surprise.

This is not two slices of the worst-looking pepperoni pizza ever made. It's an unexpectedly good snack of roasted homemade sourdough, hummus, and Momofuku sweet pickled radishes. I'd serve it to someone.

sev puri.

I've said it before in these pages, and knowing me I'll probably say it again. I mean who can really keep track of everything they've said over the course of 13 years of jotting down over 2,200 compulsively-rewritten notes to themselves. In public. Who can even count the number of years or notes properly (EDITOR'S NOTE: actually Blogger does a pretty good job of that last part, yes scroll down, it's right there in the right sidebar...but right that was probably rhetorical, anyway, carry on).

Indian food may be the hardest cuisine to replicate in the home kitchen (I say this without ever reaallllly having tried to cook with anything in that challenging-smelling Chinese medicinal herb aisle in the supertoko). I was just thinking. There are two components to the complexity: 1) exotic/authentic ingredients, without which you are not cooking the real thing. And 2) the sheer number of ingredients and techniques involved.

Japanese cooking, for example, also requires exotic/authentic ingredients in order to taste "accurate": miso, kombu, sake, furikake, etc. But once you're cooking, the ingredient list is totally manageable, six or seven things. It's the rare Indian recipe that doesn't involve at least two recipes within itself (I'm including condiments), and each one involves several ingredients, we're not even necessarily talking about curries from scratch yet.

But: I blather on about all this not only to unspool my mind into a text box in order to hopefully put myself back to sleep soon, which is why probably mm half of VDuck was written, but in order to proclaim into the void that I am currently "better at Indian food" than I've ever been in my life. In that what I cook tastes vaguely like the original thing I tasted that made me want to cook it in the first place.

Today's case in point: bhel puri/sev puri. Back in the day (I just spent 10 seconds deciding if quotation marks or italics more clearly indicated that that is not a phrase I normally use), I used to make the 35 mile (57 km) drive down to Indian Delights in Decatur as often as I could manage the incredible boringness of the scenery and the dent that the whole enterprise put in your day's productivity. OK, two hours, a two hour dent. Doesn't sound like all that much at the moment for a chance to eat at Indian Delights. Luckily they didn't serve alcohol or the dent would've been twice that and significantly more structurally damaging.

Annnywayyyy. That was where I first tasted South Indian chaat, special thanks to Cliff Bostock, who sent me into all the dark corners of Atlanta's 1990-2000-era exotic food scene via his column in Creative Loafing. Indian Delights is, of course, closed now, so I can't even find a menu to look at (although Chat Patti's seems to be very similar), but yes, their bhel puri was the stuff my dreams were made of. Crunchy, sweet and sour dreams.

This week, in an effort to re-locate the ever-elusive Pleasure Button, I started looking at chaat again, and thought that sev puri seemed like a slightly easier/more fun version of bhel puri. And, having made it, I can verify that it is. Once you 1) find some chaat masala (which is really nothing like any other masala, if you've been trying to substitute for this do yourself a favor and find the real thing) and black salt and papdi and sev, and 2) make the chutneys, the rest is just assembly.

Each one of these (as pictured above) is roughly the size of a light and crispy golfball.

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sev puri.

1 recipe date-tamarind chutney
1 recipe cilantro-mint chutney
5 medium potatoes, boiled and mashed roughly
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp chaat masala
1 mango, diced
1 cup chopped tomato
1 lime, juiced

1 red onion, minced
bunch of mint, leaves stripped, chopped

20-30 papdi (somewhere between a kroepoek and a pappadam and a rice cake, puffy and crunchy, the size of a Pringle)
2 cups sev (the chickpea vermicelli sprinkled on top)
1 tbsp chaat masala
20-30 dots of sriracha

This makes enough for at least 20 bites. So, you make the chutneys the day before, you boil and mash the potatoes with the cumin and chaat masala the day before but make sure they're back to room temperature before you try and serve. You can cut the mango and tomato the day before as well, I left them combined in the fridge overnight with the lime juice and a shot of agave because neither was very good by itself.

The last thing that should be done is dicing the onion. Then, assemble: on top of a papdi you put a tsp of potato, a tsp of tomato/mango, a dollopette of each chutney, sprinkle the onion on, put a dot of sriracha on top, throw a tiny pinch of chaat masala at it, and top with the sev and mint. Serve immediately or they get soggy. Apparently if you don't like cilantro, you can also just use a mint leaf instead of the green chutney.

