fish cake monkey.

Back in the NL. Happy to be shopping at my same old places again, American grocery store prices are fucking astronomical. $2.99 for a head of cauliflower. $2.99 for 2 twigs of rosemary. $3.99 for a bag of salad greens. I just walked around with my mouth hanging open for about 20 minutes at our local Publix, trying to find anything that didn't cost $2.99 (carrots were the lucky winner). I don't know how people are surviving.

My first dinner at home was another good welcome back moment: Mara's adaptation of saté lilit. She's been making it so often that we had all the necessary ingredients already, and it's easy to see why she's got this fish cake monkey on her back: this stuff is like crack. Made from fish.

Here's the original recipe I posted, but her version adds candlenuts and dried laos (galangal). In fact, she has most often made this with all dried spices, and though it's perhaps not as fragrant as using fresh, it's still definitely fish crack. It's really an excellent weeknight dinner (or breakfast), quick, easy, and cheap (she's been using tilapia or catfish as the protein), and made from ingredients that are completely non-exotic here in Mokum.

















































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saté lilit (fish cake saté).

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2 tbsp peanut oil
500gr mild white fish fillet (cod, tilapia, sea bass, catfish)
5 tbsp shredded unsweetened coconut
1/2 cup thick coconut milk
5 kaffir lime leaves, very thinly sliced

5 shallots, chopped
5 candlenuts, smashed/chopped
1 red Holland chile or 1 tbsp sambal
1 tsp dried galangal (laos)
1 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp brown or palm sugar
1/2 tbsp sliced lemongrass (or 1 tsp dried lemongrass)
2 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
salt to taste


Toast candlenuts gently in medium-hot pan, 5 minutes or so. Add oil to pan and sauté shallots, sambal or chiles, and ground spices until fragrant. Stir in salt, sugar and garlic, remove from heat and allow to cool.

Finely chop fish fillet and combine with shredded coconut, three-quarters of the thick coconut milk and kaffir lime leaves. Stir and mix thoroughly. Add shallot/candlenut mixture and stir to combine thoroughly.

Now you can either form these into cakes or balls and bake them in the oven, or (hypothetically) mold them onto saté skewers and grill them. For the latter, shape 2 tablespoons fish mixture around a saté skewer. Press firmly until it sticks to the skewer. Grill the skewered fish over hot charcoal and brush with remaining coconut milk until cooked. Hypothetically.

Serve with sambal or other chili sauce.

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scattered pictures.

For those of you who don't have enough memorabilia of days gone by around your own house, there's nothing like visiting one of your parents' houses to round out your collection. Above: Mara's first sculpture, from the 70s: The Platypus. Below, something small-scale she did in the 90s (both of these are sitting on the still-unbeatable dining room table she built as well). Bottom: the artist as a young girl.










































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comfort, food.

So, yeah, we're cooking for a wake tonight, my first time. If you're an obsessively overachieving home cook like some people, your first impulse might be to attempt to engineer The Most Comforting Dish of All Time. This is an impulse that should be suppressed. Cook what the families have always eaten at family gatherings: this is probably as close as you're going to get to their most comforting dishes of all time.

This side of the family is half Irish/English and half Italian, but right now the cooking crew is skewed heavily towards the latter kitchen. Tomorrow's table will be filled with sweet Italian sausage and bell peppers, eggplant parmesan, chicken with spinach and prosciutto, grilled vegetables (asparagus, mushrooms, peppers, zucchini), and a big green salad...with a bourbon-enhanced and massively cinnamonized peach crumble and a buttercream-frosted layer cake for dessert.

It will be comforting food for sure, but it might have been even more comforting to have everyone in the kitchen cooking together last night...normally we'll all take a dish, bust it out individually, and come together to serve them, but last night we were all chopping and assembling each other's contributions in a way that seemed as much an expression of support as it did cooking.

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peach crumble with bourbon and cinnamon.

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4 big cans peaches, drained
3 tbsp corn starch
1/4 cup (or a little more) bourbon (we used Maker's Mark)
2 tbsp cinnamon

1 cup flour
250gr butter (2 sticks), cut into small pieces
1/4 cup cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 375F/190C. Butter a baking dish. Slice peaches if not already and toss with cinnamon, sugar, corn starch, and bourbon.

