FYI on the Egg Problem

The massive salmonella outbreak associated with eggs is very real and potentially more far reaching than has yet been reported. In case you don't already know, certain markets DO carry pasteurized eggs that have been "flash heated" at a high temperature to eradicate any bacterium. Pasteurized eggs are approximately three times costlier than regular eggs, but it is a relatively small price to pay to avoid a foodborne illness.

September Song

It was still hot and humid when my father and I started singing "September Song" to each other over the phone about a week ago:

"Oh the days dwindle down to a precious few--
September...November
And these few precious days, I'll spend with you"

Today, there is a definite coolness on the breeze. September is on the way, and we saw it coming.

You see, fall makes me sad. The riot of colors is thrilling, but I secretly hate the changing leaves. I hate to say goodbye to the long days of languishing in the summer sun and say hello to collars turned up against the dark and chilly winds. I miss the happy chatter of the goldfinches, now drowned out by the cacophony of honking geese as they soar overhead.

You can go on and on about the wonders of the autumn season but you'll never sell me. I have the Back-to-School Blues forever programmed into the circadian i-pod of my mind.

I do adjust, though, and learn to love something about every season. (Have to! No amount of heaving sighs ever helps anything, anyway) And I've found that cooking and enjoying the bounty of the harvest season is actually a great help in my adjustment. Drinking dark beer and eating heavy cheese outdoors at Oktoberfest can be jolly and romantic. The cool smokiness of a clambake holds definite appeal. Lovingly watching over a pot of chicken stock on a lazy afternoon helps to pass an otherwise gray day. Finding apples on a forgotten tree in the park makes for a sweet little secret.

So even as I slept too late this morning due to the chill in the air and haven't had my usual spirit of adventure catapulting me through the weekend, I know that as sure as I can get myself to the grocery store to pick up some provisions and put on a great piece of music (just as loud as my poor esposo can tolerate), I can be put right back on top of the world with some flying flour and browning butter.

"And these few precious days I'll spend with you."

Kim Chee Update

Yesterday, I pulled the Kim Chee from the cool room in the basement where I had it fermenting at just below room temperature.

The results? Well, I would caution abitious Kim Chee makers out there to be judicious with your spices because the cabbage seems to absorb any spicy heat as it ages. I tend to season liberally, and I did when preparing my Kim Chee the other day, and this batch is a zesty one, to say the least. It's tasty, but I have a higher-than-normal tolerance for spicy heat. I probably cannot serve this to others without the mellowing effect of a protein. That being said, this would make an awesome condiment for pork barbeque.

One of my seasonings was horseradish root. While I associate Kim Chee with ginger, I happened not to have any ginger root on hand the other day when I was preparing this. But I did have another spicy root...horseradish. The horseradish imparted a nice enough zest, but I still prefer ginger.

Kim Chee was easy enough to do, but one head of cabbage makes enough of it to feed a small army, so don't hesitate to try this, but plan on sharing (unless you're working one of those cabbage diets that go in and out of vogue).

Oh, and I know this link below pertains to sauerkraut, but sauerkraut is just another variation on fermented cabbage. Do check it out. Evidently, if you eat enough Kim Chee or sauerkraut, you'll be an unstoppable force of glowing health.

http://www.sauerkraut.com/benefits.htm

Kim Chee in the Morning, Then Just Walk Away

Cabbage keeps showing up in my refrigerator. Sometimes I buy it, sometimes I am "gifted" with it, as it seems to be a staple in many farm-share programs. I quite like cabbage, but have had so much of it, I have nearly exhausted my repertoire for preparations. So the cabbage I was most recently given just sat in the fridge for a few days. I was so bored with all of the standard ways to prepare it.

My mother stopped by a few days ago bearing a cookbook she saw at a garage sale. It featured some rather "exotic" (for the time) menus for entertaining. This was a cookbook for REALLY ambitious 1950's housewives. I leafed through it, thinking it might be just this side of worthless, but then I stumbled on a Kim Chee recipe. I like Kim Chee. For whatever reason, I've never had the occasion to prepare it.

