Smile

This story made me happy today. NPR gets the happiest sounding Louisianans on the horn every once in a while...

South Indian Lima Bean Curry

So Baguskas was going to take lima beans to a grade school class and teach them about how plants grow, for (bio)Geography Awareness Week. But the teacher canceled, so she had a bunch of soaked beans with no home, and she didn't want to eat them. Lima beans are one of only a few food items that I've cooked and thrown away (Sharon knows the other) so I was fearful of them, but wanted revenge, too. Cooked them up and they smelled good and tasted alright. Decided to go with a south Indian curry, so made the curry sauce and added the beans. Lima beans are huge, like small chunks of tofu, so it worked. It maybe tasted a little more like a healthy thing than a tasty thing, but it's alright. Also in the pic is a dollop of peach chutney that I made in the summer of 2008, pre-blog.
Lima Bean Curry recipe:
(mostly based on the Jamie O recipe for south indian curry)
2t mustard seeds
1t fenugreek seeds
curry leaves
couple of chilies
2 onions
some garlic
some ginger
1t turmeric
1t chili powder
14oz can coconut milk
salt
cooked lima beans
bunch of cilantro

Heat oil, add mustard seeds, cover, wait for the 'pop'
add fenugreek seeds
add curry leaves, chilies
blend up onion/garlic/ginger, add, cook down, uncovered
add turmeric and chili powder
add coconut milk, cook 10 min or so
add beans, cook 10 min or so
puree cilantro in blender, add at end, off heat, to keep color

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme

So, the question is, is this a food blog, or a help-keep-out-of-the-area-friends-in-the-loop blog? Cause while I cooked the bird and gravy and stuffing, I don't really have much to say about it. In the last 8 years, I've made 5 turkeys and 1 duck. It's hard for me to write about something I've done 5 times with enthusiasm, especially cause it's just following a recipe.... maybe we'll do a turducken next year, that would result in an interesting blogpost.

Started the day biking around to collect herbs: parsley, rosemary, thyme from the garden; white sage and purple sage from the native plants area by the lagoon/dorms. Used the Alton Brown method for turkey: brined bird, ~15lbs; 500 degrees 30 min; put a tent of foil over the breast; 350 2 hrs. Great results. Gravy is pretty straightforward, pan juices, flour, let that go for a little while, homemade stock. I kinda messed up the stuffing -- baked my own bread, but the bread was undersalted and I had used a bit of rye flour in it, and thought that clashed a bit. It was alright, though. Keely and Traves and her brother and his girlfriend made the rest of the sides. Keely made a pumpkin pie, her very first attempt at making dough, rolling it out, etc. Super good. The filling was: the flesh from 1 Kabocha squash (~2c), 1 14oz can condensed milk, 2 eggs, spices. It was a pretty good day. Onto the pics:

Marshmallows for eating, saving some back for the sweet potato casserole

stock pot

the bird is the word

Keely's first pie

whip it, whip it good

Jonathan Safran Foer / OnionAV

This interview was published a week or so ago, but I was saving it for Thanksgiving. It's yet another book about ethical eating. So yet another blog post about ethical eating. There were some good points in the interview about being a vegetarian versus an 'ethical omnivore' that were along the lines of stuff I've thought about. Basically it's pretty easy, especially in California, to eat organic, local, etc food for most of the year. Adding decent meat to the mix is a little more tricky. Free-range for poultry is a more nebulous term than you'd think. Wild Salmon is good. Farmed catfish is good. Avoid wild catfish and farmed salmon like the plague, though.... Buffalo is good, I'm pretty sure you can't put any chemicals in their feed, so it's a good clean food source. There's a guy at our farmer's market who sells grass-fed beef. So there are options. If you are cooking you can control what you eat, but what about dinner parties? How do you politely say, "I'd love to go to your house, but not if you are going to serve supermarket meat"? It's a problem.

Werner Herzog

I've been meaning to do a Werner Herzog post for a while, as I recently bought Aguirre: the Wrath of God, Fitzcaralo, and Burden of Dreams. Well, OnionAV just did an interview with him about his new movie, so I reckon that's a good enough impetus.

