From Bach to Stock

Papa Joe's (Westminster, MD)

2011-11-30T15:32:00.004-06:00

It has come to my attention that, despite having lived in Westminster for almost a year and a half, I have yet to review my favorite restaurant here! This must be remedied, especially since I'm home from work today with some yucky feverish achy illness and have nothing to do but write restaurant reviews, catch up on lesson planning, and watch back episodes of "Glee".

In a town where almost every restaurant features an practically-interchangeable menu of traditional American fare that one would expect from a small rural area, Papa Joe's is an anomaly. This little Mexican restaurant faces the back entrance of Westminster's historic Main Street, fairly well-hidden unless you're coming through the back parking lot. Noah and I happened upon it last year when we were looking at Westminster apartments, and though we didn't expect it to be any good, we were tired and hungry and decided to take our chances.

Luckily, Papa Joe's is a pleasant surprise! Apart from lettuce and sour cream-laden American tacos and the like, Papa Joe's does a nice variety of traditional Mexican standards. Their Mexican-style tacos, with just meat, cilantro, and onion, are a standby order for me. I also tend to order their tortas, particularly the egg and chorizo laden down with jalapenos and avocado and all manner of other goodies. It's hard to even eat the thing without bits of everything falling down on the table (and, in the winter, down your sleeves--my least favorite thing about long-sleeved shirts).

The real time to go to Papa Joe's, however, is on the weekend when they have off-menu weekend specials. Here's where the real traditional food comes out, like pozole and menudo and more authentic tostadas than the ones featured on their regular menu. Here's an example of some tostadas we had over the summer:

Although I don't see nearly enough people ordering the more authentic dishes, the restaurant is extremely popular and frequently has a wait, especially on weekends. The real test of its excellence? Noah currently lives in Jackson Heights, the hotbed of traditional Latin American food in Queens, and he still looks forward to going to Papa Joe's when he comes here. What higher praise could you ask for?

Papa Joe's
27 E. Main St. (in rear municipal parking lot)
Westminster, MD 21157
(410)-871-2505
Mon.-Thurs. 11am-10pm
Fri. and Sat. 11am-11pm

Local Sprouts (Portland, ME)

2011-11-09T16:17:00.003-06:00

We're back, with news from Portland, ME!

"Wait," you say. "Maine?? Isn't this a Maryland/New York food blog?"

Well, it is. But it just so happens that earlier this year Noah and I went on a fantastic vacation, exploring New England. And by "exploring New England", I actually mean "eating our way through New England", because that's what we do. We even planned our trip primarily around a book, Jane and Michael Stern's 500 Things to Eat Before It's Too Late. This wonderful little book was our primary source of good eats around the country (we're hoping to eat our way through as many of these as possible one day), but once we got to Portland, there wasn't much in the book to guide us. Luckily, as we soon realized, Portlanders are rather fanatical about their food. Every single place we went clearly put extensive time and energy into putting forth fantastic food--even the smallest of restaurants are run with great care, and everywhere from bars to cafes serves locally brewed beer. Even The New York Times praises its food (though we didn't actually go to any of the restaurants featured in that article).

We were in Portland for several days, and we would frequently pass by a small cafe near our B&B called Local Sprouts that looked extremely interesting. On one of our last nights in Portland, we finally had a chance to stop in and eat, and we're very glad we did. When you first enter the cafe, you notice the kind of artistic, slightly all-over-the-place atmosphere that a good cafe does so well. The walls were covered in art from local artists, every table and chair in the building was a unique piece, there were shelves of things to read, and children ran around and even played with us at our table. Everything was very laid-back and friendly, and that demeanor extended to the staff. We ordered a jerk chicken plate and a roasted vegetable soup, and while we were ordering we chatted with the person taking our order, and I told him I was getting the vegetable soup specifically because there was eggplant in it (eggplant, for those of you who aren't aware, is my favorite food). When he told him that he said, "wait here. I can't promise anything, but I might have something for you." To my incredible surprise, a minute later he came back with a huge eggplant sandwich, and proceeded to give it to me--for free. He said they sometimes have food leftover at the end of the day, and if the opportunity arises they give it away to a good home. It made a spectacular lunch in the car the next day.

Now, onto the food. The jerk chicken plate that we shared was excellent--well-spiced, and plenty of food. It was served with a cabbage salad that I honestly don't remember much (I ate most of the soup, and was in a soup-related trance for much of the meal, so I don't remember much about the jerk chicken other than that I liked it), and rice. One thing you definitely notice when you eat at Local Sprouts is that you're getting plenty of food for your money, as the bowl of soup I ordered was probably enough for at least two people, not the small perfunctory bowls you get at most places. The vegetable soup was tomato-based, and had eggplant and zucchini and all manner of other vegetables. Big, huge chunks of vegetables. The kind of vegetable soup that makes me wish it were winter all the time so it would be seasonally appropriate to sit around and eat this stuff all day. By the end of the meal, with the combo of jerk chicken and vegetable soup and the promise of an eggplant sandwich later, I was in a happiness coma.

The one complaint I notice from online reviews is that you wait a very long time for your food, even for food you wouldn't expect to take a long time. It is true that the service is one of the most relaxed parts of the place, but it's easy to deal with if you don't expect to rush in and out. Sit down, look at the art, read a book. Listen to the live music, if they have it, which they sometimes do. Chat up your 7-year-old seat neighbor. Local Sprouts will make it worth your while.

Local Sprouts Cooperative
649 Congress St., Portland, ME
(207)-899-3529
http://www.localsproutscooperative.com/
Mon.-Sat. 8am-10pm
Sun. 9am-3pm

Local Sprouts is a Community Supported Cafe, which means that you can pay to become a member and get discounts on food and things like that. All their food is produced locally--if you want, you can even look on their wall, where they have a map of every farm and local producer where they got every ingredient they use. It is also worth noting, particularly if you are into making life happier and more enriching for individuals with disabilities (as I am; it's only my career), that the Bomb Diggity Bakery also runs out of this place. They provide a baking and arts program for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Pretty cool stuff.

Revisiting a Dumpling House in the Heart of Queens

2011-10-29T13:43:00.003-05:00

Since I moved to Queens eight months ago, one of my and Florence's favorite places to eat is a dumpling house on Broadway called Lao Bei Fang. I've written on it before, but never in any great detail. It's one of those places that seemingly reveals more everytime I go - I first went for the obvious dumplings, but quickly realized that they do a lot more. Next up was the la mian noodle soups - for an average of about $5, you can get a big bowl of soup and hand-pulled noodles, filled with anything from shredded pork to seafood to tripe and tendon.

Getting more adventurous, Florence and I decided to try out the restaurant's cold case. When you walk in, you are immediately confronted with what looks like a steam table - six or eight metal trays of food behind glass - but on ordering, you quickly realize that the trays are over ice instead of burners. Here the multiregionalism of the restaurant starts to show itself - although ostensibly a northern Chinese dumpling house, the cold case boasts such Sichuan classics as fuqi feipian (literal translation is "sliced lung by the married couple"). Here it is thinly-sliced beef tripe and tendon, dressed mostly with chili oil and Sichuan peppercorn. I already enjoyed tripe, but this dish has converted me to tendon. It straddles that line between chewy, gelatinous, and tender, and the flavor imparted by the chili oil gives it an addictive kick. In the non-Sichuan portion of the cold case, we've had liangban huanggua (cucumber with raw garlic and sesame oil), and several other combinations dressed the same way (another notable one is celery with slices of smoked pressed tofu).

Frequently at the end of last year's winter, I saw people getting bowls of soup covered with curls of sliced beef, was never able to find it on the menu. Last week we finally saw it being eaten by an English speaker and asked, and today for lunch I ordered "hot and spicy beef soup". Only appropriate, given that it's snowing outside(!). From leaning over the steaming bowl as I picked it up, I discerned that it was made ma la style, with chili oil and plenty of Sichuan peppercorn. Don't get this soup alone - even more so than the other dishes here, it is a gargantuan amount of food. The bowl is absolutely stuffed with ingredients: beyond the sliced beef, there is tofu, tofu skin, fried tofu (are we in Malaysia now?), zucchini, round bean thread noodles, bean sprouts, unidentified crunchy vegetable, lotus root, thick round coins of rice flour dough (like big round noodles), and plenty of cabbage ribbons and spoonlike leaves of bok choy. Lao Bei Fang also adorns the soup (as if it needs it) with two semicircular slices of soft, fatty, and very flavorful pork sausage.

I was going to say that the only thing I haven't had here is the hot pot, but just today I saw somebody eating what may have been a shaobing of some sort. It was a thin, crescent-shaped flatbread filled with what looked like Chinese chives. I'll have to find out what it is next time - this place always has something new for me.

Lao Bei Fang Dumpling House
83-05 Broadway, Elmhurst, NY

M/R to Elmhurst Ave. - Lao Bei Fang is located directly on the other side of the overhead LIRR tracks

Highlights: Fried dumplings, 4 for $1.50; La mian, $4.50-$6; Hot and spicy beef soup, $5.75; Scallion pancake (take it home and re-fry it for even better results), whole round for $2.50; Plates from the cold case, $2.75 for veggie only and around $3.50 for meat (plus you can get multiple items on one plate!)

Breaking News: Tuna Salad I Actually Like!

2011-04-27T20:00:00.002-05:00

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, it's going to come as no surprise to you that I have a long-standing dislike of tuna. Particularly tuna salad--most tuna salad, in my experience, is all tuna all the time, and there's nothing to balance out that taste for me. My dislike only really applies to canned tuna, also, because I liked the fresh tuna that Noah and I ate in Italy. But that's to be expected...does it really surprise anyone that fresh tuna, prepared well in a beautiful Italian restaurant tastes better than the canned stuff? I didn't think so.

Today, though, I had a tuna salad that changed my mind. Back when I was totally broke, my best friend sent me the link to the blog Poor Girl Eats Well, and I've been reading it for months. I'm actually doing fabulously budget-wise right now (and by "fabulously" I mean that I have between $2000-3000 in the bank; I don't need much to get by) due in part to a brand-new job in my career field (I work as a part-time care provider for adults with disabilities. Working with people with disabilities is the career I'm studying for now. It doesn't get any better than this!), but it's still good to have ideas for food I can make without being able to feel my bank account wincing. The writer of the blog recently posted a recipe for Mediterranean-style Tuna Salad, and I made it tonight. I was expecting "this is something I could eat and be okay with", and the first couple bites were that way. As I kept eating, though, I found myself legitimately thinking "I love this!". The idea that I would ever love anything with tuna is a pretty astounding achievement in and of itself. I will definitely make this again! So thanks, Poor Girl Eats Well, for helping me like tuna!

Mediterranean-Style Tuna Salad
(The only change I made to this recipe was that I had a 1/2 pound of chickpeas that I had soaked and wasn't sure what to do with, so I cooked them until they were tender and added them to the salad for even more protein and taste variation. I'll probably do it every time I make it! Because I will definitely be making this more than once.)

2 cans tuna
2 tomatoes
1 small cucumber
1/2 red onion
5 oz low-fat feta cheese (she calls for 4 oz., but I used all 5 because I had the chickpeas)
1 c baby spinach
Salt & pepper to taste

Chop all veggies into 1” chunks and place into a bowl. Drain the tuna of its water and add it to the veggies, followed by the baby spinach. Crumble the feta onto the rest of the ingredients and toss lightly until everything is completely coated with the feta. Add salt & pepper if needed.

But Where Did the Chometz Come From? (Rego Park's Tandoori Bakery)

2011-04-17T21:15:00.003-05:00

After reading this post from Taxi Gourmet, Tandoori Bakery in Rego Park, Queens, immediately went on my "to go" list. Today Florence and I decided to try it out - remembering only on the way that Pesach starts tomorrow evening and that Tandoori very well might not be making anything involving chometz. (The restaurant is kosher and is closed on Shabbos.) This feeling was compounded on the twenty-minute walk there first by the multiple closed kosher shops we passed and then by at least five signs on Tandoori's window proclaiming that it is kosher, kosher for Pesach, and closed for the entire week of the holiday. Oh, and that all of the its chometz has been sold.

So, happily and confusingly, the first thing we saw when we walked in was bread everywhere! Lots of what we later learned was lepeshka - Bukharan bread - and a few samsas, or the Central Asian baked version of samosas. It took a few minutes to get anybody's attention as the counter was quite crowded, but we managed to secure ourselves a table. This in itself was unexpected, as given the name (Tandoori Bakery) we were expecting some sort of counter-only place. But no, there were plenty of tables, and in fact one group of men by the window looked as if they had been there since about 9am and planned to stay all through the afternoon and well into the night. (We got there around 12:30pm.) It really was like walking into a different world in a lot of ways: one where everything was written in Cyriliic, about half the men were wearing yarmulkes, and vodka was not only accepted but standard for lunchtime. I later mentioned to Florence that it seemed like the Uzbek version of Vin Cafe, the restaurant in Alba, Italy, where we whiled away far too many nights with dinner and wine. Not usually the mornings, though.

We pored over the menu for awhile - I tried to figure out what the Cyrillic side said but am not very good at that alphabet yet - and settled on a few items. A pot of tea (mandatory, I think), lepeshka, two samsas, and marinated cabbage salad. I took the waitress' industriously scribbling silence as a good thing, but what arrived - tea, bread, one samsa, and carrot salad - proved me otherwise. No matter - it was all fantastic. We requested another samsa, but when I picked mine up it soon became apparent that we had a small mountain of food on our hands. As we saw the other tables lingering over their meals, we relaxed - this was not a place to tear through and leave in a half hour. Spending a few hours here listening to the chatter and people-watching would be just fine, thank you. Especially when we could watch the corner table repeatedly get up and stumble out the door (did I mention they had Absolut AND Grey Goose?) to say goodbye to one of their number.

A bit of research tells me that lepeshka (think nine-inch-diameter bialy) is baked in a tandoor, as are the samsas. Both have the combination of crispy bottom and chewy top that clay ovens do so well. The samsa filling was beef, onions, and cumin - kind of an Uzbek empanada, as I've seen some other places call it. The carrot salad is called morkovcha and is, according to this Times article, "a legacy of Stalin's mass deportations of ethnic Koreans from the far eastern Soviet Union to its western frontiers." It consists of shredded raw carrots in a dressing that is mostly vinegar, green onions, and raw garlic. In that it is surprisingly similar to liangban huanggua, the Chinese salad of sliced cucumbers dressed with sesame oil and raw garlic that we'd had the night before at Lao Bei Fang. The morkovcha was delicious, although there was a ton of it. But we did pretty well with our small mountain of edibles, and when we left, the last guy at the corner table had just gotten another pot of tea to work though. I have a feeling there was more vodka coming as well.

Tandoori Bakery
99-04 63rd Road
Rego Park, Queens
closed on Shabbos - sundown Friday to at least one hour after sundown Saturday

An Ode to Dumpling Soup

2011-04-09T13:37:00.001-05:00

I did promise to talk about som tam, but I haven't been able to find myself at many of the neighborhood's Thai places in the past week or two. Instead I've been eating a lot of dumplings and soup. I think that's what happens when "spring" turns out to be day after day of 45 degrees and grey drizzle. I thought I wasn't in Michigan any more, but maybe the greyness follows you after you leave.

So: dumplings. Yesterday I got off work and I really wasn't in the mood for cooking anything. I was, in fact, in the mood for curling up at a bookstore for a couple hours (which I did!) and then for going to my favorite Elmhurst dumpling house, Lao Bei Fang. I walked in fully intending to order boiled dumplings and eat them with plenty of chilies in oil - and then I smelled the soup. As far as I could tell, every single person in that place was either having soup or hot pot. Given that it was just over 40 degrees with that sort of chill damp outside, I couldn't blame them. But I wasn't hungry enough for noodle soup, so I went with dumpling soup.

For $3.50 there, you can get eight dumplings in a bowl of pork broth, with scallions, cilantro, and bok choy - Shanghai choy, I think - to add some green to your meal. The leeks and chives in the dumplings also help, but the dumplings have a slightly higher pork-to-green ratio than I would like. Nevertheless they are excellent - the wrappers are thick as I like them (I think they're wheat, but I'm not sure), and there is enough deliciously porky juice inside to make you think that Lao Bei Fang could turn out some fantastic soup dumplings if they had the inclination to do so (and any Shanghainese on staff, which I'm sure they don't). The meat is good quality and is just barely cooked, not rubbery or compressed.

