Live-Tweeting Dinner at Topolobampo

First of all--I know, I know. I've been noticeably absent on all forms of social media recently. No blogs, very few tweets, the rare facebook update. This time it's a combination of things. I got totally enthralled with the post-election unrest in Iran and stopped caring about anything for a few weeks. I had a quick stint of gaming where me and Roommate Nirmal sped through Gears of War 1 and 2 and all three Halo games. Virginia State Elections are heating up, so there's been a lot of travel and work on that. And friends have been in from out of town all summer.

I know. Poor excuses all. But I do what I want.

Last night, I attempted to live-tweet a dinner at Topolobampo, one of the most well-renowned Mexican restaurants in the country. Twitter is having a fit, though, so exactly none of my texts came through. Luckily, they're all still in the outbox of my phone, so I can recreate the dinner here.

8:58pm-Tweeps, it migt be time to hit unfollow. About to live-tweet dinner at Rick Bayless' Topolobampo in Chicago. Why? Here alone for work, no one to eat with.

9:10pm-Reservation is for 9:15 on Thursday and this place is packed with no sign of letting up. Decor=decidedly mexican despite prices for entrees in the high 30s.

9:18pm-Btw did this morning's hackerattack break twitterberry? Haven't been able to use it all day.

9:29pm-Packed indeed. 15 min post-reservation and table still isn't ready! I could use a cocktail. But then again, when couldn't I?

9:46pm-Finally sat. Mighttt have lied and said I was in Chicago just to try restaurants. What?? I'm a little salty about the wait, so sue me.

9:48pm-Ordered a nice classic margarita, served in a martini glass. @marksamburg would love this.

9:52pm-A nice treat-some guac brought to the table with cuke and jicama chips. Didn't know guac could be this good. Unbelievable balance of acid, salty, and sweet.

9:55pm-Guac has just a bit of lingering heat and crumbled almonds. First course is already out-suddenly my experience here has gotten much much better.

10:00pm-Ordered trio of ceviches for app. Hawaiian sunfish w/tomatoes, olives, jicama seems most classic. Steamed shrimp and calamari a bit more acidic.

10:03pm-I wish the shrimp were diced. Whole shrimp hard to eat bite by bite. 3rd is ahi tuna w/apricot chimoy salsa. Sweet, bit of spicy kick. All three expertly done

10:04pm-Also, more of the crumbled almond on the ahi tuna. Chips with the ceviche are nice, but taste just a bit.....store brought? No....

10:19pm-This hawaiian sunfish tastes a lot like escolar....what a great combo of flavors. Never would have thought to put crushed almonds on a ceviche.

10:23pm-Also, the manager has now dropped by to chat me up twice, hehe. I should do this more often...

10:27pm-Entree is out. Cochinta pibil-overnight braised big foot fried in croquettes with kohlrabi mashed potato, braised greens, sour organce sauce, habanero salsa.

10:29pm-Served with a tempranillo that is wonderfully fruity-blackberry, oak, very smooth, very round, lots of tannins. Great choice by server.

10:32pm-Habanero salso is hottt. Even for me. Hats off to them for being gutsy enough to serve something with real heat, most restaurants shy away.

10:34pm-They give you option of dish without the salsa. I find woefully underseasoned without, but excellent with. Pork feet are wonderfully tender.

10:35pm-Did I just use "wonderfully" two tweets in a row? (Editor's note--upon review, it appears I did not.) This wine may be getting to me. (Editor's note--upon review, it was.)

10:39pm-Sour orange gets totally lost in all the broth. A shame...it was good.

10:41pm-I've been corrected. I have both pigs feet coated in breadcrumbs and lightly fried or sauteed braised pig shoulder. The shoulder is better. (Editor's note--the flavor of that shoulder stuck with me all night. It was definitely the best thing I ate there, and that's saying something.)

10:50pm-Main Course grew on me as I ate it. Super satisfied at this point. Do I have room for dessert?

10:59pm-Ordered mexican hot chocolate, great nutty, spicy aroma. Nutmeg is freshly ground. Nice...

11:00pm-Wow. Very rich but not overbearing. Not too sweet. Tastes like the red wine of hot chocolate. A great end to the meal.

11:05pm-Tab comes to $75. Special thanks to @taylorkline and @marksamburg for the book the bro code, which kept me occupied between tweets.

11:14pm-Oops, she forgot to charge me for wine. I reminded her but she left it off as a reward for honesty. They also leave me with a strawberry jelly candy and a house made chocolate truffle w/hints of mezcal.

11:15pm--Verdict: A+

That tweeting was rather prolific--as I had more time to think about it on the subway to Lincoln Park, I realized that this had to rank as one of the top three places I've ever been, and a bit more marinating on the meal could push it into the number 1 spot. The pork shoulder, trio of ceviches, and hot chocolate were the best I've ever had in each category. Lots of points for creativity, and the service was excellent after being sat a half hour after my reservation.