Aguirre begins with a 5 minute shot of andean indians and 15th century spaniards snaking down switchbacks from the Andes to the upper Amazon. It's unbelievably beautiful. The trailer has quite a bit of footage in it, moreso than usual, so you get a feel for what the movie looks like. The movie is generally about surviving in the wild, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Fitzcaraldo is about a man who comes late to the rubber plantation boom in Brasil and decides to claim a piece of property that is inaccessible. The major part of the movie is about hauling his 350 ton steamship over a hill to get into an adjacent river valley where the property is. The movie is generally about surviving in the wild, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Burden of Dreams is a criterion release, a making of Fitzcaraldo. It's great, and there are lots of extras. Grizzly Man is about the unhinged guy from socal who 'lived' with Grizzly bears in Alaska for something like 13 summers in a row, until they ate him and his girlfriend. It's riveting. The movie is generally about surviving in the wild, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Rescue Dawn is about POWs in Vietnam who escape their prison camp and trek out to safety. I liked it, but not as much as the others I've seen.

Update:
Bob Edwards Weekend had a nice interview with him on Nov. 28.

Paper Moon

I recently got Paper Moon on dvd. Movie is from 1973, set in the Great Depression, about a grifter who agrees to drive a little girl to her aunt's house. I don't want to say much more, other than that it's highly recommended. That a 10-year old smokes in the movie is probably enough to tip y'all off that it's a bit unusual.

{I didn't include a link to the trailer cause it gives too much away}

IV Carrotmob

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. Pity it's IV Market and not the co-op, but c'est la vie.

DC Tweed Ride / NPR

Catching up with last night's All Things Considered, which I missed cause of the Blazer game. Last story was a bit hipster/cutesy, but whatever. About a bunch of people who rode around DC in tweed sunday afternoon. Nice. The audio is short, but there's a cool slideshow, from whence I stole the pic...

California Bay Leaves

There are 2 kinds of bay leaves used in cooking: leaves from Europe/Eurasia that are expensive and somewhat delicate tasting in nature, and leaves from Oregon/California that are free to gather and a little more potent. Guess which ones I prefer.... I ran out a couple of weeks ago, so my last batch of red sauce was bay leaf- free, much to my chagrin. On sunday I went for a bike ride and restocked the pantry.

The NBA is Weird

Good Blazers game last night. They should have won, deserved to win. Some bad calls. But that pales in comparison to the 2000 WCF Game 7 theft. Or, someone posted a link to some youtube action of the 2002 Kings/L*kers series today. The Blazers self-destructed in 2002, I really liked the way the Kings played then, so was pulling for them even more so than just because they were playing the L*kers. Game 6 of the Kings/L*kers is known as the worst officiated game ever.

Cold October

Me and Keely are sitting here, shivering in our office again. I googled cold october and hit paydirt. NOAA has climate stats for the nation for the last 115 years. This is the 26th coldest October in Cali. Wisconsin has it worse, 9th coldest. Oregon is one better at 8th coldest. Wetness comes in to play for the midwest, basically the wettest October all up and down the Mississippi River.

Chayote

I picked a couple a while ago at the garden, and finally got around to using them. I made them two ways, although only have a pic of the 2nd experiment. I basically sliced them in half, ate the seed raw (everything I read about them said the seed is super tasty, I thought it was ok, I think it is supposed to be eaten cooked). Anyway, slice in half, lay down flat, slice thinly. Ever recipe I saw called for peeling them, but I hate peeling things -- the skin is a little tough, but not that bad. Simmer/steam in liquid. The 1st try involved fennel, a little eggplant, 2 tomatoes, chayote, some white wine. 2nd was chayote, thyme, white wine. Throw everything in a pan, bring to a simmer, cover and steam for 10min or so. I liked the first a little more, I think the acid from the tomato helped. Glad I tried it.