To make topping: combine dry ingredients, then work butter into dry ingredients with hands until mixture resembles a coarse cornmeal. Spread mixture evenly over peaches and bake 40 minutes or until golden brown and bubbly. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

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UPDATE: This dessert was vaporized by the crowd. By the time I got to it, there was one still-warm spoonful left. It's pretty heavenly. I'd like to try it again with some kind of buttermilk ice cream....

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into the fryer.

Just checking in to point out a few things about Atlanta that I miss.

Direct access to New Orleans cooking. The line-up has always been slowly changing, like band members in a band that you like but don't care about the individual personalities in other than the singer (Gipsy Kings spring to mind), but it seems that for decades now, Atlanta has had a modest handful of reasonably authentic Cajun outposts dotting its landscape.

A newish one is AJ's Famous Seafood and Po Boys, located right around the corner from my bunker. They don't have a huge menu, but what they do do, they do right: fresh oysters, fried seafood, red beans and rice, po boys, and muffalettas. Dennis picked up some take-out from AJ's on Friday night for a couple of the Robinson girls, and pictured above is his Godzilla vs. The Fried Tentacle-looking soft-shell crab platter with hush puppies, cole slaw, and fries (the only weak point, they could've been a bit crisper). I had one of these about three weeks ago with red beans and rice instead of fries and it was dee-licious.

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Another thing i miss is Buford Highway. Yesterday we went to the 24-hour Mexican diner El Rey del Taco, and it was like being on vacation for a couple of hours. I didn't bring my camera, but a couple of "real bloggers" have already snapped some visuals for you to peep on (here's Off The Broiler's visit). Very good real Mexican tacos, and since we sat at the counter, an unusually good view of fresh tortillas being made by hand. That's right, to order: you order a taco, she presses a tortilla out and slaps it on the grill.

I grabbed 3 tacos: lengua (yes, tongue), al pastor (spit-roasted pork and beef), and suadero, which the menu described as "flat meat". The suadero was also the best of the three, sauteed in some kind of red-orange sauce that set it apart from the drier and generally more straight-up lengua and al pastor presentations, which just came scattered with cilantro and onions. Although none of this relative dryness really mattered for long: the tacos came with a pile of cut limes and two salsas (one green, one red) for customizing your lubrication (and heat) levels.

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And finally, the other thing I miss about Atlanta? Everyone has a pool table in their basement, and most of them are in much much better condition than the one I played on Friday night (this house used to contain 9 cats and 3 dogs). Luckily the cat hair didn't seem to slow things down too much, neither did the sombrero. This is a picture of me winning 20 bucks.

everything in moderation...

...but some things not at all. Non-destructive compulsions, however, may be indulged in moderately. Contradiction in terms, "moderately compulsive"? Probably.

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I love adverbs. And I enjoy their copious use, at least when I'm doing the writing. I guess you could say I use them copiously (sure you could, if you wanted to be a sarcastic dick). But the way I understand it, as long as this is the case, I am doomed to be an amateurish writer. And yet, a couple of Google hits later in our Search Results, we find this intriguingly (that's an adverb) amateurish adverb smackdown, written by a "professional freelance writer". And exactly how surprising is it that it's amateurish, really? Let's just silently (adverb) marvel at the variety and relative complexity of human expression and call it even.

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Did anyone really believe that the VDuck had been vanquished?

Turns out that this blog is a good way to, like, document your travels? And since I'm in America right now, here are some photographic moments that have occurred inside my camera over the past few weeks.

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So I arrived here in unusually grey-skied Atlanta about a month ago, and hung out on Mara's parents' porch (which used to be our porch, how 'bout that) for a few days...

















well, they let me come inside at night ha ha, and at that point I had a bite of strawberry pie just like Shoney's used to make (maybe they still do):

















Then I went over to Steve's to do a whole bunch of audio archival work (750GB worth), after which we got the old, old gang together and did some successful recording and just plain comic frolicking...






















That's my guitar/percussion station above (!), there are some pretty embarrassing items strewn about if you know what to look for (I'll give you the first one: violin bow).

Our carefully orchestrated recording sessions (not only musically orchestrated, but also from a chemical perspective...as the sober person, I was responsible for gauging when everyone else's intoxication curves met at just the right intersection of creativity and eh, impairment...then I would say, "Quickly...into the studio! 5cc of adrenaline for Steve, 50cc more Scotch for Soules, Stu? Where's Stu? etc.") were punctuated by bouts of equally successful hanging out on Steve's back porch...

















and in a stroke of good fortune, Steve's oven broke at the very beginning of my 10-day stay, so we did ALL of our cooking on the amazingly precise Ducane man-grill pictured above. We cooked everything from cauliflower (40 minutes wrapped in foil) to couscous (6 minutes) on this thing, plus the more obvious victims: pork tenderloin (25 minutes over indirect heat), lamb kebabs (4 minutes per side), eggplant (3 minutes per side), and these awesome hamburgers (5 minutes per side) topped with real Vidalia onions, from this Dominican recipe (minus the sauce). It was all immensely satisfying.

