10 Bottles of Wine On the Wall...

Isn't that a thing of beauty? A few weeks back, Metrocurean noted that a wine bar in Rosslyn, apparently just minutes from my house, was closing down and offering 40% off of full cases of wine. Nagzah and CLurie were in town, so they got a bottle apiece and I got...ten.  Combined with three bottles of Rosé I got at one of my oft-attended Food Matters wine tastings, I get the feeling I'll be set on wine for a few more days. I kid. ThirteenTwelve bottles of wine should last me at least another week or so.

In any case, I think I'll chronicle my trip through these wines.  There's a wide variety in country, region, grape, and price point here, so it sounds like fun. Let's start with this one.

This is a 2006 Chateau de Lascaux from the Coteaux du Languedoc region of France. It's a big wine, both in aroma and in the mouth, with strong notes of chocolate and cherry, very light acidity, and strong tannins.  It was listed at $18.99, which means I got it for about $12.  A very good wine, but one that pairs better with food than without.  I'd definitely pick it up again.

Wendy's Explained

The shock in their voice is always completely genuine. Inevitably, we'll have just finished talking about the merits of fleur de sel or why I prefer Malbec to Merlot. Then, "Hey, do you want to pick up some Wendy's?"

For me, grabbing a Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Wendy's is as natural as logging into Facebook or shaving in the morning. It's not even something I think about anymore...just something I do. And yet, what is the source? Of all the foods and all the restaurants to be obsessed over--why this?

I've actually never really known. As other sandwiches and restaurants come and go, I can still remember riding my bike for 45 minutes across Peachtree City at the age of 15 (A DECADE AGO) with part of the $20 I got from mowing the lawn...all to get this unusually delicious sandwich. 10 years of this obsession and it has shown no signs of abating (even though I worked at Wendy's for about six months in high school, partially with the hope that I would tire of the food).

It seems David Kessler has stumbled onto something.

His resulting theory, described in his new book, "The End of Overeating," is startling. Foods high in fat, salt and sugar alter the brain's chemistry in ways that compel people to overeat. "Much of the scientific research around overeating has been physiology -- what's going on in our body," he said. "The real question is what's going on in our brain."

...

The labels showed the foods were bathed in salt, fat and sugars, beyond what a diner might expect by reading the menu, Kessler said. The ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different times; sugars showed up five times. The "egg rolls," which are deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like meatloaf to give it a "melt in the mouth" quality that also makes it faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.

Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will stimulate that diner's brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the come-on offered by Lay's Potato Chips -- "Betcha can't eat just one" -- is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than they should or even want, Kessler found.

This shouldn't actually be much of a surprise. After all, foods that taste good can release endorphins (especially sugary foods), and the body is just about always interested in the euphoria they create. But it's at least interesting to see that perhaps science can explain 10 years of Wendy's cravings.

Some time off

You ever get so hungry that you order/make a ton of food/desserts and scarf the whole thing down without breathing?  The kind of scarfing where you don't realize you've eaten so quickly you've outpaced your "full" feeling by quite a bit, leaving your stomach to continue to expand for a half hour after you've finished loading the dishwasher in a misery that can only be relieved in a way that makes me feel like I have an eating disorder?

Anyway, that was all a metaphor for how I feel about my last run of cooking.  It was great, don't get me wrong...but after all that food for weeks on end, I had to get back to my roots (Wendy's and Chick-fil-A...don't hate).  And while there's been plenty to write about in politics, I didn't really feel like anything warranted a full post of my personal commentary.  So just a few notes to get me back into this cooking (and blogging) thing.

• It hasn't JUST been Wendy's and Chick-fil-A.  It's also been chocolate chip cookies!  The New York Times ran an article a while back about the perfect chocolate chip cookie...including recipe.  It calls for chocolate "discs" rather than chips and letting the dough rest for an unreal 18 hours.  Aside from a pretty obvious typo in the amount of chocolate (1.25 POUNDS???) this recipe was just about perfect.  In my second batch I added the sea salt after baking and could find absolutely nothing wrong with these warm, moist, chewy, droooool.

• Speaking of Chick-fil-A. Oh. My. Goodness.
• I'm finally doing this twitter thing.  To pre-empt your arguments, I refuse to update about bathroom habits or what color pen I'm writing with--I'm only going to update things of substance or hilarity.  Tune in if you'd like!
• Watching lots of NBA playoffs and sending tons of love to my hometown Hawks!  By the way, why does Doc Rivers sound like he has emphysema?
• Wolverine was downright RE-DONK-ULOUS.  The critics are haters.  Seriously.
• Arlen Specter switched parties, and promptly voted against everything the Democrats have put to a vote in the last few weeks, went on national TV to claim he wouldn't be loyal, and rooted for the Republican lost cause in the Senate in Minnesota.  Can we send this one back?  I think it's defective.  (Even better, maybe we can upgrade to the Sestak model.)
• Are you reading 2birds1blog?  Start.
• Look what I discovered at The Gibson.  New favorite EVER.

