Parabasis

Briefest food blogging

Made this tonight. highly recommended. 

Hope...

I hope hummus is good for you, because I've eaten so much of it over the last month that I'm starting to crap felafel.

Paging John Stancato...

Mother Jones magazine on the complexities (and drawbacks) of "local and organic" agriculture. 

Secret Weapon Revealed

Might I suggest, dear readers, that you buy yourselves a jar of pickled chili peppers and start throwing them in dishes?   It's kinda like... you know the first time someone told you to put a bunch of anchovy fillets into your tomato sauce and you were like ew, gross and they were like trust me and then you ate it and the fillets had dissolved into a kind of delicious sea salt goodness?  It's like that, but with pickly spicy goodness instead.

They really are incredible, spicy but with a great briny acidity.  They're quite potent, usually one is good enough for most dishes... but I've enjoyed throwing them into all sorts of stocks, soups, braises, stews, sauces... heck, I even mixed them in with eggs before scrambling them. They're awesome. And cheap, and you don't have to go to a shmancy grocery store to get them.  

Here's a soup I just made that you finish with a pickled chili pepper...

Isaac's What The Fuck Do We Need To Get Rid Of Today Soup

INGREDIENTS:

3 Tablespoons of butter

2 tablespoons of flour

2 tablespoons curry powder

2 tablespoons garam masala

An onion, diced

3-6 gloves garlic, depending on your preference, roughly chopped

3 carrots

3 stalks of celery

Wine (Optional)

2 Cups wheatberries

eight cups water or stock or water + bullion depending on what the fuck you need to get rid of today

One picked chili pepper

STEP ONE: 

-- Make a rouxuouxoux: dump two tablespoons of the butter into a large dutch oven on other soup pot and melt.  Add in the two tablespoons of flour and whisk until it's a deep brown

STEP TWO:

-- Add in the curry powder and garam masala, allow them to toast a bit and get a little fragrant

STEP THREE:

-- Add in the final tablespoon of butter and the vegetables and aromatics, saute until the onion is soft. Once this has occured (There should be some hardened bits probably of roux and/or garam masala on the bottom of the pot as well) deglaze with wine.

STEP FOUR:

Add the rest of the liquid, bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer

STEP FIVE:

Add the wheat berries. Simmer for 30-45 minutes, tasting frequently.

STEP SIX: 

By the time the wheat berries are done, they will have absorbed roughly four cups of the liquid. So you might want to add more.  Either way, grab your pickled chili pepper and, holding it over the pot, pierce it, allowing the brine and juicy goodness to pour out onto the soup.  Next, rip up (or cut up using shears) the pickled pepper into little bitty bits, discard the stem.  Stir it in and allow the flavors to come together.  

STEP SEVEN:

Eat.

Ice Cream You Can Believe In

Ben & Jerry's unveils "Yes PeCan".

About Last Night('s Dinner)

I made dinner for Anne and I last night for the first time in awhile (pre-holiday insanity and being around family cut down on my cooking opportunities. I made it up as I went along and Anne declared it "one of the best things" that I had made. I didn't necessarily agree (amongst other things it' s a very simply meal), but here you go if you're interested.  Cut the bacon and replace the chicken stock with veggie stock to make it vegetarian.

Anne's Autumn Grain Awesomeness

Ingredients:

3 Strips of Bacon

3 Carrots, diced

1-2 Parsnips, depending on size, diced

2 Tablespoons of Rosemary, chopped up into little bits

4-5 cloves of garlic (again, depending on size) thinly sliced

2 Shalllots, thinly sliced

1-2 Cups (depending on personal preference) Cauliflower chopped into bite sized pieces

1 cup wheatberries

1 cup vegetable or chicken stock

1 cup water

Lemon juice

Olive Oil

(1) Start the wheatberries. Have you never had wheatberries? If not, they're awesome, you should eat them all the time.  They're like halfway between rice and farro, and cheap!  And whole grain!  Anyway, you cook wheatberries like you do rice (twice as much liquid as grain in a pot, bring it to a boil then then turn it down super low and cover).  The only difference is that wheatberries take longer than rice to cook, up to twice as long (40-45 minutes) actually.  I find that timing them is not helpful. After about half an hour, start checking in on them regularly. You may need to let them boil with the lid off because there's too much liquid, etc, so just adjust as necessary.

(2) in a medium to large sautee pan, fry the bacon until crisp. Remove the bacon to towels to drain.  You should have 1-2 tablespoons of fat in the pan, unless your bacon is super fatty.  If you have more, take some of the fat out, but remember fat is flavor, capiche?

(3) Make sure the pan has cooled a bit and toss in the garlic and shallots with salt and pepper and sweat them down in the bacon fat until just soft (they're gonna be cooking for a while, so don't worry about getting them totally carmelized or anything yet)

(4) Dump in the carrots and parsnips.  Here's the thing about parsnips.  They're awesome.  But they have this fibrous tube that runs down the middle and is completely inedible no matter how well you cook them. Make sure you slice this bit out. How i do this is I quarter the parsnips and then simply slice (Away from myself! I have blood on my ceiling to prove how necessary this is) the fibrous bit out, and then continue along my merry dicing way.  Add in with carrots and parsnips more salt, more pepper, and a pinch of the rosemary.

(5) Don't stir the veggies too much, a little carmelization here is good news, but keep em moving so nothing burns.  When you get to the point that they're starting to brown a little bit and are soft, dump the cauliflower in.