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Now since I was officially not blogging during this vacation, there were many excellent food explosions that I did not capture with my soul stealer of a camera. Memorial Day's cookout this past weekend, for example, was homemade BBQ: pulled pork shoulder with baked beans, cole slaw, and 17 other things, and it was done right. In fact Jeanie has been on an absolutely scary tear in the kitchen (warm blueberry cobbler yesterday)...it makes me even more proud than usual to be an honorary Tomanek.

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Mmm, yes: Lastly, I should emphasize that this post does not indicate a return to regular blogging. I will be extending a tentative tentacle of Blogness every so often to catch up on shit, but don't be wasting your precious time checking for daily updates or anything, 'cause you'll be disappointed, and we don't want that. Please refer to the title of this post. Comprende?

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My own Exercise in Advanced Cliché above reminded me of a fabulous short story I listened to during our tornado-related power outage last week at Steve's. There's really not too much to do in a big suburban house at night during a tornado-related power outage (you can't really go outside) except either 1) talk to each other (ewww!) or 2) huddle in a corner and wait for your laptop battery to die. Or maybe 3) drink, which I didn't do.

So while I did number 2 (!) for one of the five hours during which we had no power, I listened to some MP3s of some short stories I downloaded from the New Yorker. The nice twist to these recordings is that the stories are selected and read by other New Yorker fiction contributors. By far the best newish story I listened to was "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff. It's only 4 pages (PDF), or 10 minutes long (MP3), the MP3 is read by T. Coraghessan Boyle (he also discusses the story before and after he reads it), so you should check it out. It takes such an unexpected turn in such a short span of time that you're left with an emotion that's an unusual mix of nostalgia and surprise. Plus it's not very amateurish at all.

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friday night tomato tasting.

This post was a draft from 2006 or 2008 or something. I'm finally publishing it because it documents the beginnings of what I've come to think of as "my red sauce", even though it's totally Clare's red sauce.

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Last week Clare called and asked where would I get tomatoes if I were making a tomato-crayfish soup for a dinner and the tomatoes needed to be righteous. And I, only knowing what I read on eGullet, said "Well, I'd use canned instead of fresh, and I'd go to Caulils and get some San Marzanos." And after some further dicking about we hung up.

Afterwards, I started thinking that hmm I bet those San Marzanos are pretty expensive. And it's not like the tomatoes I normally use are bad, in fact I think they're pretty good, I get them from the Turkish guys. And even the Italian ones from the Dirk aren't bad. And then I started feeling bad that I sent her off to buy these luxury tomatoes when Dirk would've done. And THEN I started thinking what do I really know about tomatoes anyway.

This is all just to give you the hypothetical reader an insight into the nitty-gritty of my vast, nearly inhuman intellect. THEN, this week we were talking and I asked Clare how the San Marzanos had worked out and she said they had a "great depth of flavor", but her vast, nearly inhuman intellect had been wondering how much better they really were than the other Italian brand at Caulils for half the price, or for that matter: how much better were they than the priced-to-sell Italian tomatoes at our local budget grocery store? Hmm...great minds do think alike.

So Clare suggested that a tasting was in order, and this is one of the many reasons to love Clare. Her plan was to use the simplest possible tomato sauce recipe, something she referred to as pasta napoli (more on this eventually), from which we'd make 3 versions of the sauce, each with a different brand of tomatoes. The contestants: Agrigenus San Marzano (2.50/can); Mutti (1.20/can); and the Dirk van der Broek's brand called:


















Yes. And Mara costs 0.19 cents per can. Let the jokes begin.

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Although I wish we'd had more standardized cooking equipment to test with, or just the tiniest bit of experience with the scientific method in general, I think we came to some conclusions that are based at least partially in fact. All sorts of details will follow when I get to them, but the upshot is: a 2.50 euro can of tomatoes is very different from a 0.19 cent can of tomatoes, but you don't need to spend 2.50 euro on a can of tomatoes.



































easy red sauce. 