What y'all been up to?

Right now

FML:

Restaurant Weekend Returns

For those of you in the South/other places that don't do Restaurant Week (anywhere except NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and DC?), perhaps a clarification is in order.  Twice a year, restaurants around DC for a week offer three coures from their menu (or a smaller version thereof) for $35.  Some of these places typically charge upwards of $30 for a single course.  So on the bright side, you can find great deals if you get to some of the pricier restaurants before they're totally booked.  But on the downside, restaurants often offer limited menus, chefs use cheaper ingredients, the service and food preparation is more rushed and less careful, and you'll be packed like sardine in a can with tons of other diners.

Last year, Alyse and I decided that, with an equivalent monetary contribution from our friends, we could create a better dining experience than the vast majority of places that do Restaurant Week.  Restaurant Weekend was born, and we were right. But this year's Restaurant Week was different.  Dinners I enjoyed at Farrah Olivia and Rasika turned my impression of Restaurant Week upside down.  In one weekend, both restaurants vaulted into my top four restaurants of all time, along with Perilla in NYC and Corduroy here in DC.

But we were up for the challenge again.  That is, at least, until I lost Alyse to a bit of personnel shifting at Granville Moore's.  I managed to pick up the indispensable Jazmin as a sous chef for Sunday's seating, but I was totally on my own for Saturday.  This was going to be interesting....

By starting on Thursday, I managed to take a lot of pressure off the weekend.  That night I finished up the garlic aioli, basil oil, bleu cheese butter, shrimp marinade, and maple chili glaze. Friday I knocked out the tomato jam, asparagus puree, red pepper sauce, 15 spice blend, and cilantro oil.  So by Saturday, I felt pretty good about what I had left to do.

But this was nothing like last year.  Way more moving parts=way more things to go wrong.  Fortunately, a few of the dishes were replications of  the previous weekend's 7 course extravaganza.  Making second appearances were the amuse bouche of torched escolar, the shrimp and grits, the bleu cheese butter and pear stuffed pork tenderloin, and the apple fritters with cinnamon, caramel, and white bordeaux ice cream...with some notable changes in portion size and, in some cases, garnish and whatnot.

After the amuse bouche, we had two options for course 1.  First was a slight variation of the shrimp and grits Alyse and I served the previous week.  But instead of pancetta as a base of the red pepper sauce, we used it as a garnish (Jazmin doesn't eat pork).  The flavor of the sauce was definitely a bit off from last week, but the presence of the crispy pancetta was an awesome addition.

The other option was a trio of scallop sandwiches, each with their own fillings.  In the first was a simple puree of blanched asparagus, chicken stock, and a little ground ginger.  The asparagus puree was topped with diced mushrooms (day 1 got Oysters, day 2 got Shiitakes...I preferred the Shiitakes) that had been marinated and cooked in white wine, sherry, and worcestershire sauce until all the liquid had evaporated.  The second scallop was a spicy and sweet tomato jam of peppercorns, allspice, clove, mustard seeds, sugar, and crushed tomatoes cooked down until thickened and then hit with a little basil oil.  The final scallop was delicious delicious bacon topped with a double garlic aioli.  I dusted the scallops themselves in salt and paprika before searing them in bacon fat and slicing them in half.

I got the idea for these while driving to Richmond and daydreaming about dishes (it's also when I thought of the torched escolar amuse bouche) and I was incredibly happy about how it turned out.  The asparagus and ginger was a wonderfully fresh start to the dish, the classic tomato and basil really stood out in an unusual presentation, and garlic, bacon, and scallops should definitely get together and make delicious babies.

The first option for the main courses was the same pork tenderloin as last time around, except now I was much much better at butterflying the pork tenderloin.  Look!  Pretty!  And say hi to Jazmin in the background.

I roasted the pears a bit longer in the vinaigrette this week, and boy did it pay off.  A little bit of extra time left me with a vinaigrette that was much richer and developed in flavor.  On the other hand, my better butterflying skills actually left me with a piece of meat that was even less apt to stay together than last time.  Nonetheless, this is still a wonderfully well balanced, complex dish.

I made the same 15-spice ribeye this week, except paired it with a fianciere sauce.  A fianciere is a brown sauce derivative (just as was the chevreuil sauce) that employs mirepoix, madeira wine and truffle essence (instead of the chevreuil's bacon, white wine, red wine, mirepoix, and beef trim).  The fianciere sauce was a major hit...especially on Saturday, where there was licking of plates.  And we got some cheddar potato brioches that actually brioched!  The second day's plating, which is what this picture is of, is actually a bit comical because I ended up with too much meat.  This, the sort of mountain o' meat that is below.  Leftovers!