The soup itself is a clean and clear pork broth, slightly salty but not too much so. Last night I had half the soup unadorned and then added a spoonful of chilies for the extra smoky and spicy notes in the second half - I like it both ways and didn't want to choose. The cilantro is an unusual flavor for me to associate with Chinese food and helps to cut the richness of the dumplings, and the few stems of bok choy make it feel like you're eating some semblance of a balanced meal. This is definitely winter food, but appropriate as it may as well still be winter here in New York.

2011-03-23T20:30:00.002-05:00

It's hard to say how long Chinatown's dumpling houses have been around, but as I remember they really started becoming well-known five to ten years ago. Of course, this coincided quite well with the time I spent mostly outside NYC (six years before this past August), so I never really had the chance to try any of them. Not that I didn't make an effort. Several of my holidays from school involved long meandering trips around Chinatown, in vain search of a dumpling. I'm sure I passed a few places, but for one thing I don't think I was in the right part of the neighborhood, and for another all the places I passed had Chinese-only signs. I wasn't quite ready for that (I'm still not really ready for that, actually - does anybody around here read/speak Chinese and want to go on a food adventure with me?).

Now I love Ann Arbor and its food scene, but one thing it does not have in abundance is good Chinese food. Korean, yes - there are several excellent Korean restaurants around the campus area. But most of the Chinese is the greasy American variety - good sometimes, and especially for college students, but not for dumplings. Kansas City is similar if you replace "Korean" with "Vietnamese". Certainly no great Chinese there that I ever located. And rural Maryland...not so hot in general on the ethnic food (except for one excellent and surprising Mexican restaurant).

But back in New York since late summer 2010, I had plenty of chances to do my research properly and go find some dumplings. The first thing I learned is that Eldridge Street seems to be the dumpling locus for Manhattan's Chinatown. You have Vanessa's Dumplings, which is a wee bit touristy but still cheap and good; Prosperity Dumpling, which is a tiny shack of a storefront and probably the cheapest of the lot; and Shu Jiao Fu Zhou Cuisine (or just Fu Zhou), which, per its name serves shuijiao (boiled dumplings) rather than guotie (potstickers). Sadly I have not had a chance to try Prosperity's dumplings yet, although I will probably be doing so this Friday evening. Their pork buns (seasoned differently and round instead elongated, and I think pork buns are from Beijing as opposed to other parts of northern China) are excellent, though: crisp, juicy, and 4 for a dollar.

Fu Zhou merits special mention because of their menu and mode of dumpling-making. For one thing, you have two choices as far the dumplings go: "small" (7 for $2) and "large" (11 fo $3). None of this weird filling or fried/boiled stuff. The filling is standard (pork and chives), and the the wrappers are much more delicate than most, almost translucent. I normally like thick-skinned heartier dumplings, but these were an excellent change of pace.

After my few weeks of adventures in Manhattan's Chinatown, I moved to Elmhurst, Queens, and promptly found myself smack in the middle of another Chinatown. This one is a little more varied - so far I've seen Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Malaysian. I'm not sure it's possible to get a bad meal here, actually (with the possible exception of the pizzeria, but I haven't tried it so I can't say for sure). My first night here I went to a Vietnamese place for pho with my roommate, and we took a walking tour of the neighborhood on the way back to the apartment. He pointed out a dumpling house down one of the streets (Whitney St., I now know) and I made a mental note to try it. A few days later I got off at Elmhurst Avenue and tried to find the shop. I succeeded and was rewarded with four large and well-fried dumplings, along with a fantastic house-made chili sauce. I think the sauce is a variant on la jiao - it seems to be roasted or slow-fried dried chili bits in oil along with sesame seeds. It gives this amazing smoky spicy flavor to whatever it touches. Naming this dumpling house is a little more complicated - I think it's an outpost of Lao Bei Fang, which is down the street and is the subject of my next paragraph. However, at my last visit they had taken down the Lao Bei Fang sign, so it's hard to say for sure.

Lao Bei Fang (this time on Broadway) seems to be where the locals go - they have dumplings, noodle soups, hot pot, and various prepared dishes that are definitely not on the menu. The dumplings are very good - typically fried to a crisp, very large, slightly greasy - although that same house chili sauce cuts through that quite well - and slightly more expensive at $1.50 for four, but that's still quite a good deal. But for me the star is the la mian (hand-pulled noodles typically served in soup, becoming well-known from Xi'an Famous Foods and its ilk), the presence of which is announced by the noodle maker thwack-ing his dough on the metal counter near the back of the restaurant. Watching him is a lot of fun - if you really enjoy watching noodle making then the place to go is the Whitney St. outpost, as the la mian chef there is right up front next to the ordering window. The noodles end up chewy, springy, very wheaty, and with that slight variation in thickness that lets you know that they're really handmade. And for the kicker, giant bowls of soup - deceptively large, as you don't realize when you get the bowl that it's 2/3 full of noodles - cost between $4.50 and $6.25. It's certainly worth a stop if you find yourself in Elmhurst.

Vanessa's Dumpling House
118 Eldridge St., Manhattan
Highlights: potstickers, 4 for $1.25

Fu Zhou Cuisine
118 Eldridge St., Manhattan (this doesn't make any sense, but it's one storefront north of Vanessa's)
Highlights: boiled dumplings, 7 for $2 or 11 for $3

Prosperity Dumpling
46 Eldridge St. #1, Manhattan
Highlights: potstickers, 5 for $1; fried pork buns, 4 for $1

Lao Bei Fang (Whitney outpost)
86-08(?) Whitney St., Elmhurst, Queens (address is not exact but should be close)
Lao Bei Fang (main restaurant)
83-05 Broadway, Elmhurst, Queens
Highlights: potstickers, 4 for $1.50; 8 dumplings in soup for $3.25; la mian soups starting at $4.50

Up next: eating my way through the neighborhood, and a possible som tam comparison if I can get myself to enough Thai and Malaysian restaurants.

Minar in NYC

2011-03-20T20:26:00.002-05:00

Last week, I went to visit Noah in New York, and when I got off the bus I needed somewhere to eat. Simple, right? Well, not so much. See, the trouble is that it's Lent and so until Pesach (it was going to be "until Easter", but I'm visiting Noah for Pesach and plan to go back to eating meat then instead, plus it's the week before Easter anyway so really I'll just be celebrating religion in two different ways) I'm not eating any meat.

Okay, we're in New York, the center of food life, so this still wasn't really that hard. It's just a little trickier if you're not already aware of where the good vegetarian food is in the city. I don't think I've ever consciously eaten vegetarian in NYC, so I had no idea. So I called Noah at work when I got off the bus and asked him to suggest something. I believe I used the approximate words, "anything between Times Square and your work [on the Upper East Side] is fair game". Noah pointed me to a little Indian restaurant near Times Square called Minar, and I set off to find it.

First things first: this place is small. And unassuming. How do I know? I went to the street it was on, and walked right by it because I was on the wrong side of the street. So I crossed the street and accidentally walked right by it again. Then I almost walked by it a third time before catching myself and going in. It's a small storefront on a street packed with small storefronts. The inside is pretty small, too--a couple rows of little tables, the front counter, a fridge with drinks (and pitchers inside; if you order water to drink you go and get it from the pitcher chilling in the fridge).

I ordered the saag paneer, because it's something I've gotten before at my favorite Indian place (Bollywood Masala in St. Mary's City, MD; I have eaten a ton of Indian food in my time and never will there be a better Indian restaurant) and I wanted to compare, and also because I believe that, unless you're someplace that has a very specific specialty that is highly publicized as The Thing To Get, you should start with something basic when you're trying a new place. If they care enough to do that well, they care enough to do everything well. It's why I always order fries with my meal when I go to a new BBQ place--if they put in the effort to do good fries as well as good meat, I respect them just a little more. The saag paneer was great, and fascinating because it was so different from the saag paneer at Bollywood. They're both spicy, but Minar's is differently so--a little smokier, deeper in different places. Very very interesting. I also had a samosa, which was good too. It had a nice dipping sauce, though at the moment I don't really remember anything about it except that it was delicious. The samosa was a little spicy as well, which was nice because some restaurants can make samosas kind of bland (it's the same "do the small things well and you can do the big things well" principle).

I would definitely recommend Minar to anyone in the city for a meal. I will, in fact, probably go there again if I'm back visiting Noah in the city and need lunch. The food is great, prices are good, atmosphere is good, people at the counter are friendly (I think it helped that I apologized profusely when I had to take a very important call while I was paying at the register).

Minar
138 West 46th Street
New York, NY 10036-8506

Back in the saddle in Elmhurst

2011-03-19T10:32:00.003-05:00

Well, I am sure glad that Florence has been posting to this blog for the past year, because obviously I haven't been doing anything with it. I could use as an excuse the fact that I've moved three times since May, but I actually just got really lazy and also stopped taking pictures. For some reason I don't enjoy taking pictures of my food - when I get something that looks amazing and delicious (either in a restaurant or at home) I just want to dive in with nothing in-between me and the food. Not even a camera for posterity's sake. Florence suggested that I do my posts more restaurant-review style, which I think is a great idea - reviews are typically light on the pictures and heavy on the content. I will endeavor to do the same.

My half of the blog is now being brought to you from Elmhurst, Queens, New York City. How did I end up here, you ask? It's...sort of a long story. I left Kansas City with Florence last May after completing graduate school there, and we moved into an adorable house in rural Maryland of which there are pictures several posts below. Unfortunately rural Maryland is not exactly brimming with jobs. We lived in a farm county, and retail was really the only option. Retail was barely paying my bills as was, and I knew that I had student loans coming up in a few months - I had to get a better job, and the only way to do that was to move home. So back to the NY suburbs for several months, and then a few weeks ago I decided it was time to move to the city. Not Manhattan - I think I would go crazy if I lived in Manhattan (not to mention the rent). But Queens - Queens is quiet enough and cheaper, and I unwittingly moved to an apartment about a ten-minute walk from Elmhurst's Chinatown. (Let me note that good Chinese is one of my favorites of all types of food.) From KC to a no-stoplight town to Westchester to Queens in under a year - it's been a little hairy at times, but I am more than ready to start writing about the foodways and delicious delicacies of this part of Queens.

Up next: dumpling houses, and an exemplary one just down the street.

Novel Food 2011: School Lunch Edition

2011-02-11T14:44:00.006-06:00

As I alluded to before, I've decided to write in entry for Novel Food, a celebration of food and literature organized by the blogger who writes Champaign Tast e, which is a blog I've actually been quietly lurking in for years now. The Novel Food roundup always interested me, but I was never actually able to get it together in time to enter anything. Well, now I have, in a slightly unorthodox way.

When I thought about what I wanted to make for Novel Food, I thought about the books I've been reading, and then I realized that I have just not been reading a lot of fiction lately. I've really become immersed in the world of nonfiction over the past year or so, and my inspiration for Novel Food tended to lie more in those works. I finally chose to make something inspired by the book I'm currently reading: How to Walk to School:Blueprint for a Neighborhood School Renaissance by Jacqueline Edelberg and Susan Kurland. The rules of Novel Food stipulate that the book you read doesn't have to be about food, and true to form my book doesn't mention food anywhere in it (at least not so far; I haven't actually finished the book). Instead, How to Walk to School is a book about school reform based on organizing your community to enhance the quality of already-existing neighborhood schools, which are frequently left behind as parents are taken in by the allure of shiny new charter schools popping up, and leaving the poorest families (who cannot afford to send their children to any other school) to send their children to a school that the community has given up on. The book is an inspiring story of what happens when a group of parents decides to galvanize their resources and turn their school into a better place, and I think it's worth a read, not just by those in the educational system but by communities in general.

So what made me want to cook for this book? Well, it dovetailed very nicely with where my life is now. I am currently working on my practicum (think student teaching) in a high school, dividing my time between two different special education classrooms. One classroom consists of kids with emotional and behavioral disorders, and one is primarily children with more severe physical and intellectual disabilities. Being in the schools all day puts me right in line with a pivotal issue in the education and development of young people: that of what they're eating. I've always been a hardcore supporter of more nutritionally appropriate food in the schools, so this is on my mind frequently.

A couple days after I decided to participate in Novel Food, I was in my Emotional/Behavioral classroom putting up the school lunch menu for March underneath the February menu. As I looked at this month's menu, I noticed all the usual unhealthy suspects: pizza, burgers, chicken nuggets, etc. Then I noticed that for that day, the main course was listed as "cheese sticks". I'm assuming these cheese sticks are fried, much like mozzarella sticks. Note to my school: cheese sticks are not a main course!! Especially when it seemed clear that the school had barely tried to squeeze in a fruit and vegetable side option, neither of which looked at all appetizing. I discussed the issue with my students, and one said "the only thing on the menu I care about is the cheese sticks", to which all the other students nodded. Sorry, buddy. Cheese sticks are not a meal.

Then it came to me what I wanted to do for Novel Food: I wanted to create the school lunch I wished all my kids would be interested in eating. I'm not saying it's what my kids would eat, even if it were offered, but it's what I wish they would eat. I was a woman on a mission. I went out to the grocery store and bought a bunch of vegetables: mushrooms, a green bell pepper, zucchini. I bought some pita pockets and a can of chickpeas (I prefer to buy dried ones and then soak them and cook them myself, but I guess nobody in my area does that, because dried chickpeas are rarely available at my local grocery stores. I chopped all my veggies into very small pieces and threw them in a pan to saute in a little olive oil.

Then I added a can of chickpeas...

And after letting that heat for a while, I came up with my finished veggie mix!

This got put in the fridge overnight, and here's the finished product that I ate the next day for lunch. I also brought 2 homemade oatmeal cookies, and a handful of dried apricots. At school there was some kind of snack thing available for staff, so I snagged a Quaker Chewy Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip bar as well.

This is what I wish my kids would be eating. That sandwich is packed with delicious chickpea protein (I was actually going to make hummus, but I didn't feel like breaking out the food processor the night before), the veggies are full of nutrients, and there's plenty of carbs and sweet stuff to have on the side with the fruit and the cookies (plus the surprise extra protein and sugar in the granola bar). What did I drink with it? Water. I can't go anywhere without a giant bottle of water.

I know my kids would probably not touch this stuff now, even if it was in front of them. But maybe they would if we taught our kids from the beginning that vegetables were delicious. If we raised our kids to drink water more than soda. If gardening and growing your own food was more heavily emphasized both in school and at home. If kids had a more consistent knowledge of is and is not healthy for them. If fast food were not quite so prevalent, or if local and fresh produce were more readily available to families whose socioeconomic status currently prohibits them from offering such options to their children. My job is to care about my kids, and that includes being concerned about what they eat. Maybe one day I'll be teaching in a world where my students will eat this stuff for lunch every day, and I think they'll be a lot better for it. But for now I just fantasize, and read books on school reform. It reminds me that anything is possible.

I linked in the last entry to the Novel Food roundup page, so check back in a few days and you just may see me on there!

NYC food adventures, and the best mussels we've ever had

2011-02-09T16:00:00.002-06:00

One of the best things about getting to visit Noah in New York (besides, of course, the "getting to see Noah" part) is being able to have days when we just go to the city and try to experience as much of the food atmosphere as possible. The small town where I live is almost stiflingly homogeneous food-wise, so the wealth of options available in New York is intensely refreshing. In early January, I took the bus to New York to surprise Noah with a visit (I had planned it in advance with his parents, and miraculously none of us managed to give away the surprise!), which was a huge surprise for him (he had no idea!) and was a lot of fun. Since he wasn't dong anything in particular that weekend, we decided to take a day and have adventures--or "foodventures", as we like to call them.