So for each can of tomatoes you use, you add to the pan: 1 small glug of red wine, 1 clove of garlic, 1 bay leaf, 1 glug of olive oil, 1 grind of black pepper and 1 pinch of salt or smoked salt. And maybe 1 pinch of smoked paprika if you feel spicy. Oh and 1 tsp of sugar towards the end. So just do this for every can of tomatoes, I usually do 2 or 4. Here's 2.

2 cans cheap canned whole tomatoes
2 glugs of decent red wine
2 cloves garlic, peeled
2 small bay leaves
2 glugs good olive oil
2 tsp unrefined sugar

Put everything except the sugar in a saucepan on the lowest heat possible. Let it cook until the tomatoes fall apart, this usually takes 60-90 minutes for the Dirk's tomatoes. After 45 minutes add the sugar, and after 15 more minutes start tasting for salt and sugar levels.

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korte pauze.

As you may have noticed, post frequency has been dropping gradually over the past few months, for a lot of reasons. I'd love to go into the gory details, but then again I don't have any idea how much time it would take to do so, so I can't.

I will say instead: I'm taking an official break from frequent blogging here, for at least a few months weeks, I can't really say. Thanks for reading, commenting, paying attention in general....and hopefully see you again after the summer soon, when we're all tan, skinny, hungry, etc. And we'll all be like peas in a pod again.

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Oh, yeah: tonight's rehabilitation meal: tiny 5-minute steaks with homemade A-1 sauce (store-bought apple chutney + Worcestershire sauce, 2:1 ratio) and garden-fresh kapucijners from Klary's source with a little butter and prosciutto. Couldn't ask for a much better-feeling early summer dinner. The peas were so good that I almost stuck my fork through the side of my mouth trying to get them in there.

walnut-powered.

I had one of those mornings where I once again thanked myself (and the other decision-makers involved) profusely for never having children. I am just not cut out for dispensing patient, gentle understanding to lesser-evolved and/or more helpless creatures than myself before noon.

Especially if I haven't slept well. Case in point: I wake up at 5:58am to the incessant yowling of one chubby calico cat (who is now rubbing up against my leg). I groggily acknowledge that 5 hours of sleep is not going to be enough for today, but sadly there are enough undesirable items on today's todo list that my mind is already being invaded by them and I know I won't get back to sleep. So fuck it, I'm a big boy, etc. I get up and feed the cat(s).

Except there's no dry food. Fine. That just means that we have a Gourmet Treat of canned food, tuna. Which makes everyone happy when they hear the can. Extremely happy, so much so in fact that Chubb Rock eats hers so fast that I don't notice she's eating Jo3n's as well until it's almost all gone.

Sigh. Ah, kids...they can be so cute. I stamp my foot once to remind Chubb how many dishes of food she's supposed to eat per meal, and she gallops away like a bloated squirrel. OK. Mission accomplished. Now: coffee. I hear the rhythmic gurgling of the coffee machine doing its thing, and I imagine a nice, steaming hot cup of...wait a minute. I didn't turn the coffee on. Say...that's not the coffeepot! It's....yes! The sound of a cat that has eaten too much too quickly, a sound which directly precedes the sound of 73 papertowels being ripped off of their dispenser and the Tourette's-style cursing of a crabby, crabby cat owner. Good morning!

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elsewhere.

There is an almost complete lack of cooking and/or thinking about food going on here. Unusual, but understandable: my Double Headphones Project incurred some sort of crippling software corruption disease and required a couple days of highly manual reconstructive surgery. Which sucked, but seems to have (fingers crossed) worked.

If you've ever experienced a corrupt Word or Excel document you have some idea of the angst that ensued. If you've ever worked for months on a constantly-changing document, say a thesis or dissertation, or software development project, something to which you've made literally thousands of edits, carefully backing it up as you went, and still had it suddenly fuck up fatally and mysteriously as your deadline swiftly approached, you've got an even better idea of the panic.

What sort of food is best served under these circumstances? You'd be surprised: broccoli, cauliflower, tempeh, and tofu have been the staples during Emergency Week.

What we're not eating? The Lady's Brunch Burger pictured above. Yes, those are glazed donuts.

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macaron noir.

The talented yet thoughtful Klary thankfully responded to my perpetual lack of macarons by providing us with a healthy sample from Pâtisserie Tout. They weren't even leftover from her Macaron Smackdown a few days earlier, they were brand-new (at least that's what she told us)...that's the kind of gal she is.