The apple fritters and ice cream were just as tasty as before, and even inspired Roommate Nirmal to make a little jim beam+coke+cinnamon ice cream float.  But especially exciting was the Spiced Chocolate Souffle:  just a traditional chocolate souffle with cumin, cayenne, and cinnamon.  On Day 2 I added a bit of the ice cream to the side.

And there we had it.  Huge huge thanks to Jazmin, who helped Day 2 go 1000 times more smoothly than Day 1.  And many thanks to all of my guests:  Coworkers Laura, Nora, and Maggie, Intern Monica, Roommates Nirmal and Shala, Friend Randall, Dancer Carena, and Soccer Hannah.  You are truly the cream of the crop and made this an even better experience than last year.

Maybe I won't wait a year to do this again.

Updated Blogroll and New Look

Perhaps you care, perhaps you do not.

Kathleen and I go back years and years and, even though she has now changed her last name so I can never find her on facebook anymore, she has started up a delightful food blog filled with tasty treats.  Check her at Grits and Glory.

I stumbled across a local blog called the arugula files that's both politically conscious and interested in food.  Right up my alley!

Read them.  Love them.

Also, I went and found a template that wasn't quiiiiite so blah.  This is a bit more me, so I'm gonna stick with it for a little while.

7 Course Extravaganza

For months and months, Alyse and I have talked about having over some of our favorite food lovers:  Boss Dave and his wife Jen, Chefs Tom and Christy.  Each has blessed us with delicious food and wine, and it only seemed right to return the favor.  And I have to admit...this was going to be an intimidating meal.

After all, Chefs Tom and Christy are ACTUAL Chefs (not my pretend "wannabe" variety) that have an awesome restaurant (Food Matters) and have cooked at other awesome restaurants (Cafe Atlantico).  And Dave and Jen, also awesome in the kitchen, have rather refined palates themselves (their last meal was at Alinea).  Finally, Alyse and I settled on a 7-course (7!!!) tasting menu that would give us the chance to showcase a wide variety of preparations and flavors.

The preparation for this meal actually began weeks ago with the veal stock, which was the base for the espagnole sauce, which was the base for a cheuvreil sauce that was served during the second to last course.  This has indeed been a many-weeks-long process.  But the outcome was well worth the hours and hours of preparation.

We started with an amuse bouche that had been inspired by a trip to Farrah Olivia for restaurant week.  Chef Morou serves a "shocked escolar"....a small cut of fish that has been poached very quickly, and then set in a chilled mixture of soy and wine.  It's a dish that totally stole my heart and made me crave escolar for weeks and weeks.  To get some, I had to special order it from Balducci's (did you know you can do this?  if you want a cut of meat or fish or poultry, or even produce, and you're not sure where to get it...just call and ask!  a lot of times they'll order it JUST FOR YOU.  Pretty sweet).

In any case, that is too long an explanation to tell you that I fell in love with escolar and wanted to serve it almost-raw.  I diced the raw escolar, which basically has the texture of butter, dusted it with some freshly ground cumin, placed it over some cilantro oil and topped with some fleur de sel before going at it with my blow torch and finishing with lemon zest.  I absolutely adored this amuse.

The first course was a chilled corn soup topped with a tarragon oil that was done from start to finish by Alyse.  There are few words to describe how perfect this dish turned out.  Sweet, with just the perfect toothy texture and a surprisingly mild yet well-balanced contrast with the tarragon oil.  The presentation was beautiful, with the bright green oil sitting atop the creamy yellow soup.  This was probably my favorite dish, overall, of the whole night.

And I forgot to get a picture of it.  AGH!

The second course was also all Alyse:  she wrapped some beautiful raw tuna in basil, let it sit marinate in the fridge, and then lightly steamed it right in the leaves to infuse the basil into the tuna.  She served it on top of a light, acidic slaw with a little basil chiffonade.  Another beautiful presentation, and another great starter dish.  At this point, we had hit three extra-base hits and I was feeling great about the night.

Next up was our version of "Shrimp and Grits."  We marinated the shrimp in an oil that had been infused with red pepper flakes, orange juice, copious amounts of garlic, and parsley and then sauteed them over really high heat.  At the top of the picture is my 15-spice blend (for the ribeye later) and the cilantro oil from the earlier amuse bouche

The grits were polenta and gruyere, chilled to room temperature, cut into rounds, and then deep fried until they were crispy-on-the-outside, gooey-on-the-inside goodness.  They were served over a red pepper sauce that had sweet and salty notes of polenta.  4 for 4.

So we were due for a mistake somewhere along the way, and finally we hit ours.  We thought a nice, simple, chicken consomme would be a great palette cleanser.  A little dash of it into a bowl with a sauteed mushroom and some scallions would do well to transition from the lighter first courses into the heavier main courses.

