eat food more often

new years

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:07:56 -0500

Jeff came into town and one morning we made Eggs Benedict, except with real bacon instead of the fake Canadian variety. Also, a slice of pineapple.

Unfortunately, everyone had already pretty thoroughly cleaned their plates before I made it in to the living room to take pictures.

There must be other people who take my money and shoot elephants too

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:51:29 -0500

look over here

Walmart’s founding family is worth the whole bottom third of America

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:49:00 -0500

look over here

breakfast-stuffed-pepper

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:28:43 -0500

Miriam and Dan left this morning to visit San Francisco. They abandoned a fridge full of things nearly rotten. I have to eat as many of them as quickly as possible. It’s a food race!

On the plus side, their food is fancier than my food has been for a while.

This is a breakfast-stuffed-pepper on a bed of fried tortillas. It’s stuffed with scrambled eggs, peppers, onions, cheese and mushrooms (and butter and heavy cream, of course).

The cheese I used:

This is currently my favorite cheese. Mostly because it is on sale at the grocery store down the street, but I also think it has a compelling texture when heated up. Sort of like warm styrofoam.

The mushrooms were fancy oyster mushrooms (thank you Dan and Miriam):

Things that you can learn from this picture:

We have a messy kitchen table.
There is a bottle of an unknown dark colored liquid on my counter. I hope it hasn’t started to smell by Sunday, when Dan and Miriam get back.
We got a kitten. Her name is Sassy. She was curious and wanted to be close to the mushrooms, but refused to actually get in the picture.

Also: it is snowing again. Unless I am wrong, I believe it has snowed 13 out of the last 14 days.

holliday and hollandaise, a DC experience

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:20:00 -0500

I’m spending some time back on the east coast and just visited Washington, DC. While there I made some healthy food, like Eggs Benedict:

And Pizza:

And Donuts.

Also, Jeffrey’s computer deleted all of the music on my ipod.

You can read Jeff’s words about food over at cuis-meme.

two tier frozen-pizza with pinnaple stuffing

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:07:00 -0500

an early taste

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 23:32:00 -0400

I take a little nibble from the corner of the front flyleaf. Mostly by wetting the corner with my tongue and pulling away away a few fibers. It’s hardly noticable. My copy of When You Reach Me is a library book after all. I don’t want to decrease a future library patron’s enjoyment of it.

My level of enjoyment is high. Hardback novels typically are printed on paper that is more substantial and of more durable texture. This book is no exception. This means it’s higher in fiber, and is thus healthier.

And the words in the book are unbelievably good. I consumed them more quickly than I typically consume words—and I consume bunches of words, quickly, in gulps.

I don’t know if I would let children read this book. Children shouldn’t read things like this or else they will go through the rest of their life looking for something better, something more. And they will be let down over and over again.

rendering the fat of a duck

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:20:00 -0400

To make the seitan confit I had to have duck fat. And since my missions to purchase duck fat proved so unsuccessful (in chinatown they didn’t understand what I was saying, none of the restaurants that serve duck fat fries would sell me any fat, and the only duck things the second largest Whole Foods in the world had were 3 free-range frozen birds).

So I bought a whole duck and pulled off its skin and cooked the fat.

This is not a vegetarian-friendly post.

This was my duck.

This was my flayed duck. It is sort of a difficult process—the skin doesn’t come off as easily as you would hope. But it does tear off in big chunks if you put some muscle into it.

This was the fat being weighed—you add two cups of water for every pound of fat and cook it for a couple of hours.

Until it is golden.

And then you remove it from the heat, filter the rendered fat into glass bottles and save the skin to make cracklings with.

how to make a seitan confit

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 23:17:00 -0400

In searching for an interesting way to use seitan I discovered that it’s frequently used as a vegetarian replacement for duck. When I think of duck, I think of duck confit—or at least I do now, because this has been a really involved project of which I am unclear my reasons for pursuing.

Obviously, I decided to make a confit with my homemade seitan. It turned out fantastic, the seitan is delicious and could be used in many different ways or eaten plain. And the confit I made with canola oil was still good and was vegetarian.

I, of course, preferred the confit made with rendered duck fat.

To make either confit you need a good bit of seitan and a good deal of fat. First you salt the seitan and cover it with bay leaves, cloves, and other spices you find intriguing and let it marinate over night.

After 24 hours, take it out of the fridge and leave it on cookie racks so that it has a chance to dry.

After it has dried (4-5 hours), fill a pan with fat (either animal or vegetable) and submerge the seitan. Bring the pan to a low simmer.

When the fat starts simmering, put the pan in the oven and bake it at the lowest temperature possible for 2 hours.