Our first stop was Doughnut Plant, where we started our day right with delicious fresh doughnuts. I had a hazelnut doughnut, because I am helpless to the power of hazelnuts, and Noah's was Meyer lemon. Then we went to Kossar's and had bialys. At least, I think we did. My memory is hazy after so many weeks, so I don't remember exactly where we went or what kind of bialys we had, just that we had bialys somewhere and they were really good and there wasn't a lot of seating so we pretty much had to squeeze onto one chair. From there we stopped briefly at an amazing pickle place where pretty much anything you can think of existed in its pickle form. We gaped at the selection of pickled things (I love pickles, so it was like the mothership calling me home), but decided we were going to come back to it. We never did, because we got distracted., Maybe next time! My google searches do not come up conclusive on what the place was called. This concluded Leg One of our food tour: the Lower East Side.

Our next leg was the Chinatown leg. We were only in Chinatown for one thing, and that was super-cheap dumplings. After some preliminary research, we finally decided on a dumpling house called, well...Dumpling House. (I believe my Google search also comes up with Vanessa's Dumpling House, but I can't remember if they're the same place.) We started our time there with 2 orders of dumplings. The dumplings are all crammed together in one small container, and 1 order (containing 4 dumplings) is $1. Can't get much better than that! We followed it up with a sesame pancake (Dumpling House has several varieties, and I can't remember which one we had...this'll teach me to wait so long to write my food blog entries) and some kind of soup--I think it was the pork wonton soup, but again, not sure. Dumpling House is definitely the kind of place I'd be at all the time if I lived in NY--it's super crowded, everybody's pressed together like sardines jostling each other as they eat their delicious (and budget-friendly) dumplings. I'm looking forward to visiting there more times during my regular visits to the city.

We then abandoned Chinatown for a very cold and windy walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which made me wish I'd brought a hat, but was still exciting because I'd never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge before. We were in Brooklyn for the Mile End deli, where we'd heard there were amazing smoked meats being made. And the smoked meats were really good! After a wait, we ordered the smoked meats and also a house-ground salami sandwich (I tried to get the menu on my computer, but for some reason my computer loaded it really tiny and I couldn't make the window any bigger, so I can't actually read the menu to tell you what the sandwich was called). The smoked meat sandwich was good, but we actually liked the salami sandwich better. If I remember correctly, we also had pickles. And I had a cup of tea, because I was really cold. Mile End is a great place if you enjoy people who put a lot of care into their meat, and if you've got some time on your hands (there is always always always a wait, from what I've heard, so don't expect to just waltz right in). I would definitely go back to try more of their menu, or just eat more delicious salami sandwiches.

3 days after I went back to MD from that trip, Noah came to visit me for MLK Day weekend! We had 3 days to spend together, which coincided with an early celebration of our 2.5-year anniversary. (Since we had had feelings for each other for a while before we got together, and because we were a bit hazy on when we actually became an official couple, we chose July 26, 2008 as our anniversary because that's when we believe everything really started.) Because we had an anniversary to celebrate, we decided to go someplace nice for dinner, and after some deliberation we chose a little Bistro in Baltimore called b. It was a great choice for a nice dinner--it was intimate and friendly, and pretty much everything on the menu was strong. We got a selection of appetizers, tapas-style, and then shared an order of moules-frites. The appetizers included: olives (Noah's email reminding me of where we went and what we ate describes this as "roasted olives with lemon peel and some other stuff"), a charcuterie plate with amazingly delicious duck prosciutto as well as really good bresaola and serrano ham, served with fried bread, and a potato appetizer that was reminiscent of the patatas bravas that you get at tapas places everywhere. The potatoes were SO good--the waitress had placed them by me, and I definitely had a hard time sharing! ;-)

The star of the show, however, was without a doubt the moules-frites. The mussels were the best mussels either of us had ever had. They tasted like they had never known the inside of a freezer, and were incredibly fresh and well-prepared. They were served with frites, which were also excellently done. The meal was so good that I wrote a thank-you note to the staff on the back of my receipt and left it for them. There couldn't have been a better way to celebrate 2.5 years together then with good food and wine and the company of your partner. :-)

Coming attractions:
Check back in the next couple of days for my (slightly unusual) entry in this year's Novel Food, a celebration of literature and food organized by a food blog I've been reading for a while now. I'm not sure my entry will be accepted, since I didn't base it on a novel (more of a nonfiction book), but you'll get to see it regardless! I also may talk about an excellent stir-fry I made the other day from an even more awesome cookbook that you should all go out and buy. But that's later.

ADDRESSES:

Doughnut Plant
379 Grand St.
New York, NY 10002

Kossar's Bialys
367 Grand St.
New York, NY 10002

Dumpling House (this address is for Vanessa's Dumpling House, because I think it's the same thing)
118 Eldridge St.
New York, NY 10002

Mile End Delicatessen
97a Hoyt St.
Brooklyn, NY

b
1501 Bolton St.
Baltimore, MD 21217

Rice For Dinner

2011-01-29T20:06:00.002-06:00

Sometimes you just have one of those days, you know? You go downstairs to make dinner, and you're excited because it's going to be some kind of cool sweet-and-sour thing over rice that you came up with compiled from various recipes. It's really easy, too--just put some random stuff (dates, sugar, water, cumin, tamarind extract, stuff like that) in the food processor and process it until it's done. But, for whatever reason, it doesn't work. It's disgusting. You try to fix it, to balance the ingredients, but it doesn't want to be fixed. It remains inedible. You could try harder-you know you could probably fix this somehow-but your heart's just not in it today. You're all stressed, for whatever reason--your former housemate is exhibiting creepy and potentially dangerous behavior, you're worried about your teaching practicum starting on Wednesday, you may potentially be changing jobs for the third time in the past 9 months, all your housemates are gone for the weekend and you're lonely, you're lonely even when all your housemates are here. All of the above, if you're me. You wonder if you used up all your kitchen mojo making that really delicious herb quick bread a couple hours ago. Either way, your attempt at dinner goes down the drain, the belch of the garbage disposal seeming to say that even it doesn't want it. Your rice, however, came out perfectly.

And that's when you do it. That's when you have plain steamed rice for dinner, seasoned with a little bit of fish sauce and sesame oil. You make some chai tea to soften the blow of your finished dinner product being a bowl of plain rice. You think nostalgically of the days when ruining dinner gave you a free pass to order in...back when you had a guaranteed job and your parents were paying for your schooling and you didn't have rent to pay. You write blog entries where you amp up the drama of the situation, because humor is the best medicine, and you hope that new readers to the blog don't think you're always this overdramatic (and also self-referencing).

The upside: my parents are coming to take me out to brunch tomorrow. And after a dinner like that, I'll definitely be hungry!

Catching Up

2011-01-05T13:10:00.008-06:00

Well, that time has come again. The time when, periodically, I deposit a whole bunch of pictures onto this blog, food pictures I never got around to writing about or weren't particularly interesting to write about. Think of it as a bit of a snapshot of the time that's passed since I moved back to Maryland!

Over the summer, while Noah and I lived in New Windsor, we had a burst of DIY inspiration that involved making pickles! They were delicious.

Fresh sage from our window garden! When it got to be winter I dried all the sage by hanging it from a hair tie on the window. I'm really looking forward to doing some more gardening (mostly of things that can be grown in pots, because I'm only renting the house I'm living in now) soon.

Some yummy-looking type of fried rice concoction.

These may not look like much, but they are amazing homemade chicken nuggets! I don't know why I survived on frozen chicken nuggets all through college when I could have been eating these.

Pasta with made-from-scratch tomato sauce! I was really happy with the way this came out. It's such a simple thing to make, but the sauce came out so well, with giant chunks of tomato and lots of seasoning.

Until next time, I hope you had a happy new year!

Tuna and Tomato Pasta, Stage 1: Denial

2010-11-27T21:40:00.002-06:00

I've never been a fan of tuna. And by "never been a fan", I mean that most times the very thought of tuna makes me want to throw up. I have an ingenious reason for why this is--when my mom was pregnant with me and my twin sister, she had a strong aversion to tuna, which made her want to throw up. She also had strong cravings for baked potatoes and for milkshakes. Which, by that logic, is why to this day I hate tuna and love baked potatoes and milkshakes, right? Well, not really. I recognize that baked potatoes and milkshakes are not exactly obscure cravings, and I find that most people don't like the smell of tuna, which is really what puts me off.

Within the past few months, I gave tuna a semi-fair shot for the first time. It's all thanks to Noah--when my parents pull the whole "just try a little bit and see if you like it" thing I usually respond with "but I don't like it why do you keep trying to make me eat things I don't like?". But recently Noah did the same thing. "But Noah," I said, "I don't like tuna. You know that." But he didn't have to ask too many times before I agreed to at least try it. I believe my reaction was "I guess it's not quite as terrible as I thought it was." It helps that Noah rarely steers me wrong on the food front--he was the one who convinced me that not all hot dogs were disgusting, and that mustard can be okay in some preparations (not that I've actually touched the mustard in the fridge, and in fact this hasn't stopped me from pretending it's not mine). One tip that I have for people trying to get their kids/significant others/friends to like tuna is not to make tuna salad the first thing you try. While it may seem logical to throw them into the fire in that way, introducing someone to tuna through something that is composed entirely of tuna with virtually no other flavors to complement it is very daunting. When Noah left to move back to New York and left me all his food products, included in those food products were two cans of tuna*. The only thing I knew how to make with tuna was tuna salad, and I just didn't think I could stomach that. Luckily, just then I came upon a recipe for tuna and tomato pasta. It seemed perfect to me because the tomato flavor would balance out the tuna and would make the whole tuna-eating experience a lot easier.

Because of my extreme denial that I was eating tuna, the recipe that I linked to was really only the jumping-off point for the dish I made. My dish had two main considerations: 1) I needed the tuna to be a little more sneakily incorporated into the dish than the recipe seemed to want to do, and 2) I didn't have any of the ingredients on hand except for the two cans of tuna, the seasonings, and one 28-oz can of tomatoes, which would have to substitute for the fresh ones. Here's my, uh...recipe.

How to Make Tuna And Tomato Pasta If You "Don't Like" Tuna:
1. Start your pasta going first--the sauce takes only a couple minutes to throw together, so you'll have some downtime while the water boils and stuff. Choose an appealing-looking pasta--I chose campanelle because I'd never used them before, they looked like they'd hold sauce really well, and they were adorable.
2. At about the time your water is boiling and you're ready to dump the pasta in, heat up a little olive oil in a large pan or skillet. If you're like me, take 5 tries to open the cans of tuna, pondering the great mystery of why, with all your skills in the kitchen, you still can't seem to operate a can opener correctly. Once the oil is all sizzly, dump in your 2 cans of tuna. Immediately use your wooden scraper or other implement to mash the tuna into the tiniest possible pieces, so that when you eat the finished product the individual bites of tuna will be relatively small.
3. Let that tuna cook in there for awhile, basically until you get tired of waiting around. I found it took me about as long as it took the pasta to finish cooking, so like 5-8 minutes. It didn't change terribly noticeably during that time, which is why I say just kind of keep cooking it until you think "yeah, I guess that's good".
4. Dump in your tomatoes. How much of the can you use depends on just how much you want to hide that tuna. I dumped in part of the can, but that didn't look like enough, so I put in more and then discovered I'd actually used the entire 28-oz can. If you hadn't caught on by now to the fact that this isn't a meal you should be making if you're interested in a finely nuanced dish where all the flavors come out, it should be dawning on you right about here. This dish has two purposes: to satiate hunger, and to get protein from the tuna without noticing you're doing it.
5. "Chop" your tomatoes by repeatedly stabbing them with your scraper or other implement until they come apart. I would have bought diced tomatoes if I knew this was what I was using it for, but all I had were whole peeled ones. I used a combination of a scraper and the slotted spoon from the pasta to get the tomatoes into pieces. Stir this whole mixture around and let it do its thing for a few more minutes.
6. Season with whatever appropriate seasonings you have lying around. I used a lot of oregano, and then as an afterthought I put in some of a bottle I found in the cupboard that was labeled "Italian Seasoning", which was probably just more oregano, but I used it anyway. Stir around and you're good to go!

I'm eating it right now, and my verdict is that it did what I wanted it to do: I can taste the tuna a little bit, but it is heavily offset by the large amount of tomato I put in. It does not make me want to throw up. I have a rather large bowl, and I will eat all of it and will continue to do so for the next few days.

Of course, some of you are probably thinking, "but Florence! This is kind of cheating, isn't it? How will you ever experience the glories of tuna if you make dishes where you can't even taste it?" The answer, my friends, is baby steps. This is just one stage in the tuna journey. I'm sure I'll reach Acceptance eventually. But for now, a bowl of this is a big accomplishment.

What are your favorite tuna recipes? If I'm at the store and convince myself to actually buy more tuna (which would be an even bigger step), maybe I'll make them!

*When I told my sister that I was making tuna and tomato pasta despite my aversion to tuna, she said, "but if you don't like tuna, why not give it away? You don't have to eat it." My response: "no, no, I have to do this, I should broaden my horizons!". What I meant: "I don't have a lot of money and that tuna will bring me at least 3 meals and then I won't have to go grocery shopping in the next couple days." The fact that Noah left me all his food when he moved has probably halved the amount that I've had to go grocery shopping these past couple month, but now that stockpile is running pretty low. Pretty much all I have left is a bottle of clam juice, a can of red curry paste, that poor lonely jar of mustard, and about 5 different kinds of vinegar (we here at the FBTS homestead are serious about our vinegar).

Also, an additional safety note: daydreaming while washing out tuna cans is a Bad Idea! My mind was totally somewhere else while I was rinsing those cans earlier (I think I was thinking something along the lines of "I have a headache, I'm sleepy, why do I have to go to work tomorrow"), and I grabbed the tuna can on the unfriendly end (the part of the top that gets exposed when you used the can opener on it). The sharp edge of the top was like, "Hahahaha! I kill you! *slice*" and then I was bleeding. Cooking is dangerous, kids. Or at least, doing the recycling is.

soups and stews: the official beginning of fall

2010-09-27T12:46:00.003-05:00

Hello again! As usual, much has happened in the world of FBTS since you last heard from us. Most important for this blog, Noah went back to New York in search of greener employment pastures (there's not too much around here in terms of full-time work), so we are cooking and eating separately. But we're still doing a lot of cooking and eating, of course! Here is what's going on over on my side of things.

To start with, I love cookbooks. Noah isn't so much of a fan, he prefers to make things off-the-cuff, but while I enjoy doing that too, for the most part I love picking through cookbooks and getting new inspiration. There will be days when large portions of my day are spent rummaging around in cookbooks and food blogs looking for new and delicious things to do! Those are the best kinds of days. :-) My cookbook library is steadily growing, with plenty of standbys as well as new and quirky additions (I recently picked up two childrens' cookbooks from Goodwill--I don't have any kids, but childrens' cookbooks appealed strongly to the five-year-old inside me).

A little while after I moved into the house where I live with three other young people (who also love food, so we're getting along great), I was flipping through a cookbook called Ethnic Cuisine, which Noah gave to me as a Christmas present a couple years back. All the recipes look great-in fact, as I flip through it now I find several more I want to tackle soon-but when I looked through it a few weeks ago I didn't even get past the first couple pages, because the first two recipes in the book looked so good. Here are my takes on a couple of her soup recipes. Check out the actual book for the real versions, because mine were sometimes altered significantly based on what I had lying around.

Turmeric Yogurt Soup (adapted from Ethnic Cuisine, by Lorraine Turner):
1/3 cup all-purpose flour (she suggests gram flour, but I didn't have any. You miss some of the deeper taste by using AP, but it's definitely doable)
1 tsp. ground turmeric
1/4 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 3/4 cups plain yogurt
2 tbsp. vegetable oil (you can also use peanut oil, or, even better, ghee)
3 cups water

I didn't really garnish it with anything, she suggests oil, cumin seeds, black mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds, and whole fresh red chilies.

1. Mix the flour, turmeric, chili powder, and salt together, then beat in the yogurt with a whisk (or fork) until there are no more lumps.
2. Heat the oil (or melt the ghee) in a heavy-bottom pan over medium-high heat. Mix in the yogurt mixture and then the water, whisking constantly. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat way down and simmer for about 8 minutes (keep whisking it fairly frequently; I didn't hover over it whisking it and it still turned out fine), until the soup thickens slightly. Taste and season!

