You knows it!

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On a recent camping trip my husband and I fell into typical roles. I was strutting around in my fifth outfit of the day, mixing cocktails for everyone. He was posted by an open fire, sharing deep dark secrets about his other love: barbequeing.

I am the main cook in the family, but there is one area that is his domain and it is known as THE GRILL.

Lately he has delved into the world of rubs and the art of mixing just the right spices to massage into your meat to bring out the flavor. We’ve stopped drowning chicken in marinades, and have moved on to a subtler seasoning.

On this particular camping trip he was introduced to the purest of all rubs: the dry brine.

Regular brining involves lots of liquid and can be messy. Dry brining involves only one ingredient and is fairly easy. All you need is salt. That’s right. The purest of seasonings, the most basic crystalline savory molecule. It is so simple, so versatile and so tasty.
We sampled a few pieces of chicken over this open fire (I was now in a red and white polka dot dress with white sandals and white sunglasses) that had been dry brined. DIVINE! Who knew the least amount of seasoning could bring out the most amount of flavor?

We headed home, determined to give this dry brining a whirl.

Now, while super simple to prepare, a dry brine takes a lengthy time to go to work so be prepared. All-in-all you need to let it sit for two days in the fridge after the initial rub so plan accordingly.
For our first run, we didn’t want to master the dry brine on it’s own. Oh, no… we wanted to experiment! I rushed to Whole Foods, where their selection of salt once sent me into a dizzy confusion over the sheer amount of choices. This time, though, I knew exactly what we needed: smoked salt.

What better salt to use in a dry brine on the barbeque then a smoky one?
The exact ratio we were instructed in was 3/4 tablespoon of salt for each pound of meat.
We selected a free-range, hormone free chicken from the market. The juicy sucker was medium sized… maybe four or five pounds.

Get your bird and clean out the organs. If you have a dog, feed this offal to them (no need to waste… and dogs love raw meat occasionally, whether or not you feed them a fully raw diet. Just make sure to give them enough time to digest before you try to feed them kibble so they don’t get sick).

The actual rubbing part was tricky. You have to get it into the meat, under the skin, without removing the skin. Some of it tore in places, but on the whole it worked fairly well. We covered it and stashed it in the fridge to marinate in its own juices.

The salt passes through osmosis into the juice of the bird, and that is the beauty of the dry brine. When it was completed, we chose to barbeque it beer can chicken style and oooooohhhhh.

Slippery moist morsels of chicken. The two of us ate the whole bird ourselves because we are occasionally ridiculously gluttonous.

I think the ratio of salt we were given was a little too high, but it could just be that the smoky flavor was more intense.
I may experiment with other salts to see how they come out.

For dessert… throw a couple of peaches on the grill and bake an oatmeal/brown sugar crumble in the oven to sprinkle on top with soy ice cream.

George approves of the peaches.

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Let me set the scene…

Imagine, you wake up in your tent, perhaps curled up next to somebody cute. You rub your bleary eyes, red and itchy from last night’s indiscretions. “Coffee… Coffee! COFFEE! NOW!” you think. The tent flap zips open. Nature in all her glory fills your nostrils. You take a moment to spread your arms and emit a contented yawn before quickly assembling your drug paraphernalia. Stove, moka pot, cup, grinder.

Wait, grinder? In the woods?

You fill the hopper, turn the handle for a while, and brew up a few spectacular cups as your campmates thank their lucky stars. Ahhhh, life is sweet, isn’t it?

Still in production today but little-used outside of coffee geek circles, quality hand-cranked coffee grinders often have grinding mechanisms to rival the most rarefied big-dollar electric grinders. A not-so-obvious plus is that, due to the sweat of your brow powering the grinder instead of a motor, the RPMs at which the burr spins are far lower. This means the beans will be heated less by friction, which means better coffee. The only downside is, you’ll get a little exercise and wait a little longer. So be it. Coffee is a ritual. Why shouldn’t grinding it be a little ritualistic?

I picked up the above, a vintage 50s model from German maker Zassenhaus, on Ebay just now, for a pittance. Not only will it probably outperform my current home grinder (a Nemox Lux, no slouch), it’ll come in handy for the oceanside coffee roasting party I’m currently drawing up. Please, lord, let UPS be gentle this time.

*UPDATE!*

The grinder arrived in great shape, with some construction surprises- the red domed top is actually beautifully milled out of wood, and swings out in two hinged halves. The whole mechanism’s definitely in need of a little lubing and a good clean, but it happily ground a shot so fine it choked my Aeropress, and the next just fine enough to create a wonderfully fragrant cup. I’m in love.

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I don’t want to turn this (or my other) blog into a press release portal, but I have a new dance music release that just hit Beatport, and it is some truly hott business. If you like tech house/electro and have a taste for dirty, twisted tracks, you simply MUST check this out.