Kim Chee is a Korean salad of sorts made with fermented cabbage. It has a refreshing sweet and sour balance. It always tastes very "clean" to me.

That poor cabbage was not going to make it another day in the fridge, so I got my motivation up and started the 1950's housewife Kim Chee recipe early this morning.

Only after I started the process did I compare my Betty Crocker-esque recipe to some authentic Korean ones. The "authentic" recipes and the one I used differ substantially, but the proof, as they always say, is in the pudding. Kim Chee takes a number of days to ferment, so I will update you on the finished product when it happens.

Stay tuned.

Sour Vinegar Sweetens the Season

I like to think I have an open mind, but I must confess that there are A LOT of things I discovered late in life. Meat. Sushi. Eggplant. Mussels. Beets.

I'm sure I was carrying some childhood prejudices, but am ultimately glad didn’t swear off these items with an absolute refusal: “No way… I don’t like that”. I was willing to try again. I suppose I had some instinct that life is all about discovery and re-discovery. I must have guessed it would be worth it to keep myself open to things that weren’t quite my cup of tea, because sometimes the timing is right and the whole thing gets reinvented. Everything is contantly changing. Even our taste buds change over time (it’s a scientific fact!)…so what you hated at age 8 might be pure manna at age 38.

I recently discovered that what I once dismissed as the sour battery acid of the culinary world actually works miracles in good cooking. This summer’s new discovery has been vinegar.

Yes, vinegar…humble, astringent vinegar.

It started with a shish-kabob recipe back when I was on a kabob kick earlier in the season. I was trying all kinds of marinades. Many of these marinades had exotic juices, booze, imported oils, and all kinds of sexy ingredients. But I chanced to stumble upon one recipe that wasn’t much more than distilled vinegar, salt, and chopped onions. It didn’t sound exciting, but the recipe was credited to a Middle Eastern woman who swore that this is what her parents used in the old country. I was interested in trying an “authentic” shish-kabob, so I made the marinade.

Much to my surprise, it was so good. Many people who know much more about the chemistry of food swear up and down that a marinade does little to tenderize the meat. Maybe they are technically right, but this shish-kabob was not only tender, it also had such a perfectly-balanced flavor…!! You could taste every bit of the sweet, earthy protein, but it was accented with a high piquant note.

Oh, my!

And then I tried Chimichurri.

“Chimichurri” is said to be a bastardized, made-up word that may or may not be a play on somebody’s name. Evidently, it’s an Argentine sauce. It sounds very exotic, but it's certainly not challenging to enjoy. It’s really just a lovely vinegar-herb sauce. I do mine with a healthy dose of cilantro and an eyedropper-full of honey, and find it so refreshing and summery-tasting. It’s great on grilled meat, on pasta, or as a dip for bread. Tomorrow, I think I’ll try it as a pizza sauce…maybe with some brie and a tiny dice of papaya??? It’s so incredibly inspiring and yet it’s so humble. It's not much more than some green stuff floating around in vinegar.

Of sourse I cannot discuss my "discovery" of vinegar in the summertime without recalling hand-cut potato wedges, crispy on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside, sprinkled liberally with big grains of salt and some malt vinegar.

Oh, my my my my my.

Is there a sunset over the water somewhere? Is there music in the air? Is there a carousel with painted horses? Because that, my friends, is the stuff of summer paradise.

French Toast Beef

I am distracted by other things right now, namely music. A poor, homeless piano will be coming to live with us and I want nothing more than to give it a better world than the empty, lonely space it has been living in. So I am brushing up on all the tunes we might enjoy together soon.

