And maybe just one more will do

Thinnest trim of choicest cuts
No ifs ands wherefores or buts
The juice is finger-lickin’ good
I’ll have another (knock on wood)

Man, I feel like a foodie version of Shel Silverstein, minus the talent. Hey, there are worse things to be. See you.

Today’s Rave: Tea

Tea is great. I’m so glad to see that after coffee has so long dominated the hot beverage market that tea is making a bit of a comeback. It is the most widely consumed beverage in the world, aside from water, of course. Tea has a number of advantages going for it, which I will list in no particular order.

1) Tea keeps for much longer than coffee, and freshness and oxidation are really not a problem. Coffee is great if you grind it up and drink it within a week of it being roasted, but it degrades very quickly. Tea has no such problem. Even tea a year old still tastes reasonably fresh, although it varies depending on the type of tea.

2) Tea is more accessible than coffee. With the most basic classifications of tea: green, oolong, and black, you don’t have to be a connoisseur to understand the difference between any two of these types; they’re as different as night and day. Part of the reason coffee is an acquired taste is because detecting the subtle notes of flavor requires experience and exposure to many different kinds of coffee. There are some teas that are very close in flavor, but properly made tea is not nearly as bitter as astringent as coffee in general (the best Kona stuff isn’t, but good luck getting that) and so I think it is likely more appealing to hot drink neophytes. Of course, properly making tea takes a little practice, as over-brewing can ruin a cup of tea as easily as a cup of coffee, but it’s just one step.

3) The variety of flavors in tea is simply astonishing. As I said, coffee has a wide variety of notes that are tacked onto the basic coffee flavor, and while I’m sure real coffee heads would say that there is a world of difference between coffee A and B, for me it’s simply variations on the same theme. Green tea tastes grassy and fresh, whereas oolong is smoky and nutty, whereas blacks are very strong, bludgeoning you over the head with complex flavors and often are drunk with sugar and cream.

4) Tea contains phenol, which scientists believe is responsible for tea’s gentle caffeine lift. A cup of black tea contains nearly as much caffeine as coffee, but it tends not to cause jitters and is also not followed by as much of a crash. I drink coffee when I need a jolt to the system, but I can drink tea all day and I don’t feel nearly as wired.

For those curious about tea, I will share a little of what I know. I would encourage you to check out some tea shops and see what a difference there is between real tea and Lipton tea bags.

As a brief primer, the types of teas are sorted by the degree of oxidation which is allowed to occur in the leaves.

A special type of tea in which no oxidation occurs is white tea, which is a tea that has been around forever but is only recently gaining popularity outside of China. Essentially immature or nearly mature tea leaves are used, but are dried immediately to halt the oxidation process. This tea is very light and ethereal, and some of the most prized and expensive teas in the world, like Silver Needle, are in this category.

Green tea is mature leaves that are dried quickly to prevent pretty much any oxidation, though there is a class of green teas that are brought about halfway to the next level, oolong. Green tea is fairly simple and pretty astringent; Japanese greens tend to be subtle while Chinese greens are stronger. It tends to taste pretty grassy. A popular Japanese variant is genmaicha, where toasted rice is thrown in with Sencha green tea. Generally green tea is drunk straight with nothing added in.

Oolong teas come mainly from China and are partially oxidized. They tend to be nutty or smoky flavored. They also have purported weight loss benefits, but most nutritionists say it would be true of any tea, mostly attributable to the caffeine content and no mystical compound like so many of the weight loss sites claim.

Black tea is fully oxidized, and tends to have the strongest flavor. Cream and sugar are often added to counteract the strength of flavor. Lemon is also used. There are plenty of interesting variants here too. Lapsang Souchang is a Chinese black tea that is smoked over cedar. It’s a very smoky, almost savory tea that tastes like you’re drinking a campfire or sauna. It sounds weird but it tastes great.

There’s also a type of post-black tea I learned about recently called pu-erh, which is tea that is affected not only by its own process of oxidation but other factors such as bacterial agents. Essentially nature is allowed to go at the tea, and ideally proper pu-erhs can age like wines and get better as you go. I had a cup recently and it was very earthy. It was not much like any other kind of tea.

And let’s not forget all those health benefits. Teas are loaded with anti-oxidants which help prevent cancer. So I encourage you all to give tea a try.