Listen and grab it here.

OK, so I’ll add a LITTLE food related content. I went to 99 Ranch market in Daly City last night for some weekend shopping, and really scoured the place for crazy new stuff. I saw two things I’ve never seen before:

Vegetarian Intestines:

…no comment.

Caltrops:

Apparently Caltrops are an evil-looking perversion of the humble, innocent chestnut. Raw, they often contain a very harmful parasite (and are you surprised? LOOK AT THEM!), so they must be boiled into submission, and then opened with an icepick, bowie knife, or the jaws of life. The flesh is described as “creamy”. Mmm hmm.

I bought a bunch of food, including a nice little slab of “sashimi grade” tuna. When I got it home, most of the veggies were far sadder than they looked in their (styrofoam and shrink wrap) packages, and the tuna was several shades past fresh enough to pop in one’s gob uncooked. Miffed but undeterred, I still got a decent meal out of the haul. I even cubed up the tuna, rolled it in sesame seeds and panko, and fried it ’til crispy. Served with a japanese mayo, lime and mustard sauce, it was pleasant, but not quite pleasant enough to keep my mind off the fact that I wasn’t eating it raw.

Such is life. I guess this is why I try to buy stuff at places where the scale of the store allows for better quality control. I don’t shop at Safeway for a myriad of reasons, but that’s one of them.

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…that was today’s question. In my quest to shore up my lacking Mexican cooking skills, I’ve been wanting to make a really good batch of Salsa Roja, but the texture’s been eluding me. A cooked salsa with a silky smooth texture and a burnished but still bright flavor, Salsa Roja seems simple enough on the surface…

I mean, come on, it’s just canned tomatoes, cumin, cilantro, lime juice, salt, pepper, garlic, and dried chilies, all cooked for an hour or so until well-integrated and then liquefied somehow. I’d tried a stick blender, a regular blender, a food processor and even a food mill, and all left me with too much fibrous, texture-wrecking junk behind, no matter how zealous I was. VRRN VRRN VRRNNNN…. :/

Well, I’ve finally cracked it. After reading about them in a hundred fancy blogs and marveling at their $50+ price tags, I’d lusted but never lunged for a tamis (pronounced “tah-mee”). When visiting Kamei restaurant supply last week, I found one for all of $6. A tamis would be mine, at last.

A tamis is nothing more than a fine mesh screen, steel or nylon, stretched tight in a circular metal frame with three-inch-ish-high sides. You place it on top of a pot or bowl, fill it with the food you’d like to liberate from the bonds of solidity, and then scrape back and forth across the screen with something flat (like the business end of a spatula). This mashes, purees and separates out the larger solids from your dish with blinding efficiency.

They’re used to great effect in Indian food, reducing lentils to subtle creaminess in Dhal. They’re MVPs in the creation of satiny soups. Surprise surprise, it did a perfect job of separating the essence of this salsa from the seeds, husks and skins that no blender could ever mitigate. I was left with the above, an absolutely luscious sauce that satisfied my blurry-eyed morning cravings handily. Topping a plate of eggs, refried beans and tortillas, it was a breakfast to be remembered.

Next to receive the tamis treatment will be some enchilada sauce. Definitely will post when that plan’s in motion.

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This is gonna have to be a quick one- all I’m going to say is, go to your local well-stocked liquorium, and pick up a bottle of Falernum. I picked up a bottle of the easiest to find stuff, Velvet Falernum, on a lark due to acres of mixology blog being dedicated to its ilk. I had no idea what it’d taste like, apart from knowing it had something to do with cloves and rum.

I mixed a quarter-shot of it into a shot of Buffalo Trace bourbon, plus a quarter shot of dry Noilly Prat vermouth. Stirred briskly with ice and decanted into the nearest glass, it was the perfect drink for ringing in the end of summer. Sweet, complex and refreshing, but not so detached from the base liquors to become a trifle, it was eminently enjoyable.

It’s probably been done before, but if not, I’d like to stake my claim to this combo. I’ll call it the “Aurora Borealis”.

All I’m saying is, grab a bottle of this stuff, and get experimenting. It’s wonderful. Even better, make your own damn falernum.

Filed under: Ingredients, Cocktail Hour
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For some time, I’ve been a person who is always buying giant armloads of organic/local veggies, sticking to less processed foods, ferreting out fun new things to cook with, having frequent dinner parties, etc. My shopping cart at Rainbow Grocery generally looks like a mobile hill of vibrant greens, reds, yellows and browns when I’m done. I LOVE FRESH FOOD! It’s the centerpiece of my life.

While raw foodism is seen by some as almost ascetic by many, and obviously no fun at all, I normally eat raw food constantly (along with plenty of cooked stuff). My work lunches often used to consist of a box of vegetables, raw as the day they were picked, some miso, and maybe some hummus and some other kind of protein. My contented munching on undressed spinach used to elicit smug titters from my co-workers.