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the new tapenade.

hazelnut and red pepper tapenade.
2 roasted red peppers from the jar
1/2 cup toasted hazelnuts
1 clove garlic
1 tbsp good, non-bitter olive oil, or hazelnut oil if you are living in a world of luxury
1 or 2 tsp sherry vinegar
handful fresh basil leaves
salt to taste
sugar if necessary

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broodje tempeh.

Tempeh attempt #1, based on this, which rings true to me at first glance.
UPDATE: here it is with fixes.

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broodje tempeh tempeh. 

400g tempeh sliced typically
2 tbsp coconut oil
big pinch coarse smoked salt

1 medium onion, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 to 1 small madame jeanette chile, minced
70g tomato paste
2 tbsp ketjap manis
1 tbsp tamarind concentrate
1/2 tsp salt
100ml water

Melt oil in wok, add tempeh, stir-fry for 10 minutes so that the tempeh has taken on more than a little color and is a bit crisped up, because you be about ready to de-crisp it during the next step. Add everything else and cook for another 15 minutes.

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surinamse pickle. 

1 cucumber
salt
1 cup vinegar
1 madame jeanette
1/4 tsp allspice or 10 allspice berries
1/4 tsp cloves
1 bay leaf
maybe a dash of sugar depending on your vinegar

Cut the cucumber interestingly and salt it. Add the chile and the spices to a pan with the vinegar, boil the vinegar, when it comes to a boil pour it over the cucumbers. Refrigerate. This should really be served the next day.

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southwestern polenta tots.

Mara dyed the curtains today, HBF brought over some serious homemade blueberry/lavender pie, and later I tried to make a fancy salad. Of the salad's three elements, the tastiest was something the recipe called "jalapeno-polenta croutons", but which as prepared by me were nothing like croutons at all but rather much more like polenta tots and thus totally delicious if not so so healthy. I ate a flattened one that Mara stepped on, that's how good they were. Jesus look at this pie:

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southwestern polenta tots. 

2 and 3/4 cup half-skim milk

1 tsp salt

1 jalapeno or 2 green Holland chiles, seeded and minced

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

1 and 1/2 cups cornmeal

a good frying oil
salt and pepper

Make polenta by bringing the milk, chiles and any spices to a full boil and then adding 1 cup of the cornmeal, whisking constantly. Stirring the whole time, cook for three to five minutes, or until the polenta begins to stay pulled away from the sides when you stir it. Pour into some non-stick or lined flattish baking dish and chill for 1 to 4 hours. Remove from fridge, cut into cubes, dredge cubes in the remaining 1/2 cup cornmeal and pan-fry til brown on all sides. Drain, season to taste and serve warm in a context other than a fancy salad, probably with a dipping sauce of some kind. You might look at this recipe and say oooh cheese would be nice here and yeah it probably would but also I really think they don't necessarily need it.

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bánh xèo/bánh khot.

Tonight we got us a wild hair and embarked upon a new adventure, bánh xèo. Thoroughly damn delicious and unique-tasting; thoroughly difficult to eat b/c of the form factor and contents. Here's the recipe we started from (but we didn't use their sauce, we used mara's nuoc cham instead, which remains superlative on anything).

Also a very delicious but poorly color-corrected salad condiment happened using red onion, tomato, jackfruit, cucumbers, grated ginger, fish sauce, lime, and rice vinegar. And cilantro.

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banh xeo. 

1 and 1/2 cups rice flour
2 cups coconut milk
1 egg
2 tbsp water
1 tsp dried turmeric
pinch salt
1 scallion

1 white onion, chopped
2 large carrots, julienned
a handful of snow peas, julienned
two handfuls of shrimp, peeled and deveined

scallions
basil
mint
cilantro

romaine or bibb lettuce for wrapping

nuoc cham!!! for dipping

The technique that seemed to work well was: cook onion in hot non-stick skillet for a couple minutes; add shrimp for 1 minute; make sure skillet is well-oiled and ladle 1/3 cup batter in and immediately swirl to coat pan. Add one portion carrots and snow peas now (or saute separately). Cover and cook for three minutes.