Remove the pan from the oven and pour the liquid into a heat proof container. Add the seitan. The mixture ought to remain fresh for a few weeks.

chinese cookies

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 22:39:00 -0400

I don’t know where the Koalas came from when I was younger. They were always a treat and I never could get them often enough

Well, I’ve been on a mission to buy duck fat. This mission took me to Chinatown a few times and I found out the Koala cookies are Chinese.

And I found knock-off koala cookies.

some uses of seitan

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 01:08:00 -0400

For some reason I’ve been on a bit of a curry kick. Curry doesn’t make seitan stand on its own, but it certainly makes it taste good. And I have been getting a much better idea about how to make curry (this involves, most critically, red curry paste and milk).

Here is a bowl curry and seitan with rice.

Here is another.

I also have been making a bunch of sunnyside up eggs and putting them on top of stuff. Like a few pieces of seitan in a breakfast meal.

Sometimes I combine the two things, sunnyside up eggs placed on top of curry with seitan.

some pictures of friends with food

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:48:00 -0400

We had breakfast tacos over the holiday weekend. There was no seitan yet and I don’t remember what was in them.

This is Miriam.

This is Dan.

This is me.

This is a picture from later in the day when Arthur went with Dan and me to get free pizza in exchange for paying too much for beer served out of plastic cups.

homemade seitan

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:13:00 -0400

Over Labor Day weekend, actually on Labor Day itself, I made seitan.

This doesn’t seem like the most unusual thing for me to do, but upon further consideration—like when somebody asked me why I had done this—I realize most of my reasoning is rather lame.

My most obvious argument is the depressing state of my bank account and that I had wheat gluten in the pantry. Also, that the wheat gluten was open from earlier seitan endeavors and was probably on a silent path toward spoilage or bug infestation.

And wheat gluten itself is pretty cheap so I suppose there is an economical advantage. But I can’t claim that I’m entirely economically minded when it comes to food. Sure, I eat a bunch of rice and beans, but food is one of the few things I regularly splurge on.

I suppose I could claim I wanted to embark on a cooking project I would enjoy—and this reason almost holds up to the light of day—but really, my decision to cook seitan comes from my vague vegetarian tendencies. So this holds little interest for people with no interest in reducing their meat consumption.

Basically, seitan is a meat replacement, Wikipedia’s entry suggests that it makes a good duck replacement (This is something I plan on trying, thinking perhaps of creating knock off confit).

Overall I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the idea of meat replacement. I think vegetarian cooking ought to be able to taste good without something standing-in for what it’s ostensibly opposed to.

I have so far tried a number of things with seitan, seeing if I could find a way to make it stand on its own, and have yet to figure out a reason that seitan is really important in the diet of an omnivore—being that it doesn’t have very much flavor of its own and doesn’t bring fat with it to the cooking (which the primary reason meat is so excellent).

This is the recipe I used to make the seitan, pretty much directly stolen from post punk kitchen:

3 cups vital wheat gluten
½ cup nutritional yeast flakes
2 cups very cold water
1/2 cup soy sauce
4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
10 cups of water, cold, in a large pot

In a large bowl mix together the wheat gluten and nutritional yeast. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix together, then knead the gluten for at least three minutes. Let the dough rest for a few hours. Knead it again. Roll the dough into a foot long cylinder and slice it into six parts.

Add the six parts to the pot of cold water and cover, then bring the water to a boil. If you start with hot water the seitan will probably fall apart. When the water starts to boil, reduce to a simmer and cook for an hour. Then turn off the heat and let the gluten cool. After it has cooled a bunch, remove the six pieces (which will all have grown much larger) and stick in a Tupperware, then put in the fridge.

From here you can do anything you would do with pieces of uncooked chicken.

interesting work

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:09:37 -0400

Last Thursday afternoon my temping agency called. They wanted to know if I was willing to work all night on Thursday and Friday at the same place I’d been working for a week and a half.

Apparently the company needed to make a mountain of copies, a thousand copies of a couple hundred page document, and mail it Monday—the copier would have to run for 50 hours straight.

I was going to man the decks over night, keep adding paper, binder clipping the documents that came out the feeder, keep everything running all night long.

I wanted to have something to munch on. Chicken and rice seemed like a good idea. I baked the chicken with sour cream and hot sauce in a covered dish for an hour. It ended up tasting fantastic (even if it looked less appealing after the bike ride in in my bag).

It was much less pleasant when I vomited it up from exhaustion at 9am.

hard boiled eggs with hot sauce and brown rice

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:10:00 -0400

I am out of money again.

on food photographs

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:00:00 -0400

I believe my food photography has gone downhill.

I realize now that the brief period in which I seemed to be taking good picture had nothing to do with any sort of mastery, instead it was my unemployment which allowed me to cook dinner earlier and take pictures in natural light.

Sorry.

two-cheese mac and cheese

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:25:00 -0400

In which I prove to myself that the components of dinner do not equal the whole of dinner.