I was worried originally that my soup wasn't thick enough (it didn't look nearly as thick as the soup in the picture, but it thickens up after a little while, and significantly more in the fridge. I didn't garnish it at all, and ate it with bread to mop it all up. The tangy yogurt made for a very unique soup that was different from anything I'd ever had before (especially since I hadn't eaten much plain yogurt before this year; I'm switching over to organic plain yogurt with fruit instead of store-bought yogurt because I want fewer additives in my food).

Tunisian Garlic and Chickpea Soup (adapted from Ethnic Cuisine, by Lorraine Turner):
8 tbsp. olive oil (or appx.; I didn't measure)
12 garlic cloves, very finely chopped (I only used 8 because I ran out of garlic)
3 cups chickpeas, soaked overnight (I think I only used 2 cups because I ran out of chickpeas--clearly I was unprepared for this soup)
2 1/2 quarts water
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. ground coriander (both of those are her measures, again I just put in "some" of each)
1 or 2 carrots, very finely chopped (smaller measures are what I had on hand)
1 or 2 onions, very finely chopped
4 or 6 celery stalks, very finely chopped
Juice of 1 lemon (it doesn't say it's optional but it totally is; I skipped it)
4 tbsp. chopped fresh cilantro, plus extra sprigs to garnish (I forgot to add it, so I used it solely as a garnish)
salt and pepper

1.Heat half the oil in a large, heavy-bottom pan over low heat. Add garlic and cook, stirring frequently, for 2 minutes. Add the chickpeas (drain them first), water, cumin, and ground coriander. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until tender (she says 2 1/2 hours, but it's really based on your stove. I'm pretty sure mine was done in a little over an hour, though I did use fewer than the stated ingredients).
2. While that's cooking, heat the rest of the oil in a separate pan. Add the carrots, onions, and celery, then cover and cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes.
3. Stir the vegetables into the pan of chickpeas. Transfer about half the soup to a food processor (or blender) and process until smooth. (This step shouldn't be skipped! It gives the soup a cool variation in texture.) Mix the puree back in with the rest of the soup, and add in the lemon juice little by little, tasting all the way, if you used it. Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with cilantro!

This soup was a total winner in my book! It was hearty and filling, and even with reducing the ingredients it made enough soup to last me for days. I will definitely be making it again as we go into fall and winter.

The last recipe I wanted to share with you is actually a link to a recipe. While Noah's food niche tends to lean toward the Asian food side of cooking, I have always been interested in traditional Latin American recipes. It's hard to find these written down in many places, but I did find a gorgeous Ecuadorian food blog called Laylita's Recipes, and I want to cook practically everything she writes about! The blog appears to be defunct, because she hasn't updated in a long time, but paging through the back entries of the blog has given me a lot of great ideas. I hope to try lots of her recipes in the coming weeks! This week, I was going to make a large quantity of her menestra de porotos, or bean stew, to eat by myself; in an unexpected turn of events, though, Noah surprised me with a visit this week, so we got to try the recipe out together. :-) I loved it! It was a good, filling stew that is sure to turn into a staple winter meal for me. I served it with the fried egg on top, and avocado slices on the side--over rice, of course. Since then I've been eating the leftovers over pasta, and tonight for dinner I'm probably going to bake a couple potatoes and spoon more bean stew over those! Check out the link and try it for yourselves!

That's all for now! Until next time!

A perfect breakfast for a rainy day

2010-08-12T08:50:00.004-05:00

Instead of waking up to my alarm this morning, I woke up to a nice big thunderstorm! While I love thunderstorms, my favorite way to experience them is when I have a nice long day off to stay in and watch the rain...which was not the case today. Like every weekday, I accompany Noah into town when he goes to work, hang out at the college library for a few hours, go to my own job, and then hang out at the public library for a while until Noah picks me up (such is the life of a couple with only one car, and I haven't fully learned to ride my new bike yet, so I can't get around that way, unfortunately). I didn't feel like having breakfast at home this morning because I was a bit slow and didn't want to rush through breakfast, so I decided to eat in Westminster.

My favorite place to eat breakfast in Westminster (possibly my favorite place to eat in general, except for this place), is the Heinz Bakery. I've been there 3 times so far, usually just to pick up a cinnamon doughnut for a snack. I have a serious love for cinnamon doughnuts, and Heinz makes a great one. Today, I decided to get one of their breakfast sandwiches as well. I got a bacon and egg sandwich, and paid extra to have tomato on it as well. It was delicious--the sunflower bread I chose to have it on was extremely tasty, different from your regular white or wheat options but not too jarring. The bacon and egg were nicely cooked, and I was glad I got tomato on it because it complemented everything really well. This place is clearly where most people in town go to meet and talk and have breakfast, and the people running the place seemed to know almost everyone, as well as what they usually got. The staff was warm and friendly, and the place has a nice atmosphere--sparsely decorated, but the emphasis is on good food and good people. I foresee many more breakfasts at Heinz in the years that I live here. :-D

PS-Did I mention that the whole sandwich (with tomato as an extra), cinnamon doughnut, and glass of water came out to $4.25 total? That might be the best part. :-)

Heinz Bakery
42 West Main Street,
Westminster, MD 21157-4816

things I didn't know about garlic

2010-08-11T17:55:00.002-05:00

Garlic, I'm sure most of us will agree, is a pretty awesome food. Not only is it delicious, but it has some pretty spectacular health benefits, so much so that it can be used medicinally as well as being eaten. Like regular medicines, though, it can have side effects, which still occur when you're just eating it as part of a delicious meal, particularly when you eat it raw.

Such was the case with the seemingly innocuous pasta salad that Noah and I made a few days ago. It was your standard pasta salad, with farfalle and fresh tomatoes and fresh, raw garlic. Not aware of the potential side effects of eating raw garlic, I was completely unsuspecting. I ate for a little while, munching through some raw garlic, and then all of a sudden I was hit with an instantaneous wave of nausea. Like, "wow, I'm going to throw up in approximately 30 seconds"-type nausea. So I waited (near the bathroom, just in case) and after a couple minutes it just disappeared. This confused me, but Noah was coming down with a cold at that point, and my body acts pretty weird when it's getting sick, so I thought maybe I was getting it too. Also I remember being pretty ravenous when I was eating, so I thought it was possible that I had eaten too fast.

Then, a few minutes ago, we settled down to have some leftovers for dinner, and I immediately decided to finish the pasta salad. I didn't think I would have any problems, but soon after I started eating it, boom--unhappy tummies. Since I had the sense to stop eating right when I noticed it, it just went away a few seconds later, which is when I decided to search "garlic nausea" on Google. Turns out feeling nauseous after eating raw garlic is totally something that happens! I never knew. At least it's not garlic in general--I don't know if I could get by without using garlic in my cooking. ;-)

Have you guys ever had problems with eating garlic? Do you know of any other foods that have "side effects"?

Pride goeth before a fall

2010-08-01T13:38:00.004-05:00

Everyone has to fail in the kitchen sometimes. Even the most experienced cooks and bakers, and especially the novice ones, should expect to make a lot of mistakes and have results that end up pretty much inedible. I am an extremely novice cook, so I should have expected that my first try at a pie dough would not go over so well. But I'd been thinking about making Celery and Onion Pies, from a baking book we got at Goodwill, for days. I'd spent much more time imagining the perfect result that was going to come out of the oven than I spent actually making sure I knew how to make pie dough. I entered the kitchen this morning with a feeling I can only describe as "hubris". And at first things went really well. The filling, which was a super-easy mixture of celery, onion, garlic, salt, and a little milk and flour, went spectacularly. I had remembered to put my dough ingredients in the fridge so they would be nice and cold when I made the dough. I sifted the flour and salt, rubbed the butter in with my fingers, and mixed it until it looked approximately like dough is supposed to when the butter is mixed in. Then the recipe didn't call for nearly enough water to make a dough, so I had to put some more water in, and a little more flour to balance it out. I slapped it onto one of our counters to roll it out, and here's where I ran into problems.

At the same time as my dough got progressively warmer because our kitchen does not circulate air at all, I used too much flour to roll out the dough. The addition of the water made the dough just slightly sticky, so to ease it in rolling out I added a little bit of flour. I started rolling out the dough, but after just a little while the steadily warming dough started to tear and get too thin. I added more flour. I rolled it out. Every now and then, more flour found its way onto the counter and the dough. By the time I'd managed to roll out a sufficient quantity of dough, everything was probably pretty heavily floured. Did I mention that I used an empty bottle of Arrogant Bastard ale in lieu of a rolling pin? Because I totally did.

Then it was time for Mistake #2. I neglected to check to see if the muffin tin I was going to use to bake these pies in was actually the right size for the job. Turns out it was way too big. In the pretty pictures that accompany the recipe in the cookbook, the pies come up to the top of the pan, but mine only made it about halfway. Next time I make this I'll definitely just make bigger and fewer pies. Determined not to accept complete and total failure, I managed to slap the pies together and throw them in the oven.

The recipe calls for 15-20 minutes in the oven, but after that time they just weren't looking right. I left them in for a little while longer, and then called my mom, who was currently helping my sister pack up her stuff for her imminent move. "Mom," I said, "I have these pies in the oven that turned out really badly, and here's my question: I know what the pies are supposed to look like when you do them right, but how do I know whether I should leave these in the oven for longer or whether they're as done as they're going to get?" I described them to her (as "the dough looks about like it did when I rolled it out, except drier", and she counseled me to admit defeat and take them out.

Talking to my sister on the phone later, I told her I was disappointed that the pies hadn't turned out well, but that I'd had a lot of fun making them. I love getting messy (I'm secretly a five-year-old), and this allowed me to get flour all over myself and the kitchen, including the countertops, sink, floor, table, dishes, and refrigerator door handle. Plus, since the filling actually did turn out to be delicious, I was just going to scrape it out and use it over pasta or rice as a delicious snack.

"Well," she told me, "I think you can call that a win."

Caribbean Kitchen; or, A Good Way to Beat Rush Hour

2010-07-31T15:33:00.002-05:00

A couple days ago, Noah and I were driving home after picking up our CSA share when we ran into some big traffic problems. An accident had closed off Route 140, pretty much the only way into Westminster from the Baltimore area, and everywhere else was severely clogged with rush-hour traffic. After driving on Route 26 for a little while, we decided we'd had enough and we would stop at the first interesting-looking restaurant we could find on Route 26. Soon enough, when we spotted a small yellow building called Caribbean Kitchen, were immediately intrigued.

Caribbean Kitchen is exactly the kind of restaurant I like to visit. It's small, friendly, unassuming, and the prices are as reasonable as the food is delicious. We shared an excellent jerk chicken meal, which came with the chicken and sides of rice and peas, plantains, and cabbage. The cabbage wasn't all that exciting, but it complemented everything else well. And I love plantains, so this was very exciting for me! The chicken was pretty spicy, but not as spicy as the person who took our order made it sound (maybe people in the area don't have as much of a tolerance for heat as we do?). It did come with a sauce on the side which had a nice kick, though.

As we left, the person at the front asked how we liked our meal and mentioned that she was surprised we had enjoyed the spicy chicken. "Oh, it wasn't that spicy", we demurred. "Really?", she said. "Well, next time you come, I'll make it real spicy for you." I can't wait!

Caribbean Kitchen
8139 Liberty Road,
Windsor Mill, MD 21244-3043
(410) 496-6222

PS-Today we're experiencing another good kind of food--the down-home church dinner! There's a Methodist church next door to our apartment that's serving an all-you-can-eat dinner tonight. How can we not check it out?

Happy 4th of July!

2010-07-04T19:31:00.002-05:00

FBTS wishes you a very happy 4th of July. :-) I love a good holiday as much as the next person, but the 4th of July is my least favorite holiday. Mainly because of the fireworks--I dislike loud noises, and things with a negative environmental impact. But, like most people, we did eat traditional 4th of July food: burgers, with a delicious improvised pasta salad on the side. Yum. :-D

summer food

2010-06-28T12:51:00.002-05:00

Well, summer is officially here in Maryland, as evidenced by the crushing heat and humidity that makes me want to do nothing but sit in bed reading with the fans on and watch Food Network. Neither Noah nor I are particularly summer people, and the fact that neither of us wants to move, combined with my near-constant state of dehydration (I become extremely easily dehydrated, so summer is very difficult for me) makes us highly unmotivated to step into the kitchen and cook. It's a shame, because we're getting a lovely share from our CSA, and we're visiting local produce markets as often as possible, so we have plenty to cook with.

As we were sitting around yesterday moaning about the fact that we (as usual) didn't feel like cooking dinner, it occurred to me: the CrockPot. My parents were given a CrockPot as a gift recently from one of my dad's parishoners (he's a minister), and since my family already has one they gave it to us. It was definitely a lifesaver--we just cut up some veggies, and a few hours of blissfully not being in the kitchen later, we had a delicious stew. Bonus points: it was filling (most summer foods that we feel like preparing end up being things like salads, and since both Noah and I have crazy high metabolisms we need to eat more than that), and it made the whole apartment smell delicous with very little work. :-)

In other food-related news, Noah and I have started a little herb garden on our living room window. We've been interested in growing our own food since before we were a couple (possibly sparked by reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle together on a long train trip while in Italy a few years back), and a good way to dip your toes into growing your own food is with herbs. We have a parsley plant that was given to us by our CSA, and at the farmer's market we purchased a sage plant and a basil plant. We definitely love them. :-D

we (the people, not the blog) have moved!

2010-06-02T21:09:00.003-05:00

We the writers of FBTS have just moved into the most adorable apartment that has ever existed. Ever. It's in here:

More updates once we finish unpacking and are moved in enough to make interesting food!

2010-03-14T22:02:00.000-05:00

Happy Pi Day from FBTS! We didn't have any pie, unfortunately, but we hope you did.

Catch-up!

2010-03-07T17:44:00.017-06:00

Want to know what FBTS has been up to while my camera was down? Take a look:

We made dumplings!

Noah was gone for about 2 weeks this winter to visit Israel and Turkey, so I was by myself. During the last week I made myself these delicious marinated veggie sandwiches!

Uhh...making broccoli! (And taking badly-lit photos of it!)

Making brownies! (Taking pictures while the batter is being mixed is the prettiest part.)

Making...something with meat! (Probably chili...)

Also making lots of hummus, baking large quantities of homemade bread, experimenting with homemade bagels, becoming addicted to some Vietnamese restaurants, and being happy.

Currently half of us (the Florence half) have given up meat for Lent, so we make a lot of stir-frys around here. And sometimes we compromise by making meat sauce and vegetarian sauce, and then something like rice or pasta to put it on. Lent is going pretty well; unlike last year (when I craved every meat item in sight) I'm really only craving bacon. It helps that I eat mostly vegetarian anyway, so I don't miss much when I go vegetarian. Except barbecue, but Noah and I have a system in place: if Noah goes for barbecue when it's Lent, I get to share in the joy by having him bring me back a side (because there are lots of sides that don't include meat).

Also, half of us (the Florence half, again) got accepted to grad school, so FBTS will be an East Coast blog in a couple months!

Chili beans, Texas-style

2010-02-20T18:30:00.002-06:00

I tend to value authenticity in my cooking. If I want to cook adobo, I'll look for a Filipino recipe. If I want to make rendang, I'll look for an Indonesian (or Malaysian, I suppose) recipe. If I want to make chili, I'll look for a Texan recipe. I know there are a lot of versions of chili, but Texans seem pretty adamant: no tomatoes, no beans. Usually, I can agree with that--we made a great pot of all-beef chili a few weeks ago. But now it's Lent, and Florence isn't eating meat, so chili beans it is! (There are no pictures because my camera is out of batteries, and I haven't quite mastered the clunky uploading setup yet).

Chili Beans, adapted from Homesick Texan

Ingredients
1 large yellow onion, roughly chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound (~2 cups) dried pinto beans
4 dried Anaheim chiles
2 ancho chiles (dried poblanos)
1 chipotle chile, dried or canned
Dark chile powder
Oregano (preferably Mexican)
Cocoa powder
Hot chile powder (Cayenne powder and Korean pepper powder are good options)
Salt
Cornstarch (since I have no masa harina)

Directions
Core and seed the dried chiles (especially the chipotle) and toast them in a cast-iron skillet. Open a window or get a fan, since the chiles will smoke and it will burn your nose and throat. When they're blistered or you can't stand the smoke anymore, fill the skillet with water and cover it for 20-30 minutes.