(6) Season with pepper and rosemary (it's probably salty enough at this point). Cook the cauliflower to your preference. I like mine tinged a bit gold with heat, maybe a little hint of brownness peaking in here and there, not too soft on the inside.

(7) Crumble the bacon over this, add some more rosemary.  Give it a minute for the flavors to come together and then add in the wheatberries.  Cook for a couple of more minutes, stirring occasionally until it looks delicious.

(8) To serve: Put it in a bowl, sprinkle a final pinch of fresh rosemary over it, add a little bit of olive oil and a splash of lemon juice, enjoy. 

Makes Four Servings

QUICK THOUGHT: Another way to do this would be to add in a tablespoon of tomato paste with the carrots and parsnips (you want the sugars in the paste to carmelize a bit) and then instead of (or in addition to) adding in the cauliflower, add in some canned plum tomatoes, maybe 6 or 8 oz. worth (mashed up with a fork before hand to keep them from exploding) and a little bit of chicken or vegetable stock, and then letting that cook down a bit and adding in the wheatberries.

Last Week's Column for Buzzine

I forgot in the midst of my vacation haze to post a link to last week's column on Buzzine, about The Smith Street Festival, Oliver "No Relation" Butler and Competitive Eating:

A few weeks before the Smith Street Festival, a neighbor of mine was walking down a block of Smith Street when suddenly a manhole exploded and flames shot out from underground. This lead to a downed subway line, a blackout that shut down most of the street, and several days of work by ConEdison. It seems that a transformer had exploded in the midst of the hottest day of the year–a day that would usher in a week of record-breaking May Heat. Everyone assumed that it was simply the mass uptick in power needs from air conditioning that caused the explosion, but according to a ConEd employee my girlfriend spoke to, the real story was that junkies had stripped the transformer of its copper wiring in order to sell it.

Let’s let bygones be bygones for now, however. Today, June Twenty-Second, Two Thousand and Eight, we celebrate Smith Street, or at least a sunny, nice, bouncy-castle version of it. We celebrate it the way Americans know how: Music, Capitalism, Consumption.

RTWT here.

In Lieu of a Post.. Recipe Blogging

I improv-ved my way through a tomato sauce last night, and it turned out pretty durn good if i do say so myself.

Ingredients (all quantities approx.)
1 pound of short pasta (Such as penne)

1 16 oz. can of whole plum tomatos, strained with juice set aside
1 bulb fennel
6 cloves garlic
4 uncooked sausages (i used chicken sausages!)
2 tbls. balsamic vinegar
fresh basil leaves
2 tbls. herbs de provence
1 tsp. crushed red pepper
Cheese, preferably soft, preferably talleggio

1 Assuming you are using uncooked sausages (many commercially available kinds are pre-cooked), chop those suckers up. Don't be too fastidious about it, they'll break up more as they cook. Brown the sausages with 1-2 tlbs. of olive in a medium-to-large heavy sausepan set to medium/high heat. Carmelization is what we're after here, so the browner you get the bottom of your pan, the better.

2 that'll take awhile, so while that's happening (don't forget to toss + stir occasionally!) dice your fennel and lightly mince your garlic. really, you should use whatever quantities of these appeal to you. I would say I used roughly 3/4s of a cup of fennel and all six garlic cloves. However, if you don't like fennel, or if your bulb of fennel is really strong, please alter quantities accordingly.

3 when the sausages are done, transfer them with a slotted spoon onto a paper-towel lined plate to drain. try to get as much loose sausegy goodness out of the pan, but if some stays around, don't worry about it. don't drain the pan!

4 turn the heat down (or even off for awhile) and add the fennel and garlic in, along with a good amount of salt and some pepper. Sweat those down until soft. Watch out, the garlic might start to burn, if that happens, move immediately on to the next step.

5 Dump the tomatoes, half of their juice and the balsamic vinegar into the pan. Turn the heat up and scrape the bottom of your pan with your stirring utensil in order to get up all that carmelized goodness into the sauce. Now start to break apart the tomatoes using your stirring thingy or a fork. they might spatter a bit. but keep at it!

6 Add in the herbes de provence (if you can't get that, try some sort of blend of dried thyme and oregano) and the red pepper. Stir until it all comes to a boil, and then lower heat to a slow (!) simmer and go do something else for awhile (15 minutes? sure why not) occasionally come back to it and stir. see if it needs a greater quantitiy of anything that you've put in it. If it's too spicy for you, add a tablespoon of sugar.

7 meanwhile chop the shit out of that basil. this ribbons are best!

8 boil and salt water, and dump the pasta in. when you add the pasta to the water, add the sausage back into the pan. Turn the heat on the sauce up just a bit and keep stirring.

9 When the pasta is done, drain it and then you want to do the following:

- Rip up your soft cheese into little bits of surprising cheesy goodness.

- Toss pasta, sauce, surprising moments of cheesy goodness and some basil leaves

-- Top with one dollop of cheesey goodness + a sprinkly of basil leaves and serve.

Not particularly sophisticated, but it got the job done!
(this recipe serves four)

Thanks, Jaime

Jaime unearths a chart I had been looking for for like two weeks. Go over to her place and check it out.

Lighthearted QotD

What would you say is your strangest food particularity?

For myself, I'm going to go with my absolute preference for whole-grain mustard over the smooth kind and the fact that when eating small snack items like goldfish or skittles, i like to eat them three at a time, and then position them in a traingle in my mouth before biting down.