Remove lid, drizzle oil around edges of crepe and attempt to crisp up. You can throw some herbs in there as well, then try to fold. Serve....yeah. How? We hacked our into pieces, then wrapped those pieces in a lettuce leaf and dunked it in the nuoc cham. It was completely delicious, but really awkward to eat, so we're going to try another form factor soon.

ACTUALLY: We are apparently not the first people to struggle with this edibility problem. Bánh khot is the hand-sized version, and is what we will make next time instead.

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lo bak go.

This duck loves him some lo bak go. I do wish I could make a package of them last for more than a few days, b/c Young Dong is not close enough in this arctic weather.

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salty swift.

 

Yeah, not much writing going on here, I'm doing other stuff. One of the things I'm doing, though, is planning a couple of menus and testing out a couple of dishes. Above is something I love very much but for some reason I'm afraid to serve to people: inlagd sill is Swedish for marinated herring, and that's what we have here.

One thing I loved about the Swedish version of pickled herring is that there were so many different options spice-wise. For this little bite, I've narrowed it down to something called matjes sill with potato, creme fraiche, chives, and mild bleak roe caviar. There's another version that replaces the potato with beet and switches the herring to the standard allspice-heavy version. It's a great, superrefreshing bite of food, but I have to try it out on someone before I serve to multiple people.

Something else I'm really enjoying lately is tartare aux algues, a French condiment made from seaweed, capers, and olive oil. I got it from Mustapha, our Moroccan guy downstairs, it's really unusual and, again, super fresh and healthy tasting. It's supposed to be eaten on bread with butter, but I've just been dipping potatoes in it and enjoying that. Supposedly the French mix it with canned tuna for a variation on tuna salad, I could totally see that working (mm, apparently this is a new fad in cat food as well...).

Lastly, I'm going to try another adventurous salted fish thing recipe tonight, turnip mash with anchovies and walnuts. Could be freaky as shit, but it could also be something like Jamie's pangrattato, which is the opposite of freaky.

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recidivism revisited.

Above: De Kletskop, on the Zeedijk, one of my favorite bars in that neck of the woods.

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I'm totally absorbed by my southern cooking reminiscences at the moment. Today I found myself slowing down as I passed the poelier, like H. I. McDonough and his convenience stores. Recidivism.

And then my slowing down became stopping and buying a leg of duck confit. Because yes I'm still thinking about New Orleans, and somehow the idea of duck confit and sweet potato bitterballen came into me mind (you know, instead of beef and mashed potato bechamel). Spices would be smoked paprika, orange zest, scallion, and...thyme? Cinnamon? Allspice? Chipotle? Whiskey? Cream cheese? Not all of these obviously, suggestions for refinement in the comments please. I imagine that the dipping sauce would be either something sour cream-like or something chutney-like. Maybe an orange crème fraîche like the lemon crème fraîche I had in Sweden last summer (hmm, not as crazy an idea as I thought).

UPDATE: So I tried this, but via grated sweet potato instead of mashed. They're good, but I think part of what I wanted was the texture of fully-cooked sweet potato fried rather than the al dente hash brown kind of approach.

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Virtual tourism continues via Trip Advisor, and I must say, although Trip Advisor is a wonderful resource for many reasons, sometimes it all becomes too much for me and I wish I could had time to hack into their servers and install a global banner that said "While traveling, please keep in mind: you are in a foreign fucking country. People might not speak English. This does not mean that they are "not catering to tourists", this means they are just going about their business. And even if it does mean they are not catering to tourists, it's not "a shame", it's completely OK. Because a lot of tourists suck, many many many.

For example, some tourists, I'm not mentioning any names, will come in to your traditional, basic tapas bar, sit down, order a couple of meat and cheese tapas, and wonder why there's no bread on the table to go with them. So they ask the waitress if they have any bread, she says: si, we have pa amb tomaquet. You say great (whatever that is, ha ha), she brings it and then you complain that it has tomatoes and garlic and oil on it, sorry, can you get one without all the stuff on it. You complain that the waitress "seemed confused and reluctant to honor this request".

