Today's disconcerting thought

A friend of mine now works for a small bio-diesel plant and there primary source of oil is restaurants. They have been approaching restaurants and offering to buy their used fryolater oil in order to convert it into bio-diesel. This is taking the oil (in almost every case) away from a massive international company. This company certainly did nothing as "green", eco-friendly, or in anyway constructive. Nope, they take the used, nasty, burnt oil, filter it, and then sell it to the beef industry. Where it goes into cattle feed. And then you eat it.
Once again, please take the time to find a locally raised beef, chicken, and pork supplier. Also, as I have mentioned in the past, Hannaford Nature's Place sticker seems to be sourced from more responsible farms. A couple extra dollars spent will help a local business out and give you a much superior product.

What I should have said was...

...see you in a couple of months. My name is Zube and I am a bad summer cook. That is my confession (and I don't like olives!). Sure I marinade, grill, and all that, but there really isn't any of my soul in it. My summer cooking tends to be more mechanical than passionate, more necessity than pleasure. It is absurdly ironic that when I want to cook the least, I have the largest plethora of produce available. But that is how it is.

It isn't that I didn't eat well during the summer, but rather I ate differently. Fast and furious grilling, quick salads, and lots of marinades/vinaigrettes filled the summer months. Wife Zube made me a burger one day that made a tear fall from my eye and I had a garlic-herb-dijon, hickory-smoked prime rib at Cape Cod that made me dance a jig! (And I have totally stolen that recipe and used it at work and home.)

That being said it is the end of October, fond has sat dormant for almost 5 months, and I am cookin' again! And it feels goooooood. Yesterday I had the house to myself and spent hours prepping for a small dinner party that night. Going through the quiet mechanics of chopping, peeling, roasting, etc. just puts me at ease and sorta re-establishes my being. Sounds cheesy (we did have goat cheese...) and it is, but we all have our thing that recharges our battery. Mine happens to be standing in a kitchen for a couple of hours. Sue me.

A couple of days ago Wife Zube and I realized that we both had Thursday off and that we hadn't had anyone over for awhile. Text message sent, dinner party guest list established. What to cook? Well, in the recent past I had been politely reminded by Wife Zube that I pretty much always make some form of chicken, potato, and veg for the incoming couple. So instead we took it to Fancy Town:

Second Course (first one was camera shy)
Roasted beets and sweet potatoes with watercress, goat cheese, and walnut vinaigrette


Third Course
Spaghetti squash, scallops, red curry, and fresh basil


Fourth Course
Seared duck breast, brussel sprouts, and creamy dijon-garlic sauce


Fifth Course
Braised pork shortrib, glazed purple turnips and carrots


It is good to be back. Part of the side effect of this blog is that it pushes me to make new/different things or else face the consequences of a really boring blog. This is going to be a good winter for food, I can almost taste it.

Nine days! Yikes!

I knew I was deliquent in posting, but nine days without word is unacceptable! My apologies to you all. Tonight's post is pretty much shooting from the hip, albeit an Asian hip.

It is 11 p.m., Wife Zube is out of town, I just got home from work and cleaned up, and I am hungry. I had originally planned on some form of Asian take-out for tonight, but didn't follow through. But I still want Asian flavor. Huh. I thought about the contents of my pantry, fridge, freezer and came up with this dish. It is a bastardized version of multiple different Asian cuisines, but I am a white honky and I don't know any better.

Epiphany number 1: I have really good chicken stock.
Epiphany number 2: I have fresh ginger.
Epiphany number 3: Enough said.

Here is the dilly-o for tonight's recipe:

2 cups of chicken stock
1 tbs fresh minced ginger
1 tbs miso paste (not really needed, but I had some)
1 scallion sliced thin
some celery leaves
a small handful of rice noodles, you pick which type
1 egg, beaten
crushed red pepper, if you like-a da heat.

Bring the stock to a boil and combine all ingredients except the egg. Cook this until the noodles are just shy of how you like them. While stirring the soup, slowly pour in the beaten egg and then keep stirring for a few moments. Pour into a bowl, wait a couple minutes, and devour.

In retrospect I am happy to have forgotten my take-out fantasy. This bowl of delight was beyond easy, used up random stuff in my fridge, and made my tongue thank me. It is a fair reminder of how delicious food can be made in minutes with basic ingredients.

P.S. Good chicken stock is key for this dish. Actually it is key for any dish that calls for chicken stock. And so on and so forth for beef, veggie, and fish stock. Good stock is what separates most home cooking from restaurant quality. I keep saying to Google it, but one of these days I will post a recipe for it. Until then though, Google is your friend in stock.

P.S.S. The photo is from my phone. I scrounged around but the ol' digital is no where to be found. Let your mind visual the flavor, succulence, and smell that my image completely lacks.

Celery Root with Melted Onions

Two nights ago my tongue, in a fit of sheer joy, did a back-flip and high-five'd a molar. What would make my tongue do such acrobatics, you ask? Celery root with melted onions is the culprit. The rather benign looking pile of soft, wilted looking stuff is the celery root with onions. This is another TK recipe from Ad Hoc and it is another home run. In traditional TK-style he breaks components down and then loads each step with maximum flavor. This dish needs cooked onions. You could a) simply saute them for about 5 minutes or b) sweat all the moisture out and then simmer them in butter with garlic, thyme, a bay leaf, and peppercorns for 30 minutes. Option A is a fine choice, but B will make you write your mom. (I am killing two birds with one stone, because my mom reads about it here...)