There are also a few competent taquerias and a halfway-decent noodle house about a 10-minute walk away from work, so there was always something decent to eat.

Lately, the pace of my life and work has picked up. The giant shopping trips, the weekend research kibbutzes with co-obsessives, the nice breakfasts and packed lunches on weekdays, and even the safety valve of decent restaurants a short jaunt away have been compromised. Thus springs the trap of immediately available food around the corporate workplace, which generally means: CRAP. Subway sandwiches and Round Table Pizza salads just seem like pale, cruel jokes.

Worse than all of that chain-store garbage, though, is the robot-like entity that recently descended, to much fanfare, in my company’s cafeteria.

Cold Food, indeed. Embalmed sandwiches, interred pizzas, lonely-looking yogurt, bags of tuna salad, toxic muffins. Each week, we’re told “The Machine’s been restocked! This week we’ve got…” as though the makeup of the Costco by-the-pallet astronaut food would change in some compelling way over time.

For god and Grant Achatz’s sake! We’ve invited a robot into our midst that will happily serve us dorm food, forever. Its name is “COLD FOOD”, and it’s here to save us from the drudgery of that one-minute walk. I can hear its wheels and gears clicking together in calm, collected malice, dreaming of fattening us all up for the eventual harvest by its alien creators. “Yes, my pretties. Enjoy your lunch of corn syrup fried in trans fats. The Overlings will be pleased with your girth in short order.”

I’ll never be able to bring myself to support the death-bot, but I’m still being lazy. Every time I find myself biting into another cardboard Subway sandwich when I could have walked a little further and had a really nice torta at Lisa’s, or a bowl of spicy chow fun at TK Noodle, a tiny black cloud forms in my heart, and gray raindrops stream out of it, a cartoon frown forming on its translucent face. A frown that says, “Look how the mighty have fallen.”

Consider this my official resolution, my online point of accountability (hold me to it!) that I will no longer eat crap. That I will take the wheel of my own epicurian 18-wheeler and steer it away from the oncoming ravine. Today I’m taking a couple of co-workers to Lisa’s, so we can all marvel at the rare sidewalk flower that is a great mexican joint in the wilds of Daly City. Next week, the boxes of living, breathing vegetables will be my lunchtime companions again. It’s GO TIME.

Now it’s time to create a map of good local restaurants and stick it on the robot, perhaps with a subtle warning, like this:

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Not a ton of content today, just a friendly reminder to be your own private chef. Wake up with a hard-to-satisfy craving? (no, not that kind) Just call on your internal private chef to whip you up a bespoke meal. All it takes is a little lazy preparation. it helps to do a little experimental shopping here and there.

See a vegetable someplace that you’ve never eaten? Grab a few. See a sauce that looks good but has no english on the package? Pick up a little bottle. Once you’ve done this for a few months, just when convenient, you’ll have a much more solid idea of the things you love and what they’re made of, or what they *could* be made of, in a pinch. Just take a chance- most of the most interesting stuff out there is cheap as chips, and that’s cheap, jackson!

This morning, with a fridge full of next to nothin’*, I unearthed a lonely king oyster mushroom, a nub of veggie chicken, some snap peas, the last of a sad bunch of cilantro, and a little scrap of pancit noodles.

This all went into a smoking hot frying pan with a couple of fine-chopped thai chilies and 2 cloves of garlic. Finished off with a sauce made from peanut butter, kimchee starter (my new fave thing- I’ll post about it once I get a little more info), china hot oil from the Dol Ho dim sum place in Chinatown, and a little lime juice and Maggi.

A few minutes later, a full-color version of the dish above was ready and waiting, along with a pint glass of Blue Bottle coffee, dripped from a Melitta cone. I couldn’t have bought this dish anywhere in the city. Making it it took 5 minutes, and was no harder than: Choose stuff, chop stuff, cook stuff, mix sauce, stir fry stuff in sauce, eat. Needless to say, it was just what the doc ordered. The smell even roused my hung-over housemate from his bed of pain.

…and just think what I can whip up once I actually restock the place!

* I realize that a lot of people wouldn’t call having all this crap “next to nothin’”, but what I want to foster in folks is a certain element of constant exploration, where you might be picking up random food items regularly enough to find yourself having bottomed out your fridge with a few things like these still hanging around.

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You should know that I am a huge fan of bourbon. In fact, you should be a huge fan of bourbon, too. The carmelly sweet liquor is warming and delectable. It simultaneously makes you feel classy from some by-gone era and tough, like you could take on everyone in the bar if say, some crazy movie-scene type brawl broke out.

But bourbon is a great entertaining liquor because of the endless classy cocktails you can put it in. (As well as the low class cocktails).

I offer for you here two whiskey cocktails for summer, one high class, one white trash.