And then the bread she returns with: it was kind of stale and tasteless. (pan amb tomaquet is known as a way to use up leftover bread). So you asked for some balsamic vinegar to "make it taste like something" (cause you're in fucking Spain, known for their balsamic vinegar), and the poor waitress was like was like, "ehhh, damn I love tourists, remind me why don't I speak English again?", and trudged back into the kitchen to ask the chef for his bottle, I would love to have heard that conversation, and, wow, "it tasted like it hadn't been used in years. Horrid." Yeah, guess what: it hadn't been used in years. You're in fucking Spain. "Needless to say, we did not enjoy the food here at all" you say. I say "GGG-GGG-GGG-GGG-GGG-GGG-GGGG-GGGG-GGGG-GGG-GGG"...(or however you spell machine gun fire).

Then you complain about the experience on Trip Advisor. Later reviews for this same place might say "staff seemed unwelcoming and unaccommodating for non-Spanish speakers". You know why? THEY'RE TIRED OF YOUR CRAZY FUCKING REQUESTS. And can I split this bill six ways?

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olive juice.

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green olives, argan oil, lemon, spices.

4 cups large green unpitted olives
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 clove garlic, pressed
1 pinch cracked coriander seed
1 pinch cumin seed
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp fennel seeds, toasted and ground

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caponata/caponatina.

I'm not sure if anyone really knows the difference between these two. Supposedly caponatina is a "more delicate" version of caponata, in which the vegetables are cut more finely, but Google turns up photos of both that look identical so who the fuck knows. The version I've always made is from Giuliano Bugialli's Sardinia/Sicily book, which I pretty much love, and just yesterday I realized that his recipe is actually for caponatina.

Whatever, I made a couple of small changes. This makes a lot of caponawhatever, so these quantities are good if you're making it for a party or to bring to someone's house. If you're just making it for home, you could do half this and be happy. It also supposedly keeps for a few weeks in the fridge, so it's not so bad if you do have leftovers, they'd be tasty in a pasta or on a pizza.

Ooh, also, I did the salting your eggplant thing (after you cut it, throw some salt on it, let it sit for an hour, rinse), and the eggplant was really really good, so maybe there is something to it after all.

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caponatina.

4 medium-sized eggplants
coarse-grained salt

8 celery stalks
4 bell peppers
1 red onion
about a cup of EVOO (not to be used all at once, it's for sauteeing all of the above vegetables separately)

1 can chopped tomatoes, drained, or 3 to 4 canned Roma tomatoes, chopped fine
1 good anchovy filet, minced
roughly 4 tbsp green olives, chopped fine
3 or 4 tbsp capers
4 tbsp currants

1/2 cup red vinegar, I actually used balsamic this time
1/4 cup raw sugar
1/2 cup roasted almonds, chopped
I also threw a few tbsp pistachios in there

black pepper to taste, and maybe a tiny bit of salt

fresh basil and fresh mint, chopped, for garnish

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pound for a brown.

What a strange summer it's being so far. Nothing feels perfectly normal. Kind of like these are the sentences I am writing.

Know what I mean? Everything's just a little off. Or maybe this is normal June limbo and I'm just usually too busy having beers in the sun to notice the subtle shifts toward summer shutdown.

As if to underscore the slight weirdness of things, we had D/K over at 3pm yesterday. Why then? Originally it was conceived as an afternoon on the roof, in the as-blazing-as-possible-in-Amsterdam sun, carelessly drinking bitter/fruity Pimm's cups, laughing gaily, and grilling an unfortunate victim or two. But then the weather turned against us and we were stuck inside with our fruity drinks and our summer food.

On the other hand: there are worse things. My Ethiopian Chicken Leg Experiment was let down by some flabby chicken, but I totally enjoyed chomping on our Emergency Appetizer and Mara's not-too-sweet brownies.

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My originally-planned starter was called yeshimbra assa, a Lenten dish from Ethiopia made from chickpea fritters cut into fish shapes and covered in a thick berbere-based sauce (recipe 1, recipe 2). But when I grabbed the full-looking bag of chickpea flour this morning, I found it to be not very full at all, and Sunday is not the day to need chickpea flour.

The good news about a day of retracted ambition is that you don't even remotely panic about unplanned changes. OK, so we have no fish-shaped chickpea fritters. What can I has? Trying to keep things African, Moop and I sort of commandeered this Tunisian salad and bent it to our needs, slightly tweaked and served as crostini with a boost of sriracha mayo.

And then later I ate too many brownies. You would've done the same thing, believe me.

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salade mechouia.