But the execution ended up all wrong.  When reheating the consomme, I must have left it on the burner too long, because while a consomme should have the clarity of this (which it did, before I reheated it):

mine had the clarity of this:

Yes, that's miso soup.  And that's what it looked like.  The flavor of the consomme itself was ok, but the mushroom was a little bitter and my idea for using toasted rosemary as a garnish that would impart a nice, herbal scent failed when all the rosemary fell into the soup.  Just, massive fail.  Although, if there were any dish to miss on, it was this one, and if there was any way in which to fail, it would have been that (and not overcooking/undercooking a main protein, for instance)

The pork tenderloin got us back on track.  I started by butterflying a tenderloin--something that requires a bit of practice to get right.

We then added layers of bleu cheese butter and red bartlett pears that had gone through a mandoline before rolling the entire thing up, tying it, sprinkling with salt, pepper, and paprika, pan-searing, and then oven roasting while glazing with maple syrup that had been infused with thai bird chiles.  We served over some wilted dandelion greens that had been tossed in a roasted pear vinaigrette.  This was a wonderfully balanced dish.  The mild, salty bleu cheese worked together with the sweet and spicy glaze over the bitter and acidic greens to achieve a balance of the entire palette that is often hard to come by.

Carla from Top Chef actually inspired the last of our main courses.  I loved how she was perfectly content to put a perfectly cooked piece of meat, a slam-banging sauce, and some well prepared potatoes in front of a panel of food experts.  So I picked up a huge dry-aged, bone-in ribeye and crusted it with my 15-spice blend before basting it with clarified butter and finally roasting it in the oven.  The preparation was relatively simple, something I had done dozens of times before, and felt good about.

The most complicated part of this dish was unquestionably the sauce.  The veal stock--->espagnole sauce---> chevreuil sauce.  We started with another basic mirepoix.

From there, I added bacon and some trim from the ribeye that I didn't feel like using and let all the fat render out.

My thinking here, since I wasn't working from a recipe:  "Well, I love bacon.  So I should just use tons of it.  I mean, what could be better than bacon?"

Oops.  Because after I added the sauce espagnole and began to reduce, something became very quickly apparent.  The balanced, superb sauce I was looking for was just....a bacon sauce.  Forget chevreuil and all that.  This was bacon sauce.  Sounds great in theory, but in reality....not as good as it should be.  But this was my favorite moment of this dinner for me--I didn't panic.

I added more veal stock and another dose of white and red wine.  I added a sachet d'epices.

I reduced and reduced and reduced and finally (about 3 hours after I started, and about 15 minutes before the ribeye was ready) it hit the sweet spot of both the consistency I wanted and the rich flavor with just hints (HINTS) of bacon and herbs that I wanted).

Our other part of the plate, a potato brioche, didn't quite brioche the way we had hoped, so we substituted with some (less than perfect, but still quite edible) potato chips with alderwood smoked sea salt.

Finally, we wrapped up with an ice cream that I had based off one of Christy's white bordeaux dessert wines she had introduced me to a couple of weeks earlier.  With just a touch of cinnamon and caramel, it paired wonderfully with some apple fritters and a reduction of another Food Matters special offering--the Alcyone dessert wine (also know as "the most delicious thing I have ever put in my mouth")

And there we had it.  7 courses and an amuse bouche.  All the food got out, and with generally only 10-15 minute waits between courses.  And while there were a couple of missteps, Alyse and I both agreed that this was by far the most challenging, impressive, (and, at least for me, rewarding) meal we had ever put together.  Special thanks to Dave, Jen, Tom, and Christy for joining us and letting us try this out on you!  A great night with great friends, great food, and great wine.  Can't complain about that!

On Arugula

I've been kicking around this post in my head for a month now, really trying to find the right voice to get across what is, for me, a pretty challenging subject.

In late summer of 2007, well before the Iowa Caucuses and the never-ending Democratic Presidential Primary and wholesale slaughter of the Republican Party in November, the New York Times Caucus blog casually reported on a relatively innocent comment about Obama in an attempt to poke a little fun at a line that fell flat:

One line that landed a little flat, though, was when Mr. Obama sympathetically noted that farmers have not seen an increase in prices for their crops, despite a rise in prices at the supermarket.

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” the senator said. “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”

The state of Iowa, for all of its vast food production, does not have a Whole Foods, a leading natural and organic foods market. The closest? Omaha, Minneapolis or Kansas City.

 

ARUGULA!!!  ELITIST!!!  The Right-Wing Noise Machine went into hyperdrive.  A Google search for "Obama arugula" now returns an unimaginable 145,000 hits.  A Google search of prominent wingnut blog Redstate.com alone returns 86 hits.  The message was clear:  Real Americans don't eat arugula.

What??