I mostly eat single types of food at a time. Some root vegetables, some spinach, some brown rice, a glass of wine—I reason this pretty much equals risotto if all the components are fresh and high quality. This is probably laziness.

I found a recipe for macaroni and cheese in the newest food and wine. I decided to make the dish. The recipe called for a pound and a half of pasta, I accidentally put 2 pounds in the pot. So after draining it, I mixed the extra half a pound with some of the mac and cheese mixture.

I put the pound and a half of pasta with the cheese sauce into the oven to brown. Then I sat down and ate my left over, unbaked mac and cheese. I was convinced it would be just as good as the finished macaroni and cheese meal. It turns out this isn’t true.

If you want something that tastes better than lukewarm pasta with goat cheese, if you want a cooked meal incorporating multiple things, this two cheese mac and cheese is pretty good.

I adapted this from the most recent Food & Wine, taking out a cup of cream and one of the cheeses (it was three cheese but srsly, how clichéd). It still ended up being pretty greasy, but it was really tasty and much better after baking.

1 ½ pounds whole wheat penne (Trader Joe’s has some good deals on pasta)
2 cups heavy cream
¼ cup finely chopped onion
2 garlic cloves, minced
¼ cup all purpose unbleached flour
1 11 ounce goat cheese log (Trader Joe’s also has good deals on goat cheese logs)
1 ½ cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
¼ cup sour cream
some parsley
some fresh thyme
salt and pepper
3 egg yolks

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and butter a 12 in skillet. Cook the pasta in a large pot until al dente. Drain the pasta and return it to the pot.

At the same time, in a large saucepan, bring the cream to a simmer with the onion, garlic and salt. Transfer half of the cream to a bowl and whisk in the flour, add the mixture to the saucepan and whisk over medium low heat until the sauce thickens, about 5 minutes. Whisk in the goat cheese and 1 cup of Parmigiano. Once it has melted, add the sour cream, parsley, thyme and pepper and stir. In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks with a cup of the sauce and then slowly mix into the rest of the sauce.

Pour the sauce over the pasta and stir to coat. Spread the pasta in the skillet and sprinkle with the remaining Parmigiano. Bake uncovered for about 30 minutes, until golden and bubbling. Let the mac and cheese cool for 15 minutes and then eat.

another burger off

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:54:40 -0400

These were breakfast burgers, or perhaps brunch burgers. I cooked them in a pan with caramelized onions and mushrooms. I added soy sauce, a bit of terayaki sauce and red pepper flakes to the meat.

They turned out well. Pan cooking in cohort with the soy sauce made them juicy and delicious.

I still have some Dishmans meat left over. I only have ground beef and I’ve been defrosting it sporadically so I don’t get tired of it—like I did the time we lost power and had to eat 4 pounds before it went bad.

This was a lonely burger off. Basically I compared it with my memories of the previous burger offs, in which other people (friends) were involved and I was hanging out on my old porch and had more avocados and was generally taking more pleasure in food.

Our fridge was set really cold so the meat hadn’t completely defrosted. I had to scrape off bits from the frozen center.

I suppose all in all, it wasn’t nearly as fun as Richmond burger offs. And I didn’t add any bacon, automatically making the burgers sub par. And I didn’t add any greens, which means that I’m slipping.

lunch in the loop

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:27:33 -0400

I do not do as well with frugality as I ought to. Some days I don’t pack a lunch.

On those days I go to Chipotle. Partly because I like it, partly because there’s one conveniently close by (curiously, this is true just about everywhere except Mexico). There’s a restaurant in the building where I’m working but it’s too pricey, I would have to have a salary to justify a lunch with utensils.

Going to Chipotle offers me a chance to feel like a business person. I suppose I should feel bussinessy regardless, since I’m working on the 32nd floor of a building in the loop, but Chipotle offers me a visible chance to take part in corporate culture, in the lunch break.

I take lunch early because I’m calling people in a time zone an hour earlier than Chicago’s—the people I’m calling don’t answer the phone during their lunch break, which is at 11 our time. This works to my advantage because at noon the line for Chipotle stretches out the door. Everyone is wearing business attire. A lot of people have little clip-on digital keycards. I have one too, but I keep it in my pocket and hip check the building sensors. This is something my mother taught me.

It’s difficult to convey the effect the mass of business people has, but in real life it’s impressive.

I always ask for extra rice on my burrito and spend the entire time I’m eating worrying about the quantity of refined carbohydrates I consume.

peanut butter and jelly and pbr

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:24:00 -0400

Simple, cheap and possibly my favorite summer combination: the roof, a book, a beer and a sandwich. Dan’s little brother isn’t a bad addition.

The peanut butter is organic bulk stuff, the jelly is Crofters. The bread is from Red Hen.

The book is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which in my personal method of grading books, is a game-changer.

The beer is from a bodega near the Logan Square library. It is cold and tall, which is all that can be expected.