Hachiya Persimmon Buttermilk Sherbet

This one was very different from the Persimmon Sorbet. That one was perhaps overly sweet, a little in your face considering persimmons are pretty mellow... I liked it. Anyway, this one I intentionally made less sweet, and healthy-ish (buttermilk has alot of protein and only a little bit of fat), you can eat quite a bit of this one if you had a light dinner and need some nutrition. {The funny thing is I had been researching persimmon sorbets/ice creams on the interweb, and came across a recommendation for yet another cookbook: the Curious Cook by Harold McGee. I have his more famous book 'On Food and Cooking' which is about the science of cooking. I've probably mentioned it before cause it has electron microscope pics of milk that has been heated to different temps -- showing that the protein structure changes, which affects the texture of your yogurt. I received the book in the mail recently, and the chapter right before the sorbet chapter was all about persimmons, specifically how to ripen the hachiya variety. Nice.} Anyway, the sherbet is pretty low-sugar cause there is a ton of sugar in a ripe persimmon. I upped the booze to allow for a still soft-ish, edible texture (and used limoncello so there was a little more sugar, too). This was a decent experiment, and a worthy addition to the sorbet chronicles.

Hachiya Persimmon Buttermilk Sherbet:
9 very ripe medium small hachiya persimmons (~3c)
1Q buttermilk
4oz powdered sugar
pinch salt
~1/4 c limoncello
Dissolve powdered sugar in buttermilk. Split persimmons (squeeze them) but otherwise don't peel. Add salt and limoncello. Stickblend to mix all. The orange chunk in the lower left corner of the pic is a piece of the skin. I think it looks cool. I always eat the skins, but for the sorbet I ate the skins separately and only used the pulp. All the love is in this one.

the New Frugality

There was a story on NPR on sunday that got me thinking. It was about how even with this nasty recession we are (maybe/hopefully) coming out of, people still aren't learning their lesson and saving money. I've been really disappointed about post 911 America. It seemed like there was a time, for maybe 6 months or so, when people were nicer, more considerate, more likely to do meaningful things as opposed to me me me. Seems like we don't learn.

Feist

Alone in VIPER today. lonely. Went fishing for Feist's "lonely, lonely" as for some reason I didn't rip it to my hardrive and the cd is at home. Youtube. Also found the official video for One Evening and quite liked it. It might even be better than the 1 2 3 4 video. I'm not entirely sure how they did the effects in the Mushaboom video but I dig it/them. You know what, there's alot of Feist on youtube. She even went on Sesame Street.

Oh man, the remix of lonely, lonely from Open Season (Feist remix album) is killer. I've been avoiding the album, not so much a fan of remixes, but am getting it now.

A youtube comment explaining the origin of the remix is pretty funny: The person who did it isn't known - He just threw the CD at Feist on stage (It flew like a frisbee which is why it's called Frisbee'd). She loved it and put it on Open Season.

Update:
Got Open Season. Lonely, Lonely is the clear winner. It's basically on repeat for me right now. And there's surf right now, so I'm not sad or anything...

Weekend Wrapup

Prairie Home Companion was in Iowa, and he did a bit about how crappy corn is -- about high fructose corn syrup, and also about how cows can't digest it properly. I thought it was pretty brave of him, considering the location. Info was true, of course. TAL was decent, I really liked the first story, about a guy who tried to find out who the owner was of the abandoned car parked in front of his house.

In other news, we had waves all weekend, which was much appreciated.

Sunday night we did a pizza thing. A little before people showed up I got a call, a child's voice asking about pizza. I assumed Keely or Eliza were messing with me, but it turned out to be Sweet Lou. His timing was impeccable. Alas, I lied to him, I told him I was making 'normal' pizza. Mostly because I'm not good at talking with kids. I'd made a pimiento chile sauce with a ton of cilantro that we mixed with red sauce. So not entirely normal. But quite tasty. The sorbet and the sherbet were both good, though I felt bad about sending people off with cold bellies as it was cold out. But K/T/T were biking home, so they probably warmed up a little.

There was a little bit of dough left over, so monday I made a cross between an italian and a lebanese pizza. Lebanese pizza, at least according to Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food, is pizza where you put raw meat on the pizza, and it cooks in the oven. I've done it quite often, it's great. So last night I did red sauce and pimiento sauce, with cheese slices interspersed with pieces of ground buffalo. Really tasty.