However distracted I might be, dinner somehow still gets on the table around here. And since my mind is elsewhere, I am completely opened up to the possibility of happy accidents or complete disasters. To that point, when I started dinner, I noticed I had already used up all the homemade barbecue sauce on another dish earlier in the week, but it would have been so nice on the short ribs I was about to start. Darn. What else was in the cupboards? I found some curry paste and some port and threw it into the dutch oven with the meat. Fresh ginger would have been nice, but alas, there was none left. Hmmm...cinnamon? I DO love a hint of cinnamon with curry.

Distracted as I was, You-Tube-ing piano renditions of my favorite songs, I was a little heavy-handed with the cinnamon. Ooops. It was really no problem in the end, a good deal of the deep cinnamon earthiness cooked off after a 2+ hour braise in the oven. But a hint of something wonderful still subtly remained in the flavor. AND, the house smelled like heaven. Mi esposo walked in the kitchen door and wanted to know if I had made French Toast.

The "French Toast Beef", falling off the bone, was nestled into a whopping dollop of soft polenta. I like to fortify my polenta with heavy cream. (Mashed potatoes have got NOTHING on this dreamy starch!) The zucchini was about ready to bust the produce drawer in the fridge, so I cut a bunch of that up and just threw the veg into the Dutch oven, too...this is absent-minded cooking that actually works!

So, even when you are lost in a song, or a daydream, or a pet project, wonderful things are possible in the kitchen. And if you are given to frequent absent-mindedness, consider adding slow braises and roasts to your repertoire. You just stick them in the oven on a low heat with whatever you have on hand(even cinnamon works fine) and the next 2-3 hours are yours...to get lost in cloudland before you are coaxed back to the present by some divine aroma from the kitchen, reminding you to come back down and enjoy the moment.

Make it a Better Dinner through Unapologetic Snobbery

I had a great night out yesterday evening with mi esposo and some friends. The night was great because of the company and the laughter, because if we had judged the evening on the food we consumed, it would have been an abysmal failure.

The “calamari” we started with was reconstituted fish product. Although it was deep fried like calamari often is, it was totally lacking in the usual character of fresh squid. The pizzas we ordered were under-flavored, did not feature anything close to a homemade sauce, and the pies were over-cooked to boot. Somebody distractedly slapped the pies together, threw 'em in the oven, and kind of forgot about them. I get all itchy when people over-use the word “passion’, but in this case, the food really did lack any semblance of passion.

Sigh.

I won’t bash the eating establishment because I vote with my wallet (read: I just won’t give them my food money ever again.)

I never thought I was a food snob. Why not? Well, I like some really humble stuff. After all, my guilty pleasure is an occasional greasy burger. I never met a Buffalo wing I didn’t like. And “the cheaper the cut, the sweeter the meat” might as well be my motto when cooking in my own home. Furthermore, my un-glamorous home kitchen and paltry selection of fine cookware has always been a little too primitive to allow me to consider myself a food snob. And please don’t tell on me, but sometimes I think the hoity-toity farmers’ market is an inconvenient pain in my neck, so I just wind up buying regular produce at the grocery store around the corner.

But I DO appreciate quality. It doesn’t take very long after upgrading your diet to really fresh stuff to make the over-processed and less-than-fresh alternatives that so many fellow Americans eat on a regular basis totally unpalatable. Fake calamari?? Come ON! At least have the courtesy to re-name it “squid fritters” or something.

I cannot underscore enough how NOT fancy my diet is, generally speaking. Sure, I love to indulge in the elegant and exotic from time to time, but most of what I whip up at home or at work can be concocted in less than an hour with basic ingredients from a regular grocery store. I love to do it, too. Maybe I have a passion for it or maybe I’ve found that fresh stuff made with some degree of focus is simply a joy to eat. Life is hard enough. Why can’t this eating thing be our pleasure?

This way of looking at food has utterly ruined me for over-priced rubbish. I’m so grateful we’re in the middle of a national food revolution. My wish for you is that you will be ruined, too. I hope you and the people you care about get so accustomed to “fresh”, “whole”, and “real” food made with some care that your taste buds reject the rubbish as scornfully as do mine.