To melt your onions take about 4 cups of sliced onions that have been sliced from end to end, not cross-sectioned. (End to end cut onions hold their shape better when cooked.) Put them into a saute pan over medium heat, and without adding any oil, slowly cook them for about 15 minutes or so. You are removing moisture from the onions and concentrating their flavor at this point. The onions shouldn't really brown at all, but just soften up a bit. Next add in a bay leaf, two whole cloves of garlic that have been lightly crushed, a dozen peppercorns, and some sprigs of thyme. If you have cheesecloth on hand, and I never do, this would be a good time to wrap all that stuff in it. Fancy people call this a sachet. You don't need to wrap it up, but it saves time at the end when you are individually picking peppercorns out... Melt half a stick of butter (in cubes) into the pan, swirling as you do to keep it emulsified. Now the recipe calls for a parchment paper lid. TK has a huge crush on parchment paper lids, and I finally broke down and made one. It took 2 minutes and I think it really made an impact on the dish. I'm not going to describe how to make it, but just go ahead and Google it. It is as easy as falling down and I am sold on it now. The onions are going to gently cook away on medium low heat for the next half hour. Other than stirring every 10 minutes don't do anything else to the pan.

While your onions melt take your celery root (a.k.a. celeriac) peel it, quarter it lengthwise, and thinly slice it using a mandolin or your mad knife skills. (Mandolins are cheap an exceedingly useful. Go buy one. And some band-aids.) Get a pan hot over medium heat, once again no oil, and add the celeriac and let it sit for 10 minutes or so to soften. Then add in another bay leaf, crushed garlic cloves, more thyme, and some canola. Cook until completely soft, 10 minutes or so. Remember to keep the heat on the medium side. You aren't looking for color, but just to cook and soften your veg.

When your onions are sufficiently melted, mine browned a bit, and the celeriac softened drain them both on paper towels. Combine them in a pan to heat them together and add a cup or so of good chicken stock. This helps with the creamy factor.



I didn't make enough of this dish. I used one large celery root for four people and that was a bad decision. From now on, we use one large root per two people. We also had some delicious grilled asparagus and Arista pork chops (also an Ad Hoc number). The frenched pork chops are from DuBreton and the others from Windy Hill Farms.



When in doubt, eat pork.

Chicken, Mushrooms, and Cauliflower "Mac"

I have decided to treat mushrooms like bacon. To clarify, I am including them in almost every dish I now make. All foods have different properties (bacon's is that it is awesome!) and mushrooms have the ability to satisfy. They are high in the chemicals (the carboxylate anion of glutamic acid) that contribute to the taste, umami. (Leave it to the Japanese to give a name to the taste that is difficult to explain.) We are use to salty, sweet, sour, and spice as the four primary tastes. However, we are now aware of the fifth taste; umami. It is the feeling of savory, fulfillment, and soul-restorration that comes from eating foods high in it. My favorite example is miso soup. I would always eat it and think that there was something fundamentally awesome with it. It turns out that dashi (a component of miso soup) and seaweed are both quite high in umami! I am a genius.

The color palette of this dish is just shy of institutional boring-ness, but the flavors ran strong! As the photo (And yes, it was taken on the railing of our deck. I thought I would mix up the scenery a bit.) shows we have a big ole pile of cremini and button mushrooms. These were sauteed with about a tablespoon of minced thyme and then had about 1/4 cup of chicken stock ladled in near the end. The chicken stock gave its flavor to the shroomies and picked up flavor from the pan. This became the delectable sauce you see floating around on the plate. It was included because the chicken was un-marinated and needed some moisture. The cauliflower "mac" is blanched cauliflower florets that I mixed in with a cheese sauce. I miscalculated and ended up with far too much cheese sauce, but some would argue that is impossible. The cheese sauce starts with the classic bechamel sauce and then I whip in some grated cheese. I have read about bechamel for years and have just started making it. I think the fancy French name got all big, tough-guy on me and intimidated me away. Well not no mo'! I kicked Mr. Bechamel in the face and now realize the ease and utility of it!

Take two tablespoons of butter, melt over medium heat, and then whisk in two tablespoons of flour. Bring this to a light simmer for a few minutes. Slowly pour in hot milk while whisking until it thickens. This only takes a few minutes and it is like an ankle in a tattoo parlor: a blank canvas. The cheese goes in at the end. You want the milk hot because cold milk will make the sauce seize and then you have to whisk more. A lot more.

Enjoy this dish, we were both quite happy with it, and it was around 8 points on the WW scale.

p.s. good chicken stock makes a huge difference in every dish.

Speaking of yum...

YUM!

This is a blog I read a lot feel free to click the link on the right hand side of my page to get there. Between Ruhlman's prose/cooking and his wife's photography it is a pretty killer site.

Yikes, that was a fast week!

Time flies by and suddenly I haven't posted anything in a week! On a side note as a restaurant manager, another Mother's Day successfully cooked, plated, and served with only minimal effects to blood pressure.

Life has been hectic and without time to do too much involved cooking. However, I did have time this week to compose a meal with some thought behind it. Sometimes it is those quick little jobbies that come out blazing and make you sit back and smile. This one was tasty albeit not mind-shatteringly stupendous.

What we got here is a case of Pa Zube caught brook trout stuffed with thyme and lemon, and then it was pan-roasted. The glazed carrots from a previous post (still cut with the "oblique cut" method). Lastly some asparagus that was also pan-roasted with lemon and minced shallot. Nothing like wild caught fish to make you feel good about eating. Yum.

My apologies once again for being a bad poster and this one being short. The next one will be better. And remember the first one is free... but then you pay.