First off, by way of Portland, a fabulous trailer park classic:
The Whiskeytini

The whiskeytini is served in a martini glass (for effect)
Chill the glass with ice, then pour in one shot of whiskey.
Top with PBR (to desired height) and add a thin, round slice of lemon (the same way you would add a round slice of apple to a washington apple)

That’s it! Cold, refreshing and tounge-in-cheek. Best served at theme parties or on the porch on a sunny afternoon.

The second cocktail has a name, but I can’t steal it as this isn’t my recipe. I’ve modified it slightly from the original, but it is still tasty. I must give credit to Bourbon and Branch for the original. I don’t get to that bar often, but I missed the drink enough to try it out myself.

In a collin’s glass grate about a teaspoon of fresh ginger
Add two shots whiskey and muddle the ginger into the whiskey
Fill glass halfway with fresh pressed apple juice (no sugary juice here… try to go as pure as you can… juicing yourself is the best way to go)
add a handful of ice cubes and top off with 7-up or tonic (for a less sugary version)
To finish add two dashes of cinnamon, stir and serve.

Voila… two conversation piece cocktails for any summer gathering.

Filed under: Recipes, Ingredients, Cocktail Hour
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I’d like to counter my last post of discussing the sour with a discussion about sweet and sweetners.
I have recently toyed with the idea of going on a cleanse. I have always avoided cleanses like the plague because well, the thought of giving up what I love to eat for any period of time (even if for a health reason) just kills me. Food is my drug… I want it all. I want it now. And I will NOT LET ANYONE STAND BETWEEN ME AND IT.

This is my inner fat kid talking. When I’m not eating food, I’m thinking about when I’m going to be eating it and what I’m going to eat next. People I hang out with are frequently amused at my ponderings over meal options and my sudden frequent outbursts of “I’m hungry.” I attribute this to a high metabolism and often low blood sugar.

The latter is something I try to manage, and lately I’ve been thinking about it more. I’ve also been thinking about some stomach problems I’ve been having, which as led me to the issue of doing a cleanse. While I usually try to be mindful of the organic, and the hormone free, I don’t always pay attention to ALL the ingredients I consume in my food. And one of my serious offenders is refined sugar. Especially when paired with my multiple-cup-a-day coffee habit. I used to try to make myself feel better by using sugar substitutes, despite the fact that I know they are more chemical than good for you. Equal has aspartame and Splenda has chlorine. Blah, blah, blah. I used to ignore it but eventually I couldn’t help but feel guilty enough to switch back to real (albeit processed) sugar. I just never developed a liking for the raw stuff. Who knows why? Bigger pieces take longer to melt deliciously into my steaming cup of joe?

Now, though… I know I need to cut back. I’ve been having hypoglycemic attacks more frequently, which always means I need an adjustment of my diet. (I could tell you horror stories about blacking-out from a redbull, but suffice it to say I don’t tolerate loads of sugar well). And while I’m warming up to the idea of a cleanse, the cold turkey approach just isn’t gonna work for me. I will do a slow cutback of one ingredient of a time. Starting with Sugar.

So what to do when you know you can’t visit load up on chemicals and don’t care for the raw sugar route?
Let me introduce you to my readily available ingredient of the month:

Agave Nectar.

Now I know this stuff has been all over food blogs for a while, but I’ve only recently realized that you can buy it just about everywhere. It’s perfect for sweetening because it’s thin enough in consistency to dissolve in a cold liquid or just toss into some oatmeal.

It’s also perfect for cocktails. (Something I’m always experimenting on making with less sugar).
I have yet to try it out in baking, but so far it does great in coffee, oatmeals, and cocktails.
I’m all stocked up on the Trader Joe’s version, which is reasonably priced.

There’s also another food item we all love that you can substitute with agave nectar: honey. What with the bee shortage … agave nectar is a (currently) more sustainable sweetener.

I’ll leave you with this cocktail recipe, courtesy of one of my favorite fashionistas, Julianna:

Makes enough for a poolside party
A bottle of tequila (I’m a huge fan of Cazadores because the locals in Puerto Vallarta tell me it’s the best bang for your buck in America but any tequila will do)
two jalapenos
A large jug/jar/pitcher
Agave nectar
fresh orange or mango juice

Pour bottle of tequila into the jug or pitcher and dice up two jalapenos (be sure to remove the seeds and if you are not used to handling peppers be careful not to get juice in your eyes or near your face)
throw the diced up peppers into the tequila. Soak overnight.

To make a drink fill any tumbler with ice… pour two shots of the tequila over ice and the add juice to fill the cup. Stir in one tablespoon of agave nectar and serve.

The nectar and juice work beautifully to offset the spice of the tequila and jalapeno. It’s great for hot weather and somewhere in the back of my head I believe it’s actually healthy! (Why wouldn’t fruits and veggies and natural plant juices be?)

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