Where did this come from?  Why is it that blue blooded Americans only eat tasteless, watered-down iceberg lettuce, but enjoying the bitter peppery flavor of arugula relegates you to an Ivory Tower?  And of course, it's not just arugula.  Real Americans drink beer (specifically Bud, Miller, or Coors.  Tasty microbrews are still elitist.  And don't get me started on anything Belgian.).  Effete liberals drink wine.  Thinking about some organic iceberg lettuce?  Not so fast.  A search of that earlier mentioned conservative site for "organic elitist" returns 26 hits.  In fact, any food or drink that has been prepared for the purpose of tasting exceptionally good...all of it.  It's elitist.  And bad.

This post isn't just for me to rant about the Republican Noise Machine.  I mean, it's that too.  But it's also about the sad state of affairs the sets entire genres of food (most importantly the organic variety) into a cultural gallows.  Ezra Klein stumbled across this very concept recently as he described a fundraiser held by Alice Waters:

And that's the other problem. Good food -- the sort Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store.

I get this just as much as anyone.  When I was working two jobs to get by just after college, I knew there would be about 4 or 5 days every month where I would survive solely off of french fries and $1 double cheeseburgers at McDonald's.  That money wouldn't have been particularly well spent on organic carrots from Whole Foods (about $3 on their own).  But my point is that it shouldn't...be this way.

It's hard to escape the morbid irony of the morbid obesity omnipresent in our nation's poorest neighborhoods.  The cheapest food available to us is loaded up with trans fats, sodium, saturated fats, perservatives, chemicals...The best, freshest, safest, most healthy foods are loaded up with markups for an organic label.  The rich get healthier, and the poor get fatter and sicker.  (Oh, and they often don't have health insurance, so...)  Hey Republicans out there, this is one of many reasons why voting with your pocketbook doesn't always work.  We are quite literally staring at a market failure that is screwing over poor Americans in place that hurts even worse than their pocketbooks:  their own bodies.

Klein also notes one of my fears about writing this blog as he finishes describing Waters' meal: 

However, it wasn't clear that [politicians] would be publicly promoting the "new American table" anytime soon. It was the sort of dinner that would work well in an attack ad. A politician who spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of such dining would be served up medium-effete in his next election.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if, when I run for office one, I'm not attacked for my "Horseradish Crusted Rack of Lamb with Cherry Gastrique" or the upcoming "Torched Escolar."  But I can only hope that the mainsteaming of fine cuisine via outlets like the Food Network and Top Chef (see?  Food Network does do SOMETHING right apart from Iron Chef!) will make such a focus on good, healthy food become less the aberration of a sushi-eating (by the way, what the HECK is wrong with sushi???) latte-sipping liberal and more the usual habits of families around the country.  To do that, the price of such good, healthy food simply MUST come down.  As Klein concludes:  

But Waters' vision is almost depressingly realistic. An America in which schoolchildren are assured fresh and nutritious meals and the government doesn't spend billions subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup would be cheaper to the taxpayer and healthier for the nation. What we'd spend purchasing fresh produce we'd almost certainly save in medical bills. Our current food policy makes us fatter, sicker, and poorer. And, as Waters reminds us, it tastes bad.

Family

There's really nothing like cooking for family.  Friends are great.  Dates are cool.  But then there's cooking for the people that knew you before the food.  WAY before the food.  The people that are proud of your culinary development, bewildered at how you went from your first job flipping burgers at Wendy's to being a chef wannabe, and most appreciate the food that you put on the table when all is said and done.  So the cooking I've done for the little brother, my parents, and my grandparents is by far the most rewarding that I can do.

Last night's guests weren't...TECHNICALLY...family.  But we've all got relationships with folks that are so deep and go back so far they might as well be.  So when my man David and his wife came over and joined Roommate Nirmal and Former Intern Monica for a Saturday evening dinner, I knew that only my best was to be on display.  The particular challenge?  David and his wife are vegetarians, and most of my best work involves meat of some sort.  Hm.

I decided I wanted to give a bit of Indian flavor to some classically non-Indian cuisine, so we started with a Spinach Souffle:  the time-honored bechamel sauce, spinach, eggs, cumin, garam masala, and turmeric.  I thought the dish could use both some acidic and some earthy tones, so I put together a wild mushroom vinaigrette....that really ended up more like a wild mushroom paste.  I sauteed oyster mushrooms in olive oil with a little bit of salt and pepper, pureed them with some balsamic vinegar, and pushed the whole thing through a chinois.  While the texture didn't end up as....saucy?...as I wanted it to be, the flavor was completely spot on:  an earthy punch and a little bit of acid that really enhanced the souffle.  I could have included a bit more garam masala, but overall this dish really worked.  It does seem the souffle didn't puff QUITE as much as I wanted (the picture is a bit misleading, as I only filled the ramekins about 2/3 of the way), so I've got to continue to work on getting enough air whipped into these before Restaurant Weekend in a couple of weeks.

