Last fancy meal before travel... (Although I hope to make some of the Washoku New Year's dishes with rowr.)

Tonight, I'm sous vide-ing salmon to the 'rare-medium-rare' temperature of 110F, in the hopes of getting something between cooked and sashimi.

First I brined the salmon in a 10 percent salt solution for 10 minutes. (Well, no, that's a lie; first I sliced the skin off the salmon.) Then I drained and rinsed the salmon and sealed it in a sous vide bag with a drop of soy sauce and a generous pinch of grated pickled ginger, and put it in the sous vide machine at 110F.

Then I started a batch of sushi rice in the rice cooker. Yum.

Then I sliced up an acorn squash into chunks, reserving the seeds, and made a miso glaze for it. I combined red miso, ginger, sake, and rice wine vinegar with a little honey, tossed it with the squash, and baked it.

I also toasted the squash seeds in a little oil and salt.

Finally, I crisped the skin I'd removed from the salmon in a little oil. (OMG salmon skin. I had no idea. It's got the same crunch-savory thing going on as chicken skin.)

The final dish will be a bowl of warm sushi rice, mixed with wakame sushi and chopped acorn squash seeds, topped with miso-glazed acorn squash on one side and sous vide-ed gingery salmon on the other, and sprinkled with crumbled crisped salmon skin.

With apples poached in ginger sake for dessert.

I'll post pics!

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I love caramelized onions—onions that have been well-cooked, so the sulfurous harshness of raw onions is completely gone, replaced by a complex sweetness and a deep onion flavor and a hint of richness. But they're not easy to make. For a long time, I could only make caramelized onions in one of two ways: either cooking on very high heat and needing to stir them a lot (and still having them scorch half the time -- and scorched onions are not so tasty), or cooking on low heat, with no risk of burning but also an incredibly long, multi-hour cook time, and sometimes with the onion never quite cooking through anyway, so bits of it wind up not quite the right silky caramelized-onion texture.

Fortunately, Cooks Illustrated came to the rescue with an onion caramelizing method that has worked, faultlessly, every time, and without taking too long.

( Easy Caramelized Onions )

What to do with caramelized onions? All kinds of things. They're good on sandwiches and burgers, or as the base for soups, or to make sauces both thicker and more complex; they taste wonderful mixed into pilafs or risottos, or on pasta, or alongside meat dishes. They can add a rich, unctuous flavor to dishes without adding very much fat. I use them all over the place—now that I know how to reliably make them.

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These are cookies my mother makes -- actually, I think she got the recipe out of Victoria magazine, many many years ago -- that I love. They are a perfect balance of rich and sweet and nutty, with the added advantage that they're easy to make, hard to mess up, travel well, and store well (and if you want to freeze them, they last half of forever, with no discernible difference in quality). They taste like caramel and nuts and shortbread, sort of like a hybrid between pecan pie and pralines -- quite a bit less gooey and sweet than pecan pie, but softer than pralines -- with the pecan topping layered on a firm but tender buttery crust. (You can also make them with walnuts, if you prefer, or if your budget stretches more easily to walnuts.) They take about an hour to make, including baking time, and require neither special tools nor special skills. I love them. I make them every year, for myself and to give away.

For those of you who work with me, these are the cookies I brought to the office last week. Actually, I got some very flattering comments about them at the time, including 'best cookies ever!', which I appreciated very much. :D

( Gold Bars )

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Parsnips with lemon-butter, warm German potato salad, and salmon mi-cuit. With pictures.

Also, a dose of personal nostalgia. ;)

( food neep beneath the cut )

(It's been feeling really weird to write these -- I've been so pleased with the sous vide, which makes me excited and I want to share it, but the only way I can really do that is to talk about how well the food has come out, which basically means squeeing about my own dishes. Which feels awkwardly self-congratulatory! But the sous vide supreme really is pretty darn awesome, and a lot of the amazing things -- like the super-juiciness of the meat dishes, and the way the flavors meld -- are more it than me.)

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This is my second attempt at poached eggs. No pictures this time, because, to be perfectly honest, the eggs came out ug-lee, and the point of food posts is not to nauseate people. ;)

This was also the first real Not Really A Success with the sous vide. I'm not sure whether I'm doing something wrong, or if the finished product is just not my thing, or what. We'll see.

( Eggs, eggs, beautiful eggs )

Tonight is poached salmon and parsnip puree.