While the chiles are soaking, brown the diced onions in a Dutch oven in bacon grease or neutral oil (not olive). When they're turning reddish-brown, add the garlic and turn down the heat so nothing burns. Drain the chiles (discard the water) and purée them in a food processor with enough fresh water to make it smooth. Add the chile purée to the onions and garlic, and turn the heat back up. Sauté it all together for a couple minutes, then add the beans and four cups of water, or enough to cover the beans by 1-2 cm. Season with about four tablespoons of dark chile powder, one or two tablespoons of oregano, and two tablespoons of hot chile powder to start. Don't add salt yet, since the beans will take longer to cook if you do.

Bring the beans to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 30-45 minutes. Taste and correct the seasoning, and add a tablespoon or so of cocoa powder. It sounds weird, but it's not sweet and it will give the chili a great depth of flavor. Cover the pot again and simmer until the beans are as tender as you want, probably 1-2 hours. Add salt if necessary, although I didn't have to. Scoop out 1/2 cup of stew broth and mix with 2 tablespoons cornstarch until smooth, then set aside. Turn up the heat on the beans and boil until the water is about level with the beans, then turn off the heat. Stir the water/cornstarch mixture into the chili beans--the stew will thicken as it cools down.

Serve with rice, or (more authentically) cornbread!

BBQ addendum

2010-02-15T18:23:00.003-06:00

Florence has reminded me that I forgot about C. Withers! This place is in the restaurant strip on Broadway near 36th, and is relatively new--I think it opened last year. They are really cheap: $5 gets you a sandwich and two sides. I think the smoked cabbage is amazing. The mac and cheese was recommended to me, but it was overcooked and not very flavorful. The burnt ends were good but not amazing--I'll probably try the brisket or something else next time I go back. The $5 special is for lunch and possibly also for dinner (hopefully we'll find out tomorrow when we go back for Mardi Gras dinner).

Edit: The $5 special is Sundays only, and they are only open 12-3pm on Sundays. Still a great special, though. They do have an every-day special of $5 for three smoked wings (although we got four) and two sides, which is also an excellent deal.

BBQ in KC, post LC's

2010-02-15T09:32:00.002-06:00

Wow, that's a lot of acronyms. To decode: Barbecue in Kansas City, post LC's (yeah, that's just their name).

LC's Bar-BQ was shut down on Friday by the health department. Since I considered them the best barbecue in Kansas City (and not just for their amazing fries), I suppose I have to re-evaluate. Here's my list of current top barbecue in this city.

1*. I have to include LC's up here still, just because it's (or it was) so damn good. The burnt ends are big chunks of meat, not the bits and pieces you get at most places. Their sauce is great--it's thin, spicy, and not sweet. I have no idea how they make the fries, but if and when they reopen, it's worth a trip just to have the fries. They're thick, square-cut, and extra crispy--triple-fried, maybe? Come back soon, LC's!

1. Oklahoma Joe's--The titleholder by default, since nothing but LC's ever really came close. Their fries and sauce are overrated (then again, this is true of most places), but their meat, beans, slaw, and pretty much everything else are fantastic. The Carolina Style is my favorite: pulled pork with slaw on a bun.

2. Woodyard BBQ--it's in a weird spot out on Merriam, but it's pretty cheap and really good. The pulled pork is in a light sauce (no tomato, more chilies and something else I haven't identified yet), and they have all-you-can-eat burnt ends chili on Thursday nights. Woodyard also sells wood if you want to smoke your own.

3. Arthur Bryant's--the original (or one of the originals, at least), and it's delicious. The sauce is a bit sweet for me, but the fries are fantastic (skin-on, hand-cut) and the meat is all good. The pulled pork is not in their usual sauce--I don't think it's tomato-based, and it's much lighter than most of their sauces. The sandwiches here feed two people (so $11 isn't so bad for a sandwich a fries), so don't overdose.

4. BB's Lawnside Barbecue--make sure to go for lunch, or in the summer if you're going for dinner. It's at 86th and Troost, which is not where I want my car to be parked after dark. They do have music at night as a compensating factor, but I wouldn't do it. The food is good--they have some intriguing Cajun appetizers, although I have no idea how authentic they are. The boudin balls were pretty tasty, though. The burnt ends are very good--they're chopped like most places in town do, and not too fatty at all.

The above four locations are all fantastic, and you can't really go wrong at any of them. It depends what you're in the mood for. Gas-station "ambience" and don't mind standing in line for 30-45 minutes? Oklahoma Joe's. Lard-cooked fries (so I've heard) and super-chewy burnt ends? Arthur Bryant. Something off the beaten path? Woodyard or BB's.

Honorable mention: Jack Stack. It's a bit expensive unless you're having a special occasion and/or want barbecue at a real restaurant, but their beans really are amazing--probably the best in town.

Places to avoid
Gates BBQ. Gates used to be a great place--last year I was convinced they had the best burnt ends in town. They were chewy, crispy, and very well-rendered. Almost no fat on them (burnt ends come from a pretty fatty cut, so that's not easy), and their sauce was, and still is, great. It's spicy, not too thick, and not sweet at all. I went back a couple weeks ago for burnt ends, and I'm pretty sure my sandwich was half-meat and half-beef fat. The sauce was still fine, but the fries are completely unremarkable (I'm pretty sure they're frozen, and not the good kind of frozen). I've read a few reviews that agree with me on the burnt ends front. I may go back to try their brisket, but I probably won't bother when there are so many other places I know will be good.

Smokestack BBQ. The table service is weird, the sauce is bad, and the meat and fries are nothing special. I've heard people like this place, but I don't know why.

Rosedale BBQ. I believe this is one of the oldest BBQ shops in Kansas City, so I hope it used to be better than it is now. My pork sandwich was dry and didn't taste like anything, and I think the fries were frozen. Skip it--there are better options, even if Rosedale is really cheap.

new to the FBTS bookshelf

2010-01-16T17:50:00.002-06:00

Oh dear, it seems the long hiatus continues. Every now and then asriel and I will take some good pictures, and we're always making great recipes, but somehow there's a gap between doing those things and actually going onto the blog and posting about them. However, there have been good things going on in the world of FBTS, even though this post isn't about our cooking adventures. Instead, it's about one of my other favorite things: books.

I work a full-time retail job, and when there are no customers around I read pretty voraciously. In fact, I'm in and out of the public library so often that I'm sure they are extremely familiar with my face now, and are used to me coming in 3 times a week and checking out about 5 books each time. And, of course, because of my interest in food and cooking, I went through a stage where I was pretty much cleaning the library out of their stock of food-related books. It got to the point where my coworker would come in, look at what I was reading, and say "that's another food book, isn't it?". When I looked back on all the food books I read, I began to think, "wow, this would make a great blog post!".

Of course, I waited a long time to write the actual post. And I didn't actually write down which books I read, or anything about them while I was reading them. So last week, when I thought about writing this post, I came up with a list of just a few books (which I am about 85% sure is not the complete list of food books I read these past few months), and some scattered memories of what I thought about those books. So here you have it: what to add to your booklist if you're as into food as I am. :-)

I first read Bill Buford's Heat during my time in Italy (where I met asriel, incidentally). Since there were limits on how much I could pack for a several-month trip abroad, I wasn't able to bring many English-language books with me, and for a person who reads as much as I do the lack of reading material felt almost physically painful. Luckily, there was a small selection of books in English on a shelf in the campus center where I was studying, and Heat was one of those books. I remember enjoying it very much when I first read it, and when it came to mind earlier this year I decided to read it again. It's still a very good book, one that really captures the insanity and adventure of working in a restaurant (not to mention one manned by the infamous Mario Batali). What you really get from this book is a sense of the people you're meeting--sure, some of these characters seem larger than life, but the story is told in such a way that you believe it. Buford is a good storyteller in that way; the way he describes the personalities in the kitchens where he works, and in the way he describes life in those kitchens, you feel the whirlwind sense of pressure and excitement which he felt during those same experiences. Upon re-reading this book (with significantly more cooking experience under my belt than I had when I first read it) I was struck with both an appreciation for how things are done in large kitchens, and a sense of gratitude that I don't have to work in one. :-P

Cooking for Mr. Latte, by Amanda Hesser, was one of those books where I liked the book but not the author. I don't know, something about Amanda Hesser made her seem like the kind of person with whom I would have trouble connecting. I want to say that it's because she's an elitist, but that's not quite it--I've never known anyone's differing tastes to get in the way of my ability to relate to them. I was just never sure I liked the way she looked down on non-foodie Mr. Latte's (as he is called for most of the book) less refined culinary tastes. Being someone who recognizes a time and a place for both fancy, well-put-together food and simple, unrefined food (and even fast food, every so often), I felt like Hesser would look down on me as well. She was like a friend who you get along with really well on most counts, but then she'll say something that'll really put you off. But what can be said for her is that she tells a good story, and she makes what sounds like some great food. Her tales from the world of a food writer, her misadventures in the world of relationships, and especially her anecdotes of what happens when those two worlds collide, make for a funny and well-written read. Just don't offer to take her to Panera afterwards.

I don't remember The Saucier's Apprentice, by Bob Spitz, being a bad book or even a nondescript one--in fact, I remember enjoying it. Unfortunately, it's difficult for me to conjure up a good review of the book, since I'm afraid it was near the end of a long line of food books, and I think I was a little overwhelmed by this point. However, other peoples' reviews were pretty bad across the board, and sadly only leads me to remember what I didn't like about the book. First things first: Bob Spitz complains in this book. A lot. His whole mission is to go on a tour of all these international cooking schools, where he hopes to glean some kind of enlightenment about cooking and about life. However, he spends only a short time at each place he goes, and he rarely seems satisfied by what he finds. Additionally, one wonders when reading this book if Spitz was setting himself up for disappointment. His expectations seemed to be such that they couldn't be fulfilled within the parameters he set for them, and you were left feeling like very little of what he saw was given a truly fair chance. It's difficult to be truly sympathetic to his appraisals of these cooking schools, when you feel as though his opinion was not very well-informed. However, I did take note of many of the recipes he included in the book, which were very good. And when Spitz did manage to get past his whininess, every now and then he offered up a very worthwhile insight. Not one to put at the top of your list.

The real gem of this whole collection is without a doubt Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires. If each of these books was like a person you know, Ruth Reichl could be my best friend. Reichl and Hesser are both food writers, but while Hesser makes me feel like I would be uncomfortable eating in a restaurant with her, when I read Reichl's account of her attempts to dine out in disguise to avoid the special treatment food critics are given, I kind of wish she'd asked me to come (despite the fact that she doesn't actually know me). Reichl's book has humor and heart, and she creates a picture of the food world as someplace you'd want to be, even when she has bad experiences. I could read this warm, affectionate, and quirky book over and over.

Those are the most recent additions to my foodie reading list, and there are certain to be more--I've just put several new food books on hold. :-)

Ragu ragu ragu

2009-11-28T15:40:00.003-06:00

Ragù Bolognese is something for which you don't really need a recipe - but the first time it does really help. For me it boils down to "cook aromatics, meat, and liquids for a long, long time." That may or may not be authentic, but it sure is delicious! Traditionally this ragù uses a mixture of meats, but ground beef is what we had, so we went with that. I believe beef, pork, and veal are all acceptable.

Ingredients
2 T butter*
2 T olive oil*
1 pound lean ground beef (we used 90%), thoroughly defrosted
0.5-1.0 pounds tomato passata - puréed, peeled tomatoes
1 onion, finely diced
1 celery rib, finely diced
1 carrot, finely diced
1 glass dry white wine (optional)
1 cup milk
1 cup water or chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste

Directions
Heat the butter and olive oil in a large, heavy, nonreactive pot (preferably a Dutch oven) over medium-high heat -- when the butter has melted, add the onion, celery, and carrot. Add a pinch of salt and cook until they are soft (usually 10 to 15 minutes). Lower the heat if the pot starts to scorch. Add the ground beef in one layer to brown (and turn up the heat!). If you have too much beef and a small pot, add 1/3 or 1/2 of the beef, brown it, move it to the side, and add some more. When all of your beef is browned...

Add the wine, if you're using it. Keep your nose out of the pan to avoid hazardous alcohol fumes, and stir around the pan to deglaze any brown bits that may be there. If you're not using wine, don't worry - tomato is a great deglazer too. Add the milk, tomato, and water or stock, cover the pot, and bring to a boil. Start with half a pound or so of the passata, and add more to taste as the ragù heats up. When it boils, reduce the heat and simmer the ragù for at least two hours, but more if you can. 3-4 hours would be great. As the sauce simmers, the fat that you started with (and any that is rendering from the beef, hence why to use lean meat) will rise to the top, giving you a rather ugly oily layer at the top of the pot. Skim off and discard as much of this as you want.** It's really not that flavorful, and the sauce doesn't need it for mouthfeel.

The ragù is done either when you want it to be done (it's almost impossible to overcook this), or when the beef has broken down and mixed with the liquids into a state somewhere between solid and liquid. I know you're supposed to use long pasta (specifically, tagliatelle) for ragù Bolognese, but we here at FBTS just don't like long pasta that much. You could say we have issues with it. So we didn't use it.

*What's that, you say? Butter belongs in French cooking, not Italian? Actually, northern Italy (including Bologna) uses quite a bit of butter. I think this is partially due to French influence and partially due to the climate not being so great for olive trees. For example, a classic Piemontese dish (from much closer to France than is Bologna) is ravioli dressed with sage and melted butter. No olive oil there!

**If you want to avoid the fat-skimming, drain 1/2 to 3/4 of the fat before you add the beef, and you should be good to go.

Attack of the food bloggers!

2009-10-04T19:46:00.003-05:00

Food posting has been slow recently due to the impending FBTS duet recital (this Wednesday!), and the fact that I can't post any pictures right now because I lost the USB cord that lets me put my pictures on my computer. So, in place of an actual food post, I leave you with this picture:

Because we make good food here at FBTS. But sometimes, Asriel just gets very, very hungry.

The bounty of late summer

2009-09-05T18:46:00.003-05:00

This is the time of year when the farmer's market is stuffed with vegetables. It gets to the point where I have a hard time choosing what to buy, because everything looks so amazing. But I knew that we wanted caprese this week, so I went for (among many other items) the tomatoes and basil, and fresh mozzarella from the Italian grocery next to the market.

First up we have beautiful Juliette tomatoes. They look like Romas, and I was told that they are similar - Juliettes also have (comparatively) low water content, so they should be great for oven-drying. I got a bucketful.

For caprese, you definitely need some basil. This is some of the prettiest basil I've seen all summer - huge, bright green leaves, and what an aroma!

Fresh mozzarella is expensive (around 11 dollars a pound), but so worth it! It's not chewy at all - it's soft, light, and incredibly fresh tasting. It really tastes like the milk it comes from.

Put all of this delicious food on a plate, and here you go! This eventually made its way onto what passes for a bagel here in KC, and made for a fantastic lunch.

As I told gingerrose tonight over dinner, I'm always conflicted over whether I prefer summer cooking or winter. I usually lean towards winter - I'm a stew kinda guy. I love meat, beans, roasted and braised vegetables, all that great stuff that comes with winter cooking. But sometimes you just can't resist summer's fresh bounty.

One last item: this morning at the market, I saw some peppers I'd never seen before. They were long, somewhat wrinkled, and the same dark green of poblanos. I inquired, and was told that they were called pasillas, were slightly spicy, and had a sweet, smoky flavor. I promptly bought several, and was even given two bright red serranos for free by an extremely friendly farmer. He told me that atypically, this year his red serranos were very sweet, and I should give them a try! I'm very much looking forward to it.