Second course was a chile relleno.  I roasted some poblano peppers, peeled and seeded them, and stuffed them with rice, feta, cheddar, and gruyere cheeses.  The stuffing also got a seasoning of cumin and garam masala as well as turmeric.  After running them through a dredging station where they got a coat of corn meal, salt, pepper, and cayenne, I deep fried the chilis and served them on a plate with a simple chili oil (olive oil and thai bird chilis pureed and strained) and a delightfully pungent roasted garlic sauce (just white wine, salt, and roasted garlic).  Topped with a bit of fried oregano for garnish andddd boom goes the dynamite.  Spicy and rich, with a variety of flavor profiles, this one really came together.

We finished with some chai tea ice cream that I made a couple of weeks ago for Roommate Shala.  Recipe for that one was lifted directly from here.

Building Blocks (cont.)

Chicken stock is one thing. It only takes a little preparation, some attention in the way of skimming off the impurities for an hour or so, and a simple mirepoix. Two hours of time, max.

Veal stock is another. Completely. And totally. Another. So settle in for the story of a stock that takes 12 times as long as chicken stock. (For you 1st graders out there, that's 24 hours.)

I started with 16 pounds of veal bones from Eastern Market. It's the closest thing I can find in DC to this place back in home sweet home ATL. It's not quite the same, but it makes a good effort. I let a roasting pan get realllly nice and hot in a 450 degree oven until I tossed the first of the bones in and I got that satisfying sizzle that tells me they're going to be cooked from both sides. They roasted for 45 minutes before I took them out and tossed them into my ginormous stock pot. After covering in cold water, I verrrrry slowly brought them up to a simmer at about 190 degrees (aided by my sexy new IKEA meat thermometer. Yes I called a thermometer sexy, and yes I have problems. Hush.). The time was 10:30pm.

After about three hours of simmering and skimming, I strained the first liquid into a second stock pot, added more water to the bones, and brought back up to a simmer. This second soaking of the bones is called a remouillage and is designed to extract maximum flavor from the bones. During the initial soaking of the bones, the water and the bones reach an equilibrium in flavor. To get more flavor, you need to add new, unflavored water. The remouillage drains more flavor from the bones and then gets added back to the original liquid and reduced later.

So after adding cold water, I brought the stock back up to a simmer and then stuck it in a 190 degree oven overnight. The first liquid sat, reducing, on a burner on low overnight as well. At this point it was past 2am.

I woke up in the morning around 10am to an apartment filled with the most warm, intoxicating fragrance I can imagine. Well, except for cookies. Cookies smell better, but not by a whole lot. And brownies. Ok, excluding baked goods...this smelled better than most anything I can imagine.

Finally, I discarded the bones. At this point, the stocks were still too large to fit in one pot (or, to be honest, two...I had three burners going for most of the morning). I added two cans of tomato paste and let the stock continue to reduce. Reduce and skim. Skim and reduce. Hours and hours of it. At about 3pm I added a mirepoix, along with some fresh thyme, garlic, and bay leaf. I let these cook (while skimming) for about two hours before straining them out. It was 5:30 by the time I got the stock back up to a simmer, but hark! It finally all fit in a regular sized stockpot--not even just the humongo one I had been using earlier.


I left for a few hours, came back, and finally found it had the body that I wanted it to have. It was 10pm. I strained the final product through a double rinsed-cheesecloth and my chinois and only then did I really see the beautiful dark brown stock, free of impurities and bursting with this amazing strong and yet somehow neutral flavor.




All it needed was a sprinkling of salt before I stored and froze it.

Why go through all this? Veal stock is the foundation of the basic brown sauce, of which there are at least dozens of derivatives: espagnole (one of the mother sauces of classical french cuisine), bordelaise, demi-glace....you name it. If it's a brown sauce, it is (or should be) based on a veal stock.

And with two upcoming dinners of epic proportions, it definitely made sense to have some on hand. More on these later...

Building Blocks

When I first started writing this blog, I was really only interested in having some tasty meals now and again.  But somewhere along the way, that mild interest and talent turned into something to study--to understand from beginning to end.  A real thirst to read and learn everything I can get my hands on.

This thirst has taken me to all sorts of new cooking techniques, from cooking my steaks by basting them in smoking hot clarified butter to using a chinois to strain my soups and stocks to tying bouquet garnis and sachet d'epices.  At times I have become obsessed with classic sauces, and I've even had a bit of success;  I'm pretty proud of my ability to make a good gastrique or a flavorful coulis.  But my success with sauces is limited by my success with an even more basic building block of fine cuisine.

Making your own stocks allows you to avoid spending $4 on these guys' oversalted version (510 mg/serving!!!) in addition to controlling the flavor profiles.  And having plenty of chicken stock on hand gives you an ingredient essential to make a consommé, a velouté, or any one of a number of other white sauce derivatives.  Beef or veal stock lets you make brown sauces like the classic demi-glace or espagnole (a sauce that apparently dates back to the 19th century).

