Recent Food Developments

We'll get to the eel in green sauce in Belgium in a later post, despite it having been two months ago.

First, Cafe Green in Northwest DC is much tastier than a vegan restaurant with a large number of raw food dishes has any right to be.  Their not-quite-bibimbap was pretty tasty, even if not served in a superheated iron bowl.  And the Sherbs loved their raw food assortment. 

For dessert, the cake we got tasted like good pareve cake (better than meh), but the raw cashew "milk" shake I had was pretty fabulous.

Next, the Teet now carries individually packaged servings of freeze-dried fruits.  As they say on Twitter, #winning.  

Finally, I tried to use an online "healthy recipe" guide which advertised that it could give me a healthy meal just by inputting three items currently in my fridge.  I tried that, and these were the failures:

• soy chorizo + endive + mayonnaise
• cheese singles + tuna salad + tomato (despite this being a pretty regular weekend lunch standby; fat free cheese singles on Starkist's "tuna salad in a bag" is more than tolerable on toast).
• ketchup + onion + beans (okay, no baked beans recipes?)
• dehydrated onion + brie + vegetable broth (and I didn't even try to confuse it with the fact that I was using Ile de France's "mini brie" - which, for the record, is superior to Trader Joe's Mini Brie Bites; there's something off about the way the Trader Joe's ones taste)
• mustard + orange + beans

Okay, I do have some esoteric food in my house, but if I was down to just a couple things, I couldn't trust this recipe finder to help me with my "brown rice + whole wheat pastry flour + apple/grape juice mix."  Or my "Fiber One muffin mix + San Marzano crushed tomatoes + anchovies" (two of which, however, will make a perfectly fine pasta sauce - just remember that there's no "apples and cinnamon" buccatini).

The Thrill of Organic Vegetables

I hate insects. I hate having to touch them, especially. Even through gloves.

So the fact that our CSA farm is organic leads to some unfortunate surprises, like today, when we did not get a single ear of weevil-free corn. I salvaged some of it, discarded the rest, and basically flushed the weevils themselves down the disposal. There's also a ladybug flying around the apartment from where I brought up the courage to flick it off of our lettuce.

That said, the veggies and fruits that are not bug-ridden (the vast majority of them) are delicious. I had a tomato from our box today with hummus on bread, and it was quite tasty.

Cheese Overload!

We have made and eaten some pretty awesome foods this week.

Last night I made tomato cobbler from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian; like any cobbler, it's chopped up fruity stuff with a batter topping. Unlike fruit cobblers, the tomato is mixed with salt, pepper, and cornstarch, then covered with a flour and cornmeal batter. It was pretty good, but not as good as I'd hoped; probably because I didn't add enough cornstarch and so the tomatoes didn't sufficiently gel.

I hate cornstarch. Every time I open the box up, the silken powder gets everywhere. It sticks to my hands, won't measure easily, and doesn't wipe up or wash off without work. So I try to avoid it as much as possible.

This morning I made scones again, and again with chocolate chips. The recipe from Quaker Oats is wrong about adding raisins (or chocolate chips) halfway through the process; if you do that, the raisins or chips will end up mostly on the edge of the scones, and will become burnt into bitter carbon. The rest of the scones turned out fine, though.

Dinner tonight was fondue, from our Barnes & Noble fondue cookbook. It was easy - chop an onion, sauté in a hunk o' butter, add flour and sour cream, then stir in gruyere and cheddar until gooey deliciousness achieved. It was so awesomely cheesy tasty, and none of us should have eaten as much as we did, even using broccoli and cauliflower florets as a nod to balanced nutrition.

Also a frequent dunk into the cheese goodness was Cook's Illustrated's "Almost No-Knead Bread" recipe, which is sadly no longer online for free. It's a variant of Bittman's loaf, with a little tweaking for a higher rise and tangier inside. And it worked, despite all my attempts to ruin it with inaccuracy (I'm not sure I added enough flour), shortcut-taking (we didn't let it cool for two hours because we were too hungry), and my complete inability to knead. The crust is crunchy, the inside soft and tangy, and it tastes like something you get at a restaurant. Next time, we're making it with whole wheat flour.

April Foods!

Man, I haven't posted in a while. I guess I've been too busy catching up on Kings, the biblically-themed monarchy drama that is, as my sister so often says, "awesome sauce." And not just because it stars Ian McShane, the voice of the killer leopard in Kung Fu Panda.