Vietnamese corn salad

2009-08-17T19:14:00.003-05:00

Corn is one of those things that does not keep well in the fridge. It won't exactly go bad, but it just doesn't taste the same when you take it out again. Nope, corn has to be eaten as fresh as is humanly possible - it might be the ultimate seasonal food (although that could also go to tomatoes). Thus, the farmer's market is the logical destination, and ours has been absolutely brimming with corn for the past several weeks. We're talking pick-up trucks stuffed full of ears here. Of course, it's also a tricky thing to buy (you can't see the condition of the corn before you buy it), so getting those good ears is a matter of trial and error. We lucked out this week (although of course I didn't take any pictures) with six beautiful ears of a cultivar called "Montauk". We boiled two for corn-on-the-cob, and made the rest into Vietnamese corn salad - adapted from Viet World Kitchen's recipe.

I would have taken a picture, but it really just looks like a pile of corn. I promise.

Ingredients
Four ears of as-fresh-as-possible corn
1-2 fresh red chilies (we used Thai, but I'm sure cayenne work fine), seeds removed and chopped
1.5 tablespoons or so of dried shrimp (shrimp paste works too, or you can just use extra fish sauce), chopped
Fish sauce to taste
2 small onions or a few scallions, chopped

Directions
Use a large knife to cut the raw corn off the cobs, and scrape out all the remaining pulp and juices. Discard the cobs. Heat a few tablespoons of neutral cooking oil (not olive) in a large pan over high heat, and add the chilies, scallion/onion, and dried shrimp when it starts to shimmer. Stir-fry this mixture for 30-60 seconds, or until everything's aromatic and the scallion/onion becomes transparent. Turn the heat down to medium, add the corn, and stir everything together. Cook until most of the juice evaporates and the corn is cooked through - add the fish sauce until there's a nice balance of salty, sweet, and spicy.

Drying tomatoes

2009-08-09T22:22:00.005-05:00

I love sun-dried tomatoes. They have all sorts of flavors that regular tomatoes just can't compare to - they're slightly bitter, very earthy, and have much more pure tomato flavor than a regular (80%+ water) tomato does. However, sun-dried tomatoes are very expensive. I can get regular tomatoes here for $2-3 per pound at the farmer's market, but if I could find sun-dried tomatoes anywhere for sale (which I can't), it would easily be several times that. Solution: dry my own! The oven works brilliantly for this. Simply slice your tomatoes through the middle (not through the stem connection), turn your oven to about 200 degrees, and put the tomatoes on a baking sheet or roasting pan. (Make sure to use parchment paper!) After 8-12 hours, they'll look like this:

I could have kept going, but by then it was about 11:30pm, and I had to go to sleep soon. These took ten hours - they weren't as dry as sun-dried tomatoes usually are, but they were chewy and delicious and homemade! We here at From Bach to Stock have a serious penchant for do-it-yourself cooking adventures: our current project is vanilla extract*, if that says anything. Here's another picture of a beautifully shriveled tomato.

I love how the skin deflates as the water evaporates. Several of these tomatoes were chopped up and thrown into baingan bharta the other night. There are no pictures of that, as I was too busy making sure my eggplants didn't burn up in the oven...although also, baingan bharta isn't really that pretty.

*We're infusing vanilla beans into a bottle of Bacardi. After two days it's already turning brown and smelling like vanilla! I've been told it takes several weeks to properly mature, though. I can't wait!

baking updates!!

2009-07-02T19:05:00.005-05:00

First of all, greetings from Asriel's and my cozy new apartment in Kansas City! I've been here for a few days, and we are so happy to be here and together and cooking in the same place. :-)

But this entry is actually about the whole month before my move, which was a big month for baking for me! The kitchen at my house is mostly my mother's territory, so I'm usually busy enjoying her food instead of cooking and/or baking on my own. But this month I had several opportunities to get back into the kitchen!

First up: cookies! I went to visit Asriel and his family while he was still at home in New York, and I wanted to bring them a gift that would hold up in the heat (so: not flowers), since I had a 4-hour bus ride and then (though I didn't know it at the time) a brisk walk from Penn Station to Grand Central, and then a train ride! Flowers would not have been so happy by the time they got there. Also, the present needed to say "happy belated birthday" to his father, "congratulations on your concert" to his mother (the concert was one of the reasons I was visiting) and "thank you for having me" to everyone. With a task like that, the answer was definitely cookies. :-)

I used Baking Bites' recipe for Brown Sugar Chocolate Chip cookies, and they seemed to be a big hit! They were also well-received in my family--I gave half the cookies in the recipe to Asriel's family and half to mine, and they were eating them for days afterwards. Not that my friends didn't try to sneak some away--when I went to lunch a little while later with my best friend, I noticed her suspiciously sneaking around my kitchen looking for the cookies. :-P And more of my friends began asking me to make them cookies when I related the story of my successful baking experience. I didn't get to complete any more baking commissions, though. Maybe when I come home!

I did, however, make an apple cobbler for my church's annual picnic! The mix itself was actually from a package, which I won playing BINGO at church (don't I just have the most exciting life?), so it could have been more from scratch, but came out deliciously. I think the recipe on the back of the box called for one can of apple pie filling, but I used two because I wanted it to be particularly apple-y and delicious. I heard it was, but I didn't get to taste it because by the time I was done eating it was all gone! A good sign, I'd say. It even got the seal of approval from my preteen friend Paul, which is high praise considering he just makes fun of me most of the time and rare is the time when he compliments me on something. :-P

Here's the cookie batter waiting to be baked into brown sugar chocolate chip cookies!
The finished cookies.

The finished apple cobbler! I was very pleased with it--things from packages can sometimes be a little sketchy, but this came out very well.

More happy baking and cooking updates later!

KC restaurant reviews: A tale of three Vietnamese restaurants

2009-06-16T19:42:00.000-05:00

First, the background: tonight I was going to check out New Peking, a Chinese restaurant in Westport I had heard was pretty good. The menu was not encouraging. It looked like a somewhat-overpriced American Chinese restaurant I could get back home, or probably anywhere for that matter. Instead, I decided to go to Mimi's Vietnamese Cafe, a restaurant I'd passed last time I was on 39th St. While I was there, I realized that it was the third Vietnamese place I'd been to in KC, and to emulate one of my favorite blogs, Eating Asia, decided to review them all!

First, Mimi's. While at the other two places I'd had pho, here I decided to try bun rieu ($8.15, but including the 10% tax) instead. The menu claimed it was a soup with chicken broth, chicken/crab/shrimp fritters, stewed tomatoes, rice noodles, and garnishes. Well, the noodles were overdone or precooked; the fritters were more or less chicken meatloaf; there was no plate of herbs to accompany; and it wasn't spicy even though I'd asked for it as such. It was more of a generically Asian chicken soup - tasty enough (except for the noodles), but not particularly Vietnamese. I'm beginning to think that most of the ethnic restaurants in the more popular areas here are not good. Clearly digging into corners is required - like the next place on my list!

I've been searching for Korean food in KC since I moved here. It was everywhere in Ann Arbor, so it's hard for me to adjust to a town that doesn't really have any. I thought I'd found my answer in Kim Son, up near the City Market. However, I arrived there and discovered that it was actually Vietnamese. I tried it anyway!

Kim Son's pho ($6-something, I think) was a pretty immense portion of flavorful beef broth, served over thinly-sliced steak, onions, and rice noodles, with a good big plate of herbs and bean sprouts on the side. Just the way it should be. The meat was excellent - it was obviously raw before the hot broth was poured over, as it came out very pink and quickly darkened. The rice noodles were chewy and the right width for pho. A delicious added bonus was a bowl of smoky chopped chilies in oil with garlic. I don't know if it was lajiao you or something else, but it added a fantastic earthy spiciness to the dish and definitely set it apart from the other bowls of pho I've had before. And of course, Kim Son is a bit off the beaten path - it's at 3rd and Cherry, right by the bridge that carries MO-9 over the Missouri.

Last (but the first I tried here) is Hien Vuong. It's inside the City Market complex, next to a bunch of other restaurants. It's also the smallest of the three, but they have some pretty quick turnover so it's always easy to get a table. And it's the cheapest! Just $4.50 for a bowl of pho, if memory serves me right. They have all the goodies - meat, noodles, herbs, sprouts, sriracha, hoisin, and some other kind of delicious chili sauce - but the real star here is the broth. It's just slightly sweet, but doesn't throw off the other flavors of the dish, and has an amazingly complex flavor that's hard to describe. It's beefy, well-spiced, and pretty addictive, to be honest. The portion is the smallest of the three, but that says more about the other two restaurants - this is still plenty of pho for one meal.

Mimi's Vietnamese Cafe/Saigon 39 - 1806 1/2 W. 39th St. (between Bell and State Line)

Kim Son - 315 Cherry (Cherry and 4th St., actually)

Hien Vuong - nominally 417 Main St., but it's really on the west wall of the City Market)

Adobo!

2009-06-10T20:51:00.002-05:00

I've been reading about this dish called adobo for several weeks, and then last week I couchsurfed with some wonderful people in Dayton, and they made bison adobo for dinner. Well then, of course I had to try it for myself! Adobo is a Filipino dish of meat braised in soy sauce and vinegar, and it's pretty damn delicious. Pork is probably the most common meat to use, but I had bought some chicken thighs earlier in the week, so that's what went in.

Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the finished dish - that's the meat waiting to go back into the sauce. If I remember tomorrow, I'll take a picture of everything on my plate.

Ingredients
Meat - I used about a pound and a quarter of bone-in chicken thighs
Vinegar - I combined balsamic and red wine, but I would have used rice vinegar if I hadn't dropped my bottle on the floor the other day *grumble grumble*
Soy sauce - I combined regular soy sauce and kecap manis to counteract the vinegar with some sweetness
Black pepper, cracked or ground - grinding it will save you the trouble of picking out peppercorns in the finished dish
Bay leaf
Onion, thinly sliced - I used one, but two would be better
Garlic, minced - four or five cloves

Cooking
In a Dutch oven or other large pot, quickly brown the chicken on all sides, then add the garlic and onion. When the onion softens (just a few minutes), add the vinegar, soy sauce, bay leaf, and black pepper, bring to the boil, and then simmer until the meat is cooked through. Reduce the sauce until it thickens slightly, and serve over rice.

Believe it or not, that's the basic recipe. I went further and fished out the chicken, then cut the meat off the bones and diced it into bite-size pieces, then added it back to the reduced sauce to glaze it. I just didn't want to be bothered with slicing meat off the bone while I was trying to enjoy my dinner!

As I noted above, I only used one onion tonight, but it gets so deliciously caramelized while simmering in the sauce that I'm definitely using two next time. The only problem with this dish as I made it tonight is the saltiness, brought on by all that tasty soy sauce. Next time I'm going to slice a potato and add it with the liquid, as I'm pretty sure potatoes can be used to absorb salt and then discarded.

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Something else that I don't have a picture of is a great broccoli stir-fry that I made a few days ago. I used garlic, ginger, sesame oil, and doubanjiang, which is a Sichuan paste of fermented broad beans and chilis. The brand I have is Ming Teh, and it is pretty fantastic stuff.

Broccoli stir-fry
Heat a wok or cast iron pan (I don't have a wok) over high heat, and add about a tablespoon of oil - something with a high smoke point, like peanut or canola or corn. When it shimmers, add some minced garlic and ginger, and a couple tablespoons of doubanjiang. Stir-fry for about a minute, then add broccoli florets and stir-fry for another two minutes or so, until it's coated in the sauce. Turn off the heat, toss with a bit of sesame oil, and eat!

quite old photos

2009-05-23T15:00:00.009-05:00

Hello again! It's been crazy busy these past couple months, as evidenced by the lack of activity on the blog. But first, out with the big news: I, uh, graduated from college last week! :-) I've now got a shiny BA in Music and am ready to go out and tackle Real Life (starting with getting a job, my lack of success at which has lost me no small amount of sleep over the last month or so).

However, I do have pictures! They are from the first Easter dinner I made without my parents, which I was worried was going to be one hopeless mishap after another (I am still very much learning how to cook), but ended up being extremely delicious. Cooking this dinner was a team effort between myself, my sister Sarah, and my friend Alex, and the group dynamic may have contributed to nothing going horribly, horribly wrong. We made lamb chops with glazed apples, a salad, and garlic bread. Yum!

Lamb chops looking delicious as they cook. The recipe called for 1-inch thick chops, but the store didn't have them so I got 2-inch ones and improvised tastily.

Apples getting ready to go in with the lamb.

The finished products--salad, lamb with apples, and garlic bread. Success!

LAMB CHOPS WITH GLAZED APPLES (recipe courtesy of my mom and wherever she got it)

4 lamb loin or sirloin chops (each cut about 1" thick)
2 Tablespoons butter or margarine
2 medium cooking applies, cut in wedges
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

(About 30 minutes before serving)

Slash edges of lamb chops. In 12" skillet over medium heat, in hot butter or margarine, cook chops until browned on both sides and of desired doneness (about 15 minutes). Place chops on platter. In same skillet, in hot lamb drippings, cook apples until tender, stirring from time to time. Stir in remaining ingredients; heat just until brown sugar is melted, stirring constantly. Arrange apple mixture around lab chops. Makes 4 servings.

Things are going to continue to be busy here, both with the aforementioned job search and real life hitting me in the face, and also because I'm spending the next month making preparations for a very special and exciting event. :-) And, if you're like my friends, teachers, and everyone else who's asked me what my move out to KC really means, calm down--your fearless bloggers are NOT getting engaged. :-P Believe me, if you've answered that question as much as I have, you'd put a disclaimer on the blog too. We are, however, very excited to not be writing these posts from a literal thousand miles away anymore.

Stir-fry/Steamed Asparagus

2009-05-05T21:12:00.002-05:00

Two weeks ago at the market, I bought some asparagus, and was told that it was the last harvest of the season. I wasn't surprised, as it wasn't the best-looking asparagus ever (a bit thick), and was also the only bunch I saw in the entire market. Well, that was apparently false, as this past week there was asparagus everywhere. At least five farmers were selling it, and it was all the beautiful thin kind. So I bought some. Last week I sauteed mine with ginger and new potatoes and it was delicious, so I decided to try a variant on that today.

I don't know if "stir-fry/steaming" is a real technique of any sort, but that's my name for what you do when you first stir-fry a vegetable, then add a small amount of liquid and cover the pot to let it fully cook by steaming. I debated just using water, but I wanted to infuse the asparagus with some flavor, so I added just a bit of soy sauce and vinegar.

Ingredients
1 small bunch thin asparagus (twelve to fifteen stalks)
1 small piece ginger, minced
2 medium cloves garlic, minced
Light soy sauce
Rice vinegar

Directions
Heat about one tablespoon of vegetable oil in a pot until shimmering, and add the garlic and ginger. Stir-fry for about thirty seconds, and add the asparagus. Stir-fry for another minute or two, then add about a tablespoon of soy sauce, a dash of rice vinegar, and just enough water to cover the bottom of the pot evenly. Cover the pot, turn the heat to medium-low, and steam for three or four minutes - this happens pretty fast. When the asparagus is as tender as you like it, uncover the pot, turn the heat back to high, and cook until the water boils off. Serve with rice!

Speaking of rice, I bought some new rice at the Chinatown market. It's a short-grain black rice called Gao Den, so my guess is it's Vietnamese. I tried making a batch today - I had no idea what proportions to use, so I tried six ounces of rice and ten ounces of water. That was a little too much water, since it was done in 25 minutes and there was still water in the bottom. I'll try nine ounces of water next time. The rice turns the cooking water an amazing dark purple, and the rice is delicious - not sticky as I thought it might be, but slightly nutty and flavorful.

No pictures of either yet, but some may be forthcoming if I can persuade myself to take them before I devour everything. :)

Three Cups Swiss Chard, Modified (plus extra pictures)

2009-05-02T21:26:00.004-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I read a recipe for Three Cups Chicken on Appetite for China. It looked quite tasty and easy, so I saved it for future reference - it's a Taiwanese recipe that involves braising chicken in equal parts sesame oil, rice wine, and soy sauce. Then today, I picked up some great-looking red chard at the market, and was fishing for a way to season it up. I decided to try the three cups seasoning, although I remembered it as using rice vinegar instead of rice wine. So I tossed some ginger and garlic in a hot pan, then added the chard to wilt it quickly, added soy sauce, vinegar, and oil, covered the pan for about ten minutes, and the results are below. It was delicious! The vinegar taste balanced out by the slight sweetness of the sesame oil, and the soy sauce just added a slight earthiness to the whole dish.