But for this winter weekend I was simply content to let my chicken stock be the base for a rich, earthy parsnip and celery root soup.  I blame my obsession with creating the perfect parsnip soup on the exceptional soup sometimes offered by my oft-mentioned favorite restaurant Corduroy, and I was determined to do all the right things with this latest attempt.  And boy did it pay off.

Not only was I incredibly careful to let neither the stock nor the eventual soup boil, but I actually did my due diligence and skimmed away the impurities that rise to the top during the simmering process.  Usually this step falls victim to lazy ambivalence, but fellow Emory Grad Lauren had strep throat and she deserved the best, darnit.  So there was the skimming, the use of a bouquet garni to have full control over how long my spices infused into the soup, and finally another basic building block of classical french cooking:  a roux.

A roux is simply three parts flour to two parts fat, cooked over medium heat until it combines.  Lighter roux (white or blond) have mild flavors but do well to thicken sauces or soups.  Darker roux (brown or dark brown) have strong toasted or nutty flavors (dark roux is an essential ingredient in good gumbo) but don't have as much thickening power as the lighter roux.

I chose to cook my roux until it was brown, sacrificing a bit of the thickening power for the flavor.  It did every bit the job it was supposed to:  thickened my soup without a need for heavy cream.  Score.

I finished the soup with just a sprinkling of cayenne, paprika, and thyme.  In the future, I'd prefer a full sprig of fresh thyme, but I had to use the rubbed thyme I had on hand.  I've also got to find a way to cut the richness of this soup.  It's good...very good...but has so much intense earth flavor that a bit of acid (maybe some lemon oil?) or sweetness from a butternut squash coulis (successful in the past) could provide a little break.

Mythical

I don't know what it is about hot chocolate, but it's always seemed like one of those things you just don't make from scratch.

It almost has a mythical nature--this perfect drink I would enjoy as a kid on those brisk Atlanta mornings during our three week long winters.  But you never actually saw someone make hot chocolate.  It would come out of a paper packet, like so much oatmeal or cream of wheat, to be mixed with water or milk.  Sometimes, if you were lucky, it came in a nice canister (but make sure to avoid this stuff!).  You could get it at IHOP or Ruby Tuesday's, but you never got refills.  There was something special about hot chocolate.

And so I've deep fried turkeys, made cheesecakes and mousses, put cranberries in a risotto, and made ice cream from scratch.  But I've never thought to make hot chocolate from scratch.  Until today.

Outside:

Inside:

It's actually much easier than I thought.  Just some unsweetened cocoa powder, sugar, salt, water, milk, and vanilla extract.  I finished it with a little vanilla cream and mmmmmm, no longer mythical.

I'm on my second cup right now and I can see why they don't serve multiple cups of this to little kids.  I feel like one of the balls in this commericial.

Back for the last time...

Seriously.  Maybe.

Ya know, I've been lazy for a while.  And my passion for food has really come and gone over the past few months.  Don't get me wrong; I never stopped loving anything about food--neither cooking it nor eating it.  But I got busy with this election of this guy for most of last year (you may have heard of him; he spoke to Congress a couple nights ago), spent a month on a runoff election in Atlanta, went to Mexico on vacation, went to Atlanta on vacation, went through a couple of roommates, and...well, then I just got lazy.

So I'm wrong--it had nothing to do with my passion for food.  It had everything to do with my impatience to go find my camera and take pictures on the few(er) occasions I made something worth capturing.

There's something really sad about this blog.  For the last two years, I've really grown in Food, and I haven't let this blog grow with me.  I think it would have been an interesting story to tell you (Mom) how I went from my first post about Nachos or something (dude, they're still reallllly good) to last night's Roast Cornish Hen with Plum Sherry Glaze over Butter Poached Cippolini Onions and Sum Choy.

Which reminds me.  Simplicity just doesn't feel like the most appropriate name any more.  Yes, I still like simple food, and I probably won't be doing much sous vide or wildly eclectic cuisine anytime soon.  But if I'm writing for anyone that's not doing this sort of cooking, Simplicity as a title seems at best inappropriate, at worst condescending.

So I'm changing it.

Which reminds me.

Until now, this blog has been entirely about food.  And to me it's always been just a bit....incomplete.  Perhaps it's why I've strayed so much.   To be clear, it was by design.  This blog was initially just a repository to keep me from totally forgetting about successful nights in the kitchen.  But now, I'd like something more.  I'd like the freedom to rant about politics or rave about a good movie or talk about anything else I darn well please.  But mostly I just want to rant about politics.  I want my two competing loves to live right here together, on this blog.

So today, I retire Simplicity and relaunch it as Politics and Peppercorns.

Shutup.  It'll grow on you.