2 or 3 red, orange, or yellow bell peppers, diced

2 or 3 medium onions, diced

4 tbsp light olive oil

1/4 cup capers

juice of a lemon

1 can of tuna, drained

2 eggs, hard-boiled

1 baguette, crostini-ized

Coat onions and peppers with oil and roast for one hour in a 175C oven, turning every 15 minutes or so, and reducing the heat to 150C if you're getting too much blackening. At some point, whip together a little sriracha mayo (2 tbsp mayo + 1-2 tsp sriracha, mixed). When peppers and onions are completely soft and a bit browned, remove from oven, cool, and add tuna, lemon juice, and capers.

To assemble: a quick slather of sriracha mayo, a tbsp or so of tuna/pepper/onion mix, then top with hardboiled egg and a chive if, like us, you're a sucker for The Chive Garnish.

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cocoa brownies.

150 grams unsalted butter

1 1/2 cups raw/unrefined sugar
3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 cold large eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 170°C. Line the bottom and sides of a tart pan with parchment paper or foil, leaving an overhang on two opposite sides.

Combine the butter, sugar, cocoa, and salt in a medium heatproof bowl and set the bowl in a wide skillet of barely simmering water. Stir from time to time until the butter is melted and the mixture is smooth and rather hot but not bubbling. Remove the bowl from the skillet and set aside briefly until the mixture is only warm, not hot.

Stir in the vanilla with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring vigorously after each one. When the batter looks well-blended, add the flour and stir until thoroughly incorporated, then beat vigorously for another minute or so. Spread evenly in the lined pan.

Bake until a toothpick plunged into the center emerges slightly moist with batter, 20 to 25 minutes. Let cool completely on a rack.

Lift up the ends of the parchment or foil liner, and transfer the brownies to a cutting board. Cut into fun shapes, or squares if that's how you're feeling.

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homebody.

Last night I enjoyed my final party of 2007. I'm not going anywhere tonight, except maybe to the roof to watch the 'splosions in the sky.

The food last night was simple and delicious as always, and reminded me of this NYT list of 101 Simple Appetizers in 20 minutes or Less (by How to Cook Everything's Mark Bittman), which is a nice compact little cheat sheet for those less-inspired moments. My favorites from this list (hopefully the use of the words "jazzy" and "hip" reveal that the commentary below is also Bittman's):

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Mash together best-quality tuna, minced anchovies, minced garlic, chopped oil-cured olives and olive oil as necessary.

Top buttered bread with shaved country ham, prosciutto or regular deli ham and bread-and-butter pickles.

A kind of Moroccan tapenade: As above, but use good green olives with capers; olive-oil-canned tuna (instead of anchovies); garlic, if desired; and cumin.

Beef tartare: Carefully pulse good beef in food processor. For each pound, add an egg, a teaspoon dry mustard, a tablespoon Dijon mustard, a tablespoon Worcestershire, Tabasco to taste, 1/2 cup chopped scallions and a touch of minced garlic. Salt and pepper, if necessary. Amazing stuff.

Cut chorizo into chunks. Cook in a lightly oiled skillet until nicely browned. Kielbasa is equally good (or better), if not as hip.

Even jazzier: Cut just-ripe pears in 1/2-inch cubes; sprinkle with a little salt, sugar and cayenne. Spear with bacon.

Pair crispy bacon chunks with one cube of beet and one of goat cheese.

Rumaki, a 1960s cocktail food that deserves reviving: Brush canned water chestnuts (or chicken liver halves, or crimini mushrooms, or pieces of portobello) with a little soy sauce; wrap in pieces of bacon. Skewer closed with toothpicks and broil, turning once, until bacon is done.

The egg’s gift to cocktail parties: Hard-cook eggs, peel, and cut in half; carefully remove the yolks. Mash yolks with salt, mayonnaise, good mustard and cayenne. You can also add minced radish, snow peas, scallions (or any crunchy vegetables) or curry powder. Spoon back into the whites, sprinkle with paprika, pimentón or parsley.

Even more fabulous: Cook eggs as above. Mash yolks with cooked and minced shrimp, a little chopped olive, minced onion, parsley, salt, pepper and mayonnaise to bind. Spoon back into whites. Garnish with parsley or a piece of anchovy or shrimp.

Popcorn parmigiana: Make real popcorn, pour melted butter over it, and toss with fresh Parmesan.

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