This next picture is of a quick stir-fry I cooked up last week when I needed dinner on short notice. I don't remember exactly what was in it, but it was definitely at least onions, green onions, cilantro, garlic, and some seasoning sauces.

On to baking! These are some beautiful corn muffins I made, based on my mom's recipe. Here's my version:

Ingredients
1 cup AP flour (160 grams)
1 cup or 190g cornmeal
1/3-1/2c or 100-130g sugar depending on how sweet you like it
2-3 tbsp or ~70g vegetable oil
1 egg
1c milk or water (~240g)
2-3 tsp baking powder (12-18g)
1/2 tsp salt

Directions
Preheat the oven to 400 F.

Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar in a bowl. Beat the egg and mix with the oil and milk/water. Add the wet ingredients to the dry, mixing until they're just combined - lumps are fine. Don't overmix. Fill six muffin cups evenly and bake for 20-25 minutes depending on the consistency of your oven - start toothpick-testing at 20 minutes.

Up next: scones! This is a recipe I made just as Baking Bites' recipe described*, so go there and check it out! They were fantastic - slightly crumbly but moist, and very peanut-buttery.

*One addition I made: I stirred an extra tablespoon of peanut butter in after adding all the liquids. It made for an almost-swirl of peanut butter in the finished scones, since it wasn't completely incorporated, and it was a very good flavor boost.

The last recipe is matzah brei! The recipe I used is almost ridiculously easy, and here it is:

Ingredients
Two pieces matzah
One egg
Water
Salt
Brown sugar (optional)

Directions
Crumble the matzah into small pieces and soak in cold water for a few minutes. It should be soft but not disintegrating. Drain the matzah by picking it up in clumps and squeezing as much water as possible out of it. Beat the egg and combine with the matzah, using a fork to mix them together evenly. Heat 2 teaspoons or so of butter in a pan and add the matzah-egg mixture, then pat it evenly into the pan with a spatula. You're trying to end up with a matzah brei cake like in the picture below. Slicing the cake into the pieces in the pan will make it easier to flip - brown the cake on both sides and you're done! Garnish liberally with brown sugar and salt. :)

All about the ingredients

2009-04-09T21:25:00.002-05:00

I've been noticing a sort of informal debate on the food blogs I frequent regarding ingredients and technique. Some fall on the side of technique: it doesn't matter what you start with, but if you use the right techniques it'll be delicious. Others take the other position: it doesn't matter how you cook it, but if you have the right ingredients it'll be delicious. Perhaps neither extreme is really accurate, but this blog certainly lies on the "ingredient" side of the spectrum. By "ingredients" here, I really mean flavorings, sauces, and spices, as for me they define what I eat. Basically every dish I make has onions, but some have turmeric, some have soy sauce, and some have lemon juice. To give you an idea, here is the list of the contents of my spice cabinet, from the common to the exotic.

Black pepper
Dried red chilies
Cumin
Coriander
Sesame seeds
Turmeric
Mustard seeds
Paprika (three different kinds, in fact)
Soy sauce
Lemon juice
Sesame oil
Dried thyme
Dried oregano
Chili powder (this one has chiles, onion, garlic, cocoa, oregano, cumin, cinnamon, and cloves)
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Cloves
Rice vinegar
Allspice
Star anise
Five-spice powder - a Chinese spice mix of cinnamon, cloves, star anise, black pepper, and fennel
Sichuan pepper
Doubanjiang - salty fermented bean paste
Dark sesame paste - like tahini but using unhulled sesame seeds
Piri-piri grinder - dried birdseye peppers mixed with salt and lemon zest
Chili-bean sauce - chopped chilis mixed with fermented black beans in oil
Sambal balado - a chili paste with shallots, tomatoes, and garlic
Kecap manis - thick soy sauce made with palm sugar
Douchi - fermented soybeans
Belacan - block of fermented shrimp paste
Shrimp paste in oil

Obviously, I cook a lot of Asian food; there's quite a bit of Indian food in my kitchen as well. All of these spices and sauces give me a huge variety of dishes and tastes to choose from, even when I use the same base ingredients (onions, garlic, carrots, celery, red peppers, some other veggies) most of the time. Every time I go to one of the ethnic groceries I frequent around here, I'm on the lookout for something new and interesting to try. Since I often get cravings for starkly different cuisines, it's great to have all those options - last weekend I made goulash with good Hungarian paprika, and just tonight I sautéed up some vegetables with kecap manis and sambal. Who knows what I'll do this weekend!

Cabbage, two ways

2009-04-06T21:44:00.003-05:00

Argh! Another month has gone by, and FBTS languishes by the wayside. I suppose that's what happens when you have a recital, a band trip to the CBDNA conference in Texas (which was fantastic!), and then a paper to write when you get back from Austin. But we're back, with more delicious ways to make...cabbage?

Cabbage often gets a bad rap, blamed for stinking up the house. I'm here to tell you that it can be a subtle, crunchy, and delicious vegetable, as long as it's cooked properly. "Properly" in this case mostly means "not for too long" - the odors start to arise when it's cooked for too long.

But last week when I woke up on Sunday, I realized that there were no groceries in the house (as we had returned from Austin by bus late Saturday night), and I had also missed the local farmer's market. So off it was to get groceries at Thriftway for the first time in weeks, if not months. Just on a whim, I picked up a cabbage, figuring it was cheap and could make a nice stir-fry. Little did I know! Cooking shredded cabbage over relatively low heat with a couple tablespoons of olive oil gets rid of most of the pungency, and gives you a crunchy, slightly sweet, delicious veggie! The "two ways" up top is just different ways of spicing it, as I used the same cooking method both times.

The first way is Indian-style, more or less. To prepare the cabbage, first cut it in half through the root end (I used one half for each flavoring style) and cut out the core. The core is much more pungent than the rest of the cabbage head. Then put your cabbage half face-down on a cutting board, and slice it into strips about a quarter-inch wide. Thinner would also work, but I wouldn't go wider.

Now, flavorings! Garlic is important. Chop three or four cloves of garlic and set it aside for a moment. Put 2T or so (I didn't actually measure anything) of olive oil into a large skillet and set it over low heat. Add an anchovy and mash it up - when it starts sizzling, it will dissolve into the oil. Add a pinch of cumin, a pinch of mustard seed, a dried chili or two (optional), and your garlic, and cook them slowly until the garlic is getting soft. Add the cabbage and toss with a pair of wooden spoons to get everything coated with oil, then just let it cook. If the pan's getting dry you can add a bit of water. If you used chilies, make sure to fish them out when you're done.

Style two is more Indonesian than anything else. No picture, but it looks the same as the first version except that it's a bit more brown (for reasons that will be revealed shortly). It starts the same way: chop three or four cloves of garlic, heat 2T of olive oil, add an anchovy, etc. This time you can use belacan if you want, but last time I tried that my apartment smelled like a fishing pier for the next day or two. It has a much deeper flavor, though.

Add a teaspoon or so of sambal balado (it's potent stuff), and a drizzle of the real magic: kecap manis. This wonderful stuff is Indonesian sweet soy sauce - it's made with palm sugar. Regular soy sauce won't quite substitute, but if you have good brown sugar on hand adding some of that might do the trick. Molasses could work too. The flavor is an intense combination of sweet caramel and saltiness, but it really mellows out with cooking. Stir that around for a second and add the strips of cabbage. Cook the same as last time - add water or more sambal or kecap manis if you think it needs more flavor. The end result this time is slightly sweet, not too salty, but with a wonderful depth of flavor that's the closest I've gotten to a "restaurant" taste so far. This definitely calls for more kecap manis experimentation!

Title of the blog...

2009-03-07T21:13:00.009-06:00

The title proclaims "stock," and so we shall have stock! As it turns out, vegetable stock is unbelievably easy to make by hand. The picture is not my best work, but it's difficult to take pictures of transparent objects! I tried taking a picture of the stock still in the pot, and I couldn't see the color - it looked like water. Next time I make it I'll try some more things and see what I can come up with.

The ingredients for vegetable stock are vegetables (root vegetables are best), water, and just a bit of spices. I used three onions, three carrots, a clove of garlic, five small radishes, and a pinch of whole black peppercorns. I just sliced all the veggies into large pieces (I smashed the garlic with the flat of my knife), covered them in the pot with water, and simmered it for about an hour. Voilà: stock. The radishes gave the stock a slight pink tinge which isn't visible in the photo. I've read that you should be careful with vegetables in the mustard family (turnips, radishes, broccoli, cauliflower), so I only used a few radishes, but the stock isn't too pungent or off-flavored. I didn't measure the amount of water I used, but I ended up with about five cups of stock. If you want more, just use more vegetables!

Now that I had stock, I needed something to do with it. Homemade stock only lasts a few days in the refrigerator, so barring soup, the only thing I could think of was risotto! I figured it would taste much better than if I used water or canned stock. Besides - my stock didn't have any salt. (There's no reason to use any - just add it later if you end up making soup.)

There was some exceptionally beautiful asparagus at the market this morning, so I took a chance (hoping it was asparagus season) and bought it. I also had some arborio rice from Wild Oats, since I'd been planning to do risotto at some point. There are many, many ways and theories of risotto, but I subscribed for this attempt to the "stir infrequently" method, and the result was wonderful. Don't let anybody tell you risotto is difficult - patience is required, but there are no tricky techniques here.

Ingredients
1 cup arborio rice
1 small bunch fresh asparagus (I didn't get it weighed, but my guess is between 3/4 and 1 pound)
1 small onion (1-2 shallots are even better, if you can find them)
6 small radishes (nontraditional, but I have to use them up!)
4 cups vegetable or chicken stock, preferably homemade
olive oil
butter
Parmiggiano or other hard Italian cheese
1 dried shiitake mushroom (you'll see...)
salt

Preparation
Wash and trim the asparagus, and slice it into small pieces. You'll want to slice smaller pieces at the thicker end, and longer pieces at the tips. Mince the onion or shallot and radishes.

Cooking
Blanch the asparagus for 2-3 minutes in simmering water, adding the thicker pieces first, everything but the tips thirty seconds later, and the tips another thirty seconds after that. Taste a couple pieces for doneness - when it's almost as tender as you want, drain in a colander and plunge the asparagus into an ice-water bath to stop the cooking.

Bring the stock to a bare simmer. Heat about 2 tbsp olive oil in a wide pot over high heat, and add the onion/shallot, radish, and a pinch of salt. Stir often and cook for about five minutes - if it shows any signs of browning, turn down the heat. Add the arborio (you may need a bit more oil also) and saute for a few minutes, until the rice is turning translucent.

Add enough stock to just cover the rice, and turn the heat down to low. Repeat when it's almost all absorbed, stirring every few minutes. Keep adding stock until the rice is tender but slightly chewy (or however you like it) - this should take 20-30 minutes depending on your rice and your stove. You probably won't need all the stock. Add the asparagus and stir to combine, then add about 2 tsp of butter and 1/2 cup of grated Parmiggiano, and stir that in.

You may be wondering what that shiitake mushroom is doing on the ingredients list. This is definitely cheating, but if you crave even more umami flavor than the Parmiggiano can give (as I do), get out your microplane and grate some shiitake powder over the risotto. Try it over one bowl first, just in case, but it really elevates the flavor.

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Regarding the other half of the title: there isn't any Bach involved, but I am performing my first Master's oboe recital a week from tomorrow. If by some happenstance there are any Kansas Citians reading this blog, I would be honored if you would come see and hear me perform several fantastic 20th-century works for the oboe, as well as a Baroque quadro sonata featuring one of my studio-mates. Don't worry, this isn't the scary kind of 20th-century music. The recital will be at 5pm on Sunday, March 15, in Grant Recital Hall at UMKC (5200 Holmes, KCMO).

I should have known better...

2009-03-07T17:34:00.006-06:00

I miss Italy.

Asriel and I met on a trip to Italy, where we lived for 4 months in apartments, played music all day, and traveled extensively. I miss it a lot. And sometimes, in spite of myself, I still forget that I'm not there.

There should be some glaring signs that I'm back home in America. For instance, when I walk down the street these days I don't get run over by cars driving on the sidewalk because the streets are so narrow. There aren't old Roman ruins and other historical artifacts everywhere you look. I no longer have time for everything in the day (oh, how I miss those slow days in Italy). I can't pay 8 euros each way to get on a train that takes me 4 hours away to almost the Italy/France border. I no longer have wine with dinner every night, and dinner no longer takes me 3 hours to eat (or, maybe it does. No matter where in the world I am, I've always been a slow eater).

I can no longer walk 5 minutes from my apartment and see this:

And, of course, the food here (or, more precisely, the dishes that pass for Italian-inspired food here) really get me down. Don't get me wrong, I don't walk into restaurants (especially the chain restaurant I went into today) expecting authentic Italian food. Who would? But sometimes I just...forget...that I'm not in Italy.

One of the things that makes you really shake your head and say "Toto, I don't think we're in Italy anymore" (if you had a dog named Toto. I don't. But I digress.) is when you go into a restaurant and order a panino. I'm sorry, you order a panini. Despite the fact that "panini" is a plural, and a single sandwich is a "panino", it's called "panini" here. Today I wandered into a Panera and did just that. I ordered a Tomato and Mozarella panini. The menu informed me that it had tomato, basil, and mozarella on it--reminiscent of a caprese sandwich in Italy. The menu also said it had some kind of "sundried tomato pesto" on it, but I disregarded that in my mind. Already visions of Italian caprese panini were dancing through my head--nothing more than a gigantimous slice of fresh mozarella, with some tomato and basil slapped on top, between slices of delicious bread. What could be better? Forgetting that I was currently standing in an American chain restaurant, and not one of my favorite Italian cafes, I gleefully ordered it.

I came abruptly back down to Earth when I started eating it. Was it tasty? Sure. Was it anything remotely like the Italian version? Of course not! I had forgotten that I wasn't in Italy once again, and now instead of my fantasy caprese panino, I was eating some sandwich with melted cheese and a large quantity of some kind of sundried tomato paste (see: "sundried tomato pesto").

I miss you, Italia.

The first glimpse of the faces of your bloggers! We took this picture probably less than a week after meeting, on a walk in the hills near our apartments.

From peppers to belacan

2009-03-01T13:19:00.002-06:00

This is what happens when the real world takes over: I end up with a dozen or two pictures on my camera that I haven't even transferred to my computer yet, let alone put up here. So here we go!

A beautiful red bell pepper, just begging to be char-grilled, sliced up, and devoured. With a gas stove, you don't even need charcoal! Just put the pepper down on the metal, grab a set of tongs, and fire it up.

The same pepper, about ten minutes later. I would have gone further, except that it was starting to drip pepper juices onto my burner and into the stove, which wasn't such a good idea. After it's nicely charred, I just ran it under cold water and rubbed off the skin. The other option is to put the pepper in a paper bag and close it (which steams it), wait until it cools down, and then get the skin off. But I didn't have a paper bag on hand.

Scallion pancakes, ready for the oil! While perusing Farmgirl Fare's recipe backlog, I came across an entry involving an overload of scallions. Buried in the comments was a very tasty-looking recipe for scallion pancakes: a simple flour-and-water dough, kneaded and mixed with scallions, torn-off pieces rolled into pancakes, and pan-fried.

The results were delicious. So delicious, in fact, that I forgot to take a picture until I had already taken a bite out of one. They weren't quite as stretchy as restaurant scallion pancakes, but I have a feeling that came from not using as much oil in the dough--I just brushed it with oil once, instead of every time I folded the dough.

From Appetite for China, I got a recipe for pan-fried green beans. I took the liberty of replacing the dried shrimp with belacan (Malaysian shrimp paste), since I couldn't locate dried shrimp at the Asian market. I also got to use my brand-new mortar and pestle! I mashed up some garlic, ginger, dried chilies, belacan, sambal balado, and doubanjiang into some sort of unholy pan-Asian spice paste, but it was fantastically delicious when I stir-fried it and mixed in the green beans. My apartment did smell a bit like a fishing pier until early this morning, but it's absolutely worth it for belacan.

There are plenty more pictures to come, including cookies and homemade bread!

Long time no see!