(Oh, and as a coda to yesterday's experiment post: after chilling overnight, the pot de creme actually did set up perfectly, somewhere between pudding and custard. Apparently the recipe was fine, but 4 hours in the fridge wasn't enough. Good to know!)

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(More on sous vide, including an Interesting Link, and Science.)

( Cut to spare those who are bored by this )

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Lemon chicken, and chocolate pot de creme for dessert.

This time there are pictures, because sithjawa was interested in how things came out looking. Pardon my less than expert photography skills.

( Food neep beneath the cut! )

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Eggs, today.

( Cut to spare those who don't care. )

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Success, sez I!

So I finished the lamb by searing it very briefly (45 seconds per side) in butter, just to give it a nice crust, and then made a super-quick pan sauce with the fond and the juices.

Results:

The beets are a little bit less soft than I like -- I think next time I will jack the heat up just a tad -- but are firm and juicy and perfectly infused with the brown sugar and balsamic vinegar. Delicious. I can't wait to try with the parsnips.

The lamb chops are perfectly done, evenly pink (I cooked them medium-rare, as that's my preference for red meat) from edge to edge without the band of gray meat around the outside that you tend to get when pan-cooking them. The chops are incredibly juicy, with good but not overpowering flavor from the rub. The meat is moist and almost silky; I've never had chops this tender before.

I'll have to do my next trial with the kind of food I'd usually poach -- chicken or fish, say -- but sous vide cooking for lamb chops is a noticeable improvement on my prior lamb chop cooking method. I bet it'd be great for steaks, too.

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So I decided to go with the beets with balsamic and brown sugar, and the lamb.

( Details of how I cooked it all )

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Problem? Overcooked the chicken breast.

Solution?

BUTTER.

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Three culinary lessons of the day:

* You can make good pesto out of practically any combination of nuts, greenery and cheese, plus olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. (Okay, I probably wouldn't recommend, e.g., pistachios, beet greens and chipotle cheddar, but nevertheless.) This one? Pecans, parsley, soft cheese from the farmer's market. Mmm. (It's going over pre-prepared butternut squash ravioli.)

* Golden beets are a godsend. They may not have quite as assertively beet-y a taste as regular red beets, but they also don't make me look like I just survived a knife fight.

* Beets and apples roasting in the oven smell awesome.

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Dear world,

Medieval cooks didn't use spices because they were covering up the taste of rancid or rotten meat. There is a very simple reason for this: eating bad meat will make you very very sick, and quite possibly kill you (especially if you live in a time when you can't get electrolyte drinks or IV fluid replacement). Covering it up with cinnamon and pepper will not fix that. Medieval people did not eat rotten meat, because, while they didn't have our modern germ theory, they were capable of noticing that people who ate meat that smelled bad got very sick and often died.

It is true that a lot of meat in the middle ages was not eaten right away, but then, a lot of modern meat is not eaten right away -- what do you think aged steak is? And yes, accordingly, some of the meat eaten at the time probably had a somewhat different taste and texture than our refrigerated meats. (Also, not surprisingly, they very often dealt with the no-refrigeration problem by preserving meats, by salting or drying or sugaring or pickling or submerging in fat. But they preserved them before they went bad, because that's the point of preserving.) And yes, absolutely, people in the middle ages liked their food heavily spiced, and also sweeter than most modern people do. But they liked it that way because that was what they liked; it was a luxury, and also just a preference. I like the way pickles taste, but that doesn't mean I eat them because I had to do something with a bagful of rotten cucumbers.

But they didn't eat rotten meat, because eating rotten meat isn't something people do -- our digestive tracks can't handle it. It's almost impossible to hide the smell or taste of rotten meat (being as it's one of the things our bodies are designed to teach us not to eat), and even if you could, you'd get out of that habit pretty quickly after the first round of people got sick and died.

(Also, since spices were extraordinarily expensive, and therefore province of the wealthy, it just doesn't make sense. You save nothing by refusing to throw out a piece of meat and instead putting on spices that cost many times the cost of the meat; it would be financially wiser to just throw out the meat and slaughter another animal.)

Medieval people didn't think like modern people, but they weren't stupid. They just liked spiced food, when they could afford it.

Yours in the puncturing of historical just-so-stories,

Cora

the irritated history geek who just watched Top Chef

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I have two medium-sized zucchini (ie, big enough to stuff, not so big they're unpleasantly woody to eat) in the fridge that need eating. I need something to feed the book group people tonight. The boy doesn't care for zucchini. Therefore, obvious answer: feed zucchini to book group. Simple!

The question is: how?

Poll time!