Anyway, the Sherbs and I have been making plenty of tasty food. This Saturday we went back to the Book of a Million Zillion Curries (comic book reference explained here) for dinner, and made both the tasty tea and chickpea curry and a curry of French green lentils and too much spinach. Turns out the recipe makes something like eight cups of food, so I'm glad we broke out the big pot; it's not easy to wilt two pounds of spinach in boiling water already full of lentils. Also: it made the water turn really green.

What was kind of interesting about the spinach/lentil curry is that it basically was boiled spinach and lentils with what I'd call a "sauteed pico de gallo" tossed in during the last fifteen minutes. If tomatoes were in season, there would probably be a bit more flavor (also, we ran short of cumin - who keeps track of how much cumin they have?), but the spinach was otherwise tasty and a good counterpoint to the chickpeas, which were spicy.

The chickpea spiciness could be in part due to the serious chopping of the serrano chiles in that recipe; we have an off-brand Slap Chop® (for immature but hilarious parody, click here; for incident involving the Slap Chop® pitchman and a prostitute, click here) that does in fact make short work of garlic, ginger, and serrano peppers, rendering them into tiny bits in a matter of moments. With more pepper surface area exposed to the oil in the pan, we got more spiciness.

Tomorrow's dinner will involve another salad from the Benedictine monks. This one will require me to make carrot matchsticks tonight. Wish me luck; I can never get them small enough.

Diced Tomatoes = Improv Food Awesomeness

I have now improved two improvised meals with diced tomatoes, and I come sharing my newfound wisdom.

1) "Real America" Tuna a la Tomato

As everyone knows, left to my own devices, I eat horrible things. This is why, since we had a coupon long ago, a box of Tuna Helper stood on our shelf in the pantry. I decided to make it for at-work lunches.

After a horrible experience with Hamburger Helper and Morningstar Farms Grillers (tastes like a very bad idea), I resolved always to add other things to "Helper" meals so that they have some taste and nutritional value.

This time, on top of Costco canned sliced mushrooms, I added a can of diced tomatoes, as well as the sauce packet.

The result: not bad. The diced tomatoes turned a plain cream-saucy dish (I used skim milk) into something closer to an Italian pasta. Definitely edible.

2) The Pedant Succeeds With Goat Cheese

Today, the Sherbs and I managed to find ourselves with an unplanned dinner, so I promised to make something. I had in my head the Amateur Gourmet's blog post about a penne alla vodka recipe from Lydia Bastianich, the Sherbs's favorite WETA Create food personality.

It was, of course, horrible with cold and rain outside, so we didn't want to buy anything. Which meant that we had no cream and no vodka.

However, after an excellent risotto last week, we had some leftover goat cheese. This was the inspiration.

I started with a can of Muir Glen diced tomatoes, which Cook's Illustrated considers the best brand of canned tomatoes, and a can of Hunt's diced tomatoes with random junk in it, which Cook's Illustrated did not rank highly but was on sale when I was stocking up on emergency pantry goods at the Teet (did you make out like a bandit on triple coupon weekend? We did!). Added to that the remainder of some vegetable stock, a healthy dump of garlic powder, Italian seasoning, and grated parmesan, not to mention more canned mushrooms, and it started to seem like sauce.

Then, in went the cheese and two small spoon scoops of low-fat sour cream. It creamed up just enough for true tastiness when we added the Barilla Plus rigatoni (I was too lazy to reach back further on the shelf for penne). The Sherbs and I both liked it a lot.

Book Recommendations, Etc.

I have just recently acquired a copy of James Lileks's Gastroanomalies, the sequel to his modern classic The Gallery of Regrettable Food, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is hilarious.

I do not just say that so that Lileks's lifestyle, which is that of a stay-at-home dad who makes extra cash by posting funny things on the internet, is still available for me in twenty years. Lileks's witty mockery of bad food concepts of yesteryear (although, I must confess, I am tempted in an inexplicable way to want to try the corned beef in beef-flavored gelatin) is as good as it ever was (unlike, say, Toby Keith).

Currently, the Sherbs and I are trying a Grand Chili Experiment in the slow cooker. We put in corn, beans, two cans of tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, a small can of mild chili peppers, mustard powder, cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, garlic powder, half of a large onion, one whole bell pepper, and a whole mess o' TVP. We set the slow cooker on "forever" last night, and we'll see, come dinnertime, how it all turns out.