2009-02-21T14:25:00.008-06:00

Predictably, once school has started up and asriel and I got busy with work and recitals (and job applications and planning the coming year and Yours Truly's impending college graduation), posting has dropped dramatically. However, I have still been busy! Here are some pictures I took over the past month or so:

That's 3-pepper pasta (the three peppers are just red, green, and yellow bell peppers).

The Epic Cake, which needs no explanation. (It's archaeology-themed!)

Closeups of the Epic Cake.

The aftermath of dinner.

Stay tuned for more adventures!

Pizza

2009-01-25T20:49:00.004-06:00

Pizza is wonderful and versatile stuff. Pizzeria pizza is one thing, but homemade is a totally different beast. You can top it with virtually anything, it's fairly quick and extremely easy, and it's also delicious. Tonight I made pizza courtesy of Farmgirl Fare's pizza-dough recipe. The dough is simple - flour, water, salt, and yeast. Mine barely rose in two hours, but it did rise after splitting it into pieces, and quite a bit more in the oven.

The topping: caramelized onions, grated Parmigiano, and olive oil. I cheated on the onions and pulsed them in a food processor instead of slicing or grating. I processed the first one too much and ended up with puréed onion, but the next three were a lot better - I ended up with coarsely grated onion. 40 minutes or so in the frying pan, and they were brown and getting crispy. I pulled the dough (mostly using gravity) into a nice oblong pizza shape, added plenty of onions, added some cheese and olive oil, and put my pizza into a 500-degree oven for about 13 minutes. I got lucky - I caught it seconds before the onions would have been charred. I somehow got a fantastic crust on the bottom, which I didn't expect - considering that I used a roasting pan and parchment paper, not a baking stone.

Time to make dough: 10 minutes
Time to rise: 2 hours (making the onions goes in here)
Time to proof: 10 minutes
Time to bake: 10 minutes

I started at about 4:45 and was eating at 8. The best part is that I have a partially-baked one that I'll finish baking for dinner tomorrow night, and two more rounds of dough in the freezer. Now I just need more toppings...

Fractured Prune

2009-01-25T13:40:00.002-06:00

Recently, my housemates and I found out that our local branch of the Fractured Prune, a Maryland doughnut chain, was going out of business! So, like the true college students we are, my entire house (plus my roommate's boyfriend) got up at 9:45 this morning, piled into the car, and headed out for a doughnut run...in our pajamas.

Fractured Prune is mostly based in Maryland, but also has other locations in Delaware, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. They make specialty doughnuts in lots of interesting flavors. Most of us got a kid's meal, because you got two doughnuts and that was mostly what each of us wanted (my roommate got a dozen so we would have some left over for the next few days). I got a Chocolate Covered Cherry doughnut (with cherry glaze and mini chocolate chips), and a French Toast doughnut (with a maple syrup glaze and cinnamon sugar). My favorite, despite the awesome chocolate-y flavor of the Cherry doughnut, was the French Toast one. Cinnamon sugar on doughnuts brings warm fuzzy feelings into my heart.

My roommate's boyfriend took a couple of pictures on his phone, so they may be posted on here later. Meanwhile, a fond farewell to the Lusby branch of the Fractured Prune...

dirty dishes

2009-01-23T11:56:00.004-06:00

A person's desk can say a lot about them. Unique insights about a person's personality, interests, and organizational skill can easily be gleaned from taking a look at their desk. I chose to take this picture at one of the times when my desk was at its most disorganized--right after I had finished unpacking after coming back to school. Since I hadn't had time to organize my desk yet, my stuff got to lie out in all its glory.

"So, what does this have to do with food?" you say. Well, apart from gathering useful information about my love of Audrey Hepburn movies (that's an Audrey Hepburn dvd collection in the back behind the books) and Scrabble (beside the movies you'll see the travel Scrabble set) and the propensity of my best friend to give me unicorn-themed gag gifts (in the back right corner of the shelf, behind the chocolate-themed tear-away calendar), my desk inevitably becomes the what's what of What I've Eaten Recently based on the collection of dirty dishes. Since I frequently eat in my room, and am responsible for doing my own dishes, I usually get scatterbrained and let them pile up on my desk for a few days. Because of that, you get dishes which used to contain(left to right):
-a plate of chocolate biscotti (black plate in the front left);
-a bowl of seeded grapes;
-leftover lamb saag (top of pile);
-a pancake (bottom of pile);
-a glass of milk (purple cup);
-the excess from when my roommate opened a bottle of beer and it overflowed (cup behind the purple cup);
and
-some kind of dessert-y fluff my roommate made (flowery container).

As a final note, underneath all the plates is an oven mitt with penguins on it, a belated Christmas gift. That is all.

Pictures from Sunday: ropa vieja

2009-01-21T21:05:00.003-06:00

This wonderful-looking steak is a big slab of skirt - usually used for fajitas. I used it for ropa vieja. The recipe I used called for simmering the steak until it was just about falling apart. I didn't go that far (though maybe I should have), but it was still delicious. I got to shred it with my fingers! Pulling it into little pieces is lots of fun. Plus the steak is locally-grown and bought (Pisciotta Farms), always a plus.

Stocks and broths are pretty amazing. Two or three hours previous to this picture, this was just water. Plain old tap water. That skirt steak above, combined with a couple onions, some cracked pepper, and a touch of salt, made this delicious beef broth.

I was thinking "beans" - but I got distracted at Wild Oats by these black-eyed peas. Definitely not beans (hence the name - I didn't realize they actually were peas until I tasted a raw one), but still excellent. The rice is brown rice from the Chinatown Food Market.

Obviously I need to fool around with my camera settings - or maybe get a tripod so I don't have to use the flash - but this is the shredded skirt steak simmering away with some onion, garlic, and the broth that it created from its cooking. I had a pretty busy Sunday - this was about 3.5 hours from start to finish.

Bollywood Masala!

2009-01-20T19:44:00.002-06:00

Well, it's my second day back at school, which means that I haven't had time to go grocery shopping. So, as a celebration of the new semester (and a way of compensating for the fact that we have no food that's not chocolate, Jello, or expired), my housemates and I went out for dinner tonight!

The place we chose was a pretty new Indian place, Bollywood Masala. Asriel and I went there with my sister back in October, right after it opened, and we were really blown away by the food. This time was just as good. I got lamb saag, which is a lamb dish with spinach and spices. Of course I have no real memory of what everybody else at the table got. If I want to be a total blogger I'll have to start taking notes. And pictures. But the saag was amazing--nice big chunks of meat, and tons of spinach. It also had a nice lingering spicy flavor. We started the night with garlic naan, and ended with another kind of naan that I don't remember the name of, but it had cherries on it. And of course, they give you plenty of food, so I have enough for leftovers for tomorrow's lunch!

2009-01-17T17:58:00.001-06:00

I have discovered why my mapo tofu wasn't as good as it should have been! I didn't use chili bean paste (otherwise known as doubanjiang) - I used chili black bean sauce. NOT the same thing. Next week at the market: resuming the search for doubanjiang. I will succeed yet!

Barbecue in KC

2009-01-15T11:39:00.003-06:00

Barbecue in Kansas City is a Big Thing. This is the first place I've lived that has BBQ as a cooking tradition, so I am definitely not qualified to compare different styles of 'cue, but I've been to a number of BBQ places around the city - I think I'm qualified to compare those, at least.

There are several categories going into this review/comparison: price; crowded-ness; quality of the meat, sauce, fries, and beans; and general ambience. "Meat" here isn't going to include ribs, since I haven't tried them at all four shops I'm reviewing yet. First up is Jack Stack!

Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue
This is the most (well, only) upscale of the four restaurants I'm looking at. It's also the only one that's a sit-down, order-at-the-table restaurant. As you would expect, it's also the most expensive. Ultimately, the sit-down experience wasn't worth it. The sauce was excellent - not too sweet or salty, but very flavorful and a bit spicy. The beans were probably the best I've had - very obviously homemade, with slivers of meat floating in them. They had a very smoky flavor, and the beans had great texture and flavor. However, the meat was not great. At the time I thought the burnt ends were excellent, but later discovered (see below) that they were not - they're too tough and not "burnt" enough. I have a feeling they weren't real burnt ends.

The saving grace of Jack Stack is the take-out shop next door. Meat and side dishes by the pound (or other measurements) are available, as well as sandwiches. This is where I (well, gingerrose) discovered their pulled pork, which is excellent - far beyond any of their other meats I've tried. It has the right texture - much like ropa vieja in a good Cuban restaurant. It's tender, stringy, and just has that great pulled-pork mouthfeel. They also sell their excellent beans by the pint, quart, or whatever you want - that's probably all I would go back for.

Arthur Bryant's BBQ
Now we're bringing out the big guns. Arthur Bryant's is one of the two original BBQ shops in KC - Wikipedia says it's the oldest one. The decor is sort of 50s-diner-meets-sports-bar - Formica tables, with a TV (usually showing the Chiefs) in the corner, and paper towels and barbecue sauce on the tables. It seems a bit pricey at first, but only until you realize that one sandwich (about $11 including fries) comfortably feeds two people. At least, two people with the size and appetite of me and gingerrose.

Onto the food! The only thing to get here, as far as I'm concerned, is the burnt ends. They are just amazing - one of the two best meals I've had in Kansas City (the other being a bowl of pho from Hien Vuong). The burnt ends are perfectly cooked - very well done but not dry (because of all the sauce), a bit chewy from the caramelized outside, stringy and fork-tender, and utterly delicious. Their sauce - a bit salty for me, but not sweet and quite spicy - adds to the flavor. The fries are very good - a little oily, but hand-cut, crisp, and tasty. The only thing not to get is the beans - I don't know if they're from a can, but they sure taste like it - sweet and uninteresting.

Oklahoma Joe's
Oklahoma Joe's is located in a gas station. Don't let this stop you from going there! Most people I've met here tell me this place is the best in KC. The lines attest to it - gingerrose and I went here for dinner last Friday at about 7pm, and waited 20 minutes or so to order (and it looked like it was going to be worse). The prices are certainly right - about $5 for a good-sized sandwich, and another $2.50 or so for a big bag of fries or a side of beans. The listed specialty is pulled pork, although the ribs look phenomenal (and everybody seems to have them at dinnertime), so I'm going to give them a shot next time I'm there.

I can't really put OK Joe's above Arthur Bryant's in meat or sauce. The pulled pork is good, although they don't sauce it much on a normal sandwich - they seem to have a variant including more sauce and slaw, which I'm going to try soon. Their sauces are too sweet for me, but they have a nice level of spice. The fries, though - fantastic. I'm not sure if they're hand-cut, but they're crispy and not greasy, and they have a great spice mixture (probably salt, paprika, and something else) that's sprinkled on. Plus they're served in a paper bag. What's not to love? The beans are also very good - definitely homemade, with chunks of meat and I think vegetables floating around. If you like good value, ridiculous decor, and killer fries, this is the place for you.

Gates Bar B. Q.
This is the other "original" KC barbecue joint. It's my favorite for a quick lunch or dinner, as it's the closest to home and school, and one sandwich (again burnt ends, about $7) is about two meals for me. The decor is something resembling a trolley car - it almost looks like they took an old one and built it into the building. It's not quite as grimy as Arthur Bryant's, but this seems like a very "local" place in comparison - you're expected to know what you want as soon as you walk in the door.

I can't give the food a full review because I haven't tried their beans or fries, but the meat and sauce are both fantastic. I usually eat the sandwich with a knife and fork, just cutting pieces off (bread and all) and munching on them. The sauce goes really well with the meat - not very sweet, but very flavorful - and the sandwich is well-sauced. The second half is even better the next day, when the sauce soaks into the bread a bit. The meat is not quite as amazing as at Arthur Bryant's, but is still very, very good, and the added convenience means I go here more often - it's walkable from school, which no other BBQ shop is.

======================

Ultimately, Arthur Bryant's is my favorite, just because of the transcendent quality of their burnt ends. Their only problem is that they give you a ridiculous amount of food - next time I'll probably take it out and eat some at home, then save the rest for the next day.

Best meat: Arthur Bryant's
Best sauce: Arthur Bryant's (but Gates gives them a close run)
Best fries: Oklahoma Joe's (AB in a close second)
Best beans: Jack Stack (OK Joe's in a close second)
Best value: Gates BBQ
Best location: Gates for convenience, OK Joe's for silliness

PBJ pictures

2009-01-13T15:41:00.004-06:00

A container of homemade peanut butter, looking startlingly like store-bought peanut butter.

Two halves of a delicious sandwich - my typical lunch around here.

Half of gingerrose's sandwich.

Lunch: peanut butter, jam, bread (sadly not homemade), and sweet potato fries (coming soon!).

comfort food?

2009-01-13T15:13:00.002-06:00

As a follow-up to the peanut butter post...

I was having a conversation about comfort food with my co-writer of this blog as we were having lunch yesterday. The reason we were discussing this is because we were having what I consider to be a particularly good comfort-food meal: a PB&J with peanut butter we made ourselves and blackberry jam we bought from a farmer's market, with homemade sweet-potato fries on the side. (Delicious photos are on the way!) I was commenting on how I once had a discussion about comfort food with my friend Paul, who tends to go the ice-cream route when he's feeling down. While I have certainly been known to curl up with a carton of ice cream when stressed (my most recent acquisition last semester was Ben & Jerry's Fossil Fuel--the little dinosaurs were so cute I couldn't resist!), I prefer hot foods for comfort. Thick vegetable soups, french fries, grilled cheese with pesto (that I came up with when I was trying to use up a giant jar of pesto I got for cheap at a community market) and pasta pasta pasta (in fact, I have a nice bowl of pasta leftovers keeping me company as I write this entry...) are definitely the way to go in my book. I also tend to gravitate even more towards vegetables when I'm in need of comfort...but then again, I'm a big fan of vegetables.

Do you have any particular comfort food preferences? Leave 'em in the comments--I might just get inspired!

Peanut butter, homemade in five minutes

2009-01-12T13:14:00.003-06:00

Barbecue review/comparison still upcoming! I made another batch of peanut butter this morning and had some for lunch, and then I realized I had to write about it.

Most people like peanut butter - at least, those who don't have deadly peanut allergies. But most of the peanut butter I see in the grocery store has all kinds of funky stabilizers and emulsifiers to hold it together, as well as sugar and other stuff that definitely does not belong. There's at least one brand of natural peanut butter in major supermarkets (Smuckers), but it's usually expensive. It's not bad here, but I know it costs quite a bit more back in New York. But I like my peanut butter - and my food in general - with the fewest possible ingredients, so I buy natural peanut butter.

A couple months ago, one of my friends at the library mentioned that her boyfriend makes her
homemade peanut butter, and that she loves it. I was pretty interested. She told me I'd have to get specific instructions from him, but the ingredients were basically peanuts, oil, and salt (as well as whatever else you want to throw in). I immediately ran out to the store, bought some peanuts, and gave it a whirl. It's delicious - there's much more peanut flavor than in any store-bought peanut butters, and it's also much stickier. For some reason it's also more stable than store-bought natural peanut butters - the oil doesn't tend to separate from the peanuts. The consistency is somewhere in-between what's usually sold as "creamy" and "crunchy" - there are tiny bits of peanut everywhere because the food processor can't grind them quite fine enough to really be creamy. A mortar-and-pestle might be able to get better results, but it would also take a long time.

Ingredients
Peanuts - raw or roasted (your choice), but should be unsalted
Neutral oil - not olive oil (although this may be worth a try for a different flavor)
Salt

"Cooking"
Plug in your food processor. Add a quantity of peanuts to the bowl - just not so many that it'll overflow. Process until the ground peanuts start to clump together unevenly. Drizzle in oil while the processor is running until it's the consistency you want. Add salt to taste, and make a sandwich!

I did have a sandwich with this homemade peanut butter and some blackberry jam from the farmer's market, but it got eaten before I was reminded to take a picture. Next time! (That'll probably be tomorrow, never fear.)

First post!

2009-01-11T15:20:00.002-06:00

A new foray into the world of food blogs! This one gets to combine two worlds, because we're both musicians as well as avid cooks and bakers and eaters.

Forthcoming: a review of Kansas City barbecue spots!