Tracy Morgan / Fresh Air

The interview was broadcast a couple of weeks ago, took me a while to listen to it. It's an amazing interview. Highest recommendation.

Vanilla Bean Buttermilk Sherbet

I don't know what terminology to use when describing vanilla beans. Is the whole thing a bean or a pod? Are the little black specks the beans? I forget. Anyway, I had used 3 whole beans/pods in the syrup for the persimmon sorbet, and then chucked them in a jar of apricot preserves for a couple of days. Yesterday I used them to make vanilla sherbet. And it was good. Buttermilk sherbets have brought great joy the last few months, I wasn't sure if just vanilla would be interesting enough, so would have added something else if needed, but I quite liked it as is. The recipe is very simple, buttermilk, vanilla pods, sugar. Mix it with a stickblender to pulverize the pods, making cool brown flecks throughout. I used vanilla sugar, not powdered sugar, I wanted maximum vanilla flavor and wasn't sure the pods would have alot of life left. Also, blending allows the sugar to dissolve well enough without it having to be heated; this is a technique advocated by David Lebovitz who wrote 'the Perfect Scoop.' I've followed the Jamie O school of syrup making for sorbets (fruit + sugar syrup), but I don't like to heat cultured milk products, so all of the sherbets I've done have involved dissolving sugar in buttermilk. A worthy addition to the sorbet chronicles.
Vanilla Bean Buttermilk Sherbet:
3 bourbon beans
1Q buttermilk
10 oz vanilla sugar (granulated sugar stored in a jar with a couple of vanilla beans)
pinch salt

blend it all up. it blends less messily when it is partly frozen. freeze, stickblend, freeze.

Hachiya Persimmon Vanilla Bean Sorbet

I recently ordered a 2nd batch of vanilla beans, so have a pile, and am thinking about what to do with them. Came upon the idea of steeping them in water as opposed to dairy (milk, cream) to get the flavor out. Goes along with the whole non-dairy sorbets thing. So steeped in water, took them out and dropped them in a jar of apricot jam (which made the jam taste differently/divine after only 1 night of being in the jar) and then added sugar to the water and made a simple syrup. I prefer fuyu persimmons, but the hachiyas are growing on me, and a whole bunch were ripe at the same time yesterday. So dropped them in with the syrup, froze it, stickblendered it. The flavor is a little too far on the subtle side for me, but it's still pretty good. We'll try it on Keely soon and see what she thinks.

Hachiya Persimon Vanilla Sorbet recipe:
1.5 c water
3 bourbon vanilla beans
1c sugar
pinch dried blood orange zest
pinch salt
2c hachiya pulp, ~7 medium ones

Cut beans in half lengthwise and crosswise and put in water. Bring water to simmer. Cool. Repeat. Not sure if the 2x thing was necessary, but felt like it. Take out beans.
Add sugar, heat water till sugar dissolves.
Add zest and salt, let cool completely.
Squeeze fruit out of the skin. Eat the skin. Add to sugar syrup. Freeze.
Stickblend it. The stickblender takes the frozen syrup and frozen fruit and makes a gorgeous frozen puree.

Ramen / NPR

An interview with a dude who makes HQ ramen in NYC.

Michelle Norris: This takes hours to do this... you have to let the pork bones simmer for six to seven hours... there are a few steps beyond that... help us understand why it's worth it.

David Chang: that's a stupid question; if you have to ask, you'll never understand (I'm paraphrasing, he said this more politely).

I spent all day sunday making red sauce. Filled my huge 20Q pot with tomatoes twice. It's worth it.

'I Know How to Cook' / NPR

Clotilde, who writes the Chocolate & Zucchini blog is on NPR as I write this (radio via my Sony cd player w/ radio, internet via Woodstock's in IV). She translated a french cookbook into english (the resultant tome weighs 5+ lbs), and perhaps more importantly, has a delightful accent. She's been on NPR twice before, about her blog, and about her book.