Your Unimportant Food News Update

New in the world of food:

1) Beef magazine has perhaps one of the most fascinating opening sentences in industry writing:

In the past, if you asked me which factor is the most important in determining profitability in the cow/calf sector, I would have said supply and demand.

Turns out that geopolitical considerations are more and more important in the cattle industry, leading the writer to advise:

This is the time of year when ranchers are preconditioning, weaning and preg-checking. Maybe calls to our congressman, attending state and national cattlemen meetings and donating dollars to our industry's PACs will be just as important on our planning calendars.

I know what I'm doing this season in between my preconditioning and preg-checking!

2) Molly Laas, a commentator on the Huffington Post website, says that you shouldn't eat apples when they can be turned into sweet, soothing alcohol. My response is that you need to eat a lot more apples (as opposed to drinks) before you lose gross motor control and start puking.

3) I love tomato juice. But I don't drink it around sensitive electronics. Fark.com alerted me to the fact that LaGuardia Airport's security personnel are not so diligent - someone managed to spill juice on a baggage scanner, disrupting the checkpoint for hours.

Although it is interesting that this happened at LaGuardia - pretty much the only time I drink tomato juice, instead of the cheap gazpacho base that Campbell's calls "V8," is on airplanes. Why I do this, when "V8" sounds much more like Werner Von Braun's aeronautical invention, I cannot tell you.

4) Finally, Slashfood clues me in to an automatic marshmallow rotator for toasting your marshmallow in the fire.

Personally, I like to put the marshmallow directly into the fire, and watch the exterior light up like the detonation of the Genesis Device, or, more recently, the introduction for every Universal Pictures movie. A light char on the outside is tasty, and gets the interior properly melty.

Jicama . . . what the hell?

No, seriously, what is up with jicama?

The Sherbs and I foolishly decided to make a salad involving the mutant apple-radish that is jicama (it also includes beans, avocado, green pepper, and tomato). At the Teet, we got the produce guy to find us some jicama, and he gave us a huge, mutant thing weighing about five pounds that looked like a failed cross between a coconut, a turnip, and an heirloom tomato.

No, they did not have any smaller jicama available.

Turns out, only a third of the jicama was actually necessary for the salad (we only needed two cups of jicama), which is good because we did not have the machete necessary to effectively cut off more of the tough root vegetable. Then we had to peel off the stringy, leathery skin, a thankless task.

The salad, at the end of the day, is tasty. But I dare Rachael Ray to make jicama into anything in thirty minutes or less.

Food Attempts

On Sunday, I played the Nintendo Wii game "Cooking Mama," which humiliates one for one's inability to crack an egg using the Wii controller, and I think it jinxed my cooking.

Of course, making entirely vegetarian turnip greens in a slow cooker wasn't a guaranteed success; they're bland, but not inedible.

I did successfully make tuna fish sandwiches, although I don't know where the safety cap to some of my dehydrated spices went - it popped off somewhere.

I also destroyed a tomato with a mandoline.

Tomatoland!

Yesterday, I pointed out that some consider the tomato-and-mayonnaise on white bread the best sandwich ever.

Today, the Washington Post released the winners of its tomato recipe contest. The first place winner was for a frozen tomato appetizer with crystals of frozen tomato layered with marscarpone and topped with olive bits.

It sounds super-tasty.

Tomato and Mayo - "World's Best"?

A commentator on the Huffington Post says that a sandwich of thick-sliced tomatoes, white bread, and mayonnaise is "the world's cheapest and best sandwich."

Neither of these claims are necessarily true (PB&J is cheaper), but the sandwich does sound tasty. However, I still stand by thin-sliced tomatoes, served open face on toasted pumpernickel spread with hummus.

The Always Snack

If I haven't mentioned it before (and I think I haven't), I've been remiss: I have a hummus-based snack on a regular basis when I can't think of anything else to eat (and my food aphasia is a post for another day). It's very tasty, and I recommend it to everyone (except the Sherbs, who strongly dislikes tomatoes):

• sliced bread (usu. toasted)
• hummus
• sliced tomatoes

I eat the whole thing open face, because I'm really all about the hummus and tomato (and the bread is just a foundation), but now that I'm reading this and thinking about it, I think the addition of sliced green onion would go well, too. With a lot of effort (and Bobby Flay-level plating skills), it would make a classy hors d'œuvres on thin crackers.

Pasta Tastiness

Today's lunch:

• spaghetti
• chicken
• spinach
• garlic
• crushed tomatoes

No sauce necessary.