Poll #1484528 oh the wonders of zucchini
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20

how to serve?

what else?

(Since it's potluck, none of the options have to be the main course; hence, the variety from main-course-like to warm-salad-y. You will note that all the options are vegetarian, as food for book group is always vegetarian. You will also notice some ingredients turning up over and over. This is because I'm not going shopping for this, and those are what I have on hand. But if you have any suggestions, you can suggest them, especially if they are permutations of above and/or use fairly basic pantry staples.)

This is for rowr, who's coming down sick. jmpava told her that she should get me to make her matzoh ball soup, since he thinks I make it well. (Which is quite a compliment, since I'd never made it before I met him! Although I'd made a great deal of chicken noodle and chicken rice soup. I made soup probably twice a week in high school.) Unfortunately, since she's in California and I'm in Washington, the recipe is the best I can do!

Anyway, this is easy, and quick, and not too expensive, and also warm and filling and comforting. Quantities are for two, but it scales up well. I'm including one recipe with chicken and one that's vegetarian -- the vegetarian is the one I make for Passover, because jmpava's mother is allergic to poultry; the chicken one is the one I make for jmpava when he's not feeling well. :)

( Chicken Matzoh Ball Soup )

( Vegetarian Matzoh Ball Soup )

( Adjustments to make it faithhopetricks-compatible (or anyone else with alium intolerances) )

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...Cora dinner theater!

I'm currently defrosting some cube steak that could stand to be used up, and I can't decide what to do with it. Should I make....

Poll #1473441
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

cube steak?

(There will be mashed potatoes and probably sauteed spinach as side dishes.)

Last night for dinner I made a big batch of split pea soup, which I love and jmpava does not care for. It's one of my favorite autumn and winter dishes: warm, filling, comforting, inexpensive, with a mild but distinct flavor. And it keeps beautifully, and freezes just as beautifully.

So even though it's just me who will be eating it, I made the whole six-person batch. Another portion has gone in the fridge for this week; four more will go in the freezer for later.

There's nothing particularly unusual or special about the recipe. It's just mine, and I like it. It does call for meat (specifically, bacon), but I have a note for how to convert it for vegetarians. I have been known to spice it up with curry spices or Middle Eastern spices, but, you know, often I just want the plain recipe, which tastes of peas and carrots and onion and garlic and thyme and bacon.

No pictures, because soup in general is hard to photograph well, and split pea, doubly so.

( Split Pea Soup )

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Watching the Food Network -- a kosher cook just called schmaltz (rendered chicken fat, used frequently in kosher cooking) "Jewish truffle oil."

Having tried and used schmaltz -- and loving it so much that I now save scraps of chicken skin and fat to render down -- I have to concur. It's as rich and wonderful as truffle oil -- not the same, but as good -- at a tiny fraction the price.

(Yes, it's a saturated fat. But a little bit of wonderful is better than a lot of bland -- and a little bit of good animal fat goes a long way. I also use homemade tallow to make french fries, and homemade lard in biscuits. I just don't eat them all the time.

I would provide my method for rendering fat, but I'm not sure that's the kind of thing most of you would be interested in. But let me know if it is.)

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If one lives in Seattle and wants to purchase exotic meats -- by which I mean wild boar, venison, squab, partridge, quail, things like that; I don't need crocodile or anything -- where would one go to buy it? I can order online, and I will in absence of a local source, but I do like local where I can. (And if you know a good online merchant for this kind of thing, I'd take that recommendation too!)

(Yes, I could hunt most of those myself, if I were inclined. But I don't want to learn an entirely new hobby just because I want to cook with venison.)

EDIT: Oooooooh, this is the coolest suggestion I've heard for how to dispose of the large quantity of oil that results if you do your own frying. I'll have to see if Uwajimaya stocks it!

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This month's Washoku Warriors meal was a variety of miso-based dishes. We technically only had to make a couple of things, but I went a little, uh, overboard. :D

From Food 2009

The dishes I made were:

Goma Miso (Creamy Sesame-Miso Sauce)
Aka Neri Miso (Pungent Red Miso Sauce)
Shiso Miso (Herb Miso)
Shira Ae (Creamy Tofu Sauce)
Saikyo Yaki (Miso-Marinated Broiled Fish)
Hakuto No Dengaku (Poached Peaches in Lemon-Ginger Miso Sauce)

...along with raw or blanched chilled vegetables, rice, homemade tsukemono (pickles) and homemade pickled ginger.

( Details and more pictures behind the cut )

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