And, I enjoyed the holy heck out of them, frankly. My favorite was the cassis (+ maybe white chocolate?), and the pistachio was also very pleasant. Mara liked the strawberry, and I thought the chocolate one was just kind of good.

Mostly, though, it felt like a certain kind of completion to finally have a real macaron in front of me and not have to have gone to France to do it. Thanks!

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yay masa/no mas.

We've had a slightly dreamlike few days of cooking, eating, drinking. socializing, etc. Dreamlike in a good way, including last night's extra-dreamy tamales, but I now need a few days of returning to reality, so will catch up with you once that's been achieved.

What you're looking at here is the final assembly of the shrimp and basil tamales by our esteemed colleagues Klary and Dennis. Yes, we made our dinner guests assemble their own dinner. But, you'll agree, right?: one of the coolest things about cooking for other people, and especially cooking for other people who come from previously faraway lands, is the opportunity to make for them something that is somehow comfortingly familiar and yet absolutely unlike anything they've ever tasted before. Even better is revealing how un-secret and essentially simple the construction process is, and a tamale is a nearly perfect teacher in this regard.

These tamales in particular taste like the essence of southwestern cooking to me. Mostly due to the BBQ sauce in the masa dough and the smoked mozzarella added to the filling. This may sound like a smoke overload, but to me at least the end result is quite subtle and mysterious. The marinade for the shrimp also adds some sneaky complexity: hazelnut oil, lime juice, and rosemary.

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fun with foodism.

You're looking at my favorite item from last night's soirée: that's right, a quiche. Not just any quiche, but a totally unexciting and overexposed quiche: the spinach, red pepper, and feta quiche that we threw together at the last minute when it seemed like too many people might be coming.

But even though everything else we cooked came out as well as or better than expected, the last leftover bite of this quiche was what I was eating at the end of the night.

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spinach, red pepper, and feta quiche.

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1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 handful fresh spinach, chopped
5 eggs, beaten
1/2-3/4 cup feta, crumbled
freshly cracked pepper
bladerdeeg


Line a tart pan with crust, bake to set. Actually you don't even need a recipe for this thing, do you. This is just so we remember the proportions. And the temperature. 170C. For 30 minutes.

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too haute.

Right. So if you're one of the people who is eating at our place this week and you want to be utterly surprised when your food shows up in front of you, you may want to stop reading now. I leave the decision in your hands.

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Above: tamale dough for shrimp and basil tamales. Below: those homemade chipotles en adobo I was talking about a few posts back for a top secret duck adventure.

I'm also working on integrating a Dutch coldcut into my southwestern cooking. It's basically very thinly sliced (what I believe is) cold-smoked beef, and it matches up especially well with this prune thing I've been making. Here's the question: is it too fusion-y to make a smoked beef quesadilla with prune, shallot, and pine nut preserve? And if not, what cheese/salsa combination are we talking about? I'm thinking goat cheese and pico de gallo. Let me "run some tests".

THE ANSWER: Smoked beef, goat cheese, prune/shallot/pine nut stuff makes for an excellent quesadilla. It's very rich, so you need to cut into small slivers. And you probably need to saute the smoked beef first before putting it in a tortilla, because it seems to give up a good bit of fat when heated. And I'm using flour tortillas for this one b/c corn is just a little distracting.

prepping.

Lack of interesting posts around here b/c we've programmed ourselves into a jam-packed schedule and there's not a lot of room for true leisure, which seems to be the heading under which "blogging" falls.

Thus instead of blog posts we get shopping lists and vacuuming. Which I guess is good, it was time for that yearly Spring Cleaning thing where we try really really hard to get rid of some stuff. But we're so bad at getting rid of things. I have a hard time even throwing away leftovers.

But anyway. This week we have: a day of shopping and cleaning (today); a day of Italianish cooking for 10; an evening of attempted southwesternizing for some new neighbors; rehearsals with a new band (a minimalist electric guitar quintet, which sounds frightening, but the other members are all pretty cool players). Plus hopefully some serious progress on the Double Headphone Project.

Here's a test run of a timballo di melanzane I'll be making on Tuesday. We wanted to see if we could do an eggplant parmigiano in some form factor other than a big casserole that you scoop out lunchlady-style. Still not sure we got it right, but it tastes good: a ton of basil and very light coating-free frying sets it apart from traditional, heavy Italian-American eggplant parm.





































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UPDATE: Of course it's Poverty Emulation Day at the Dirk: no canned tomatoes on the shelves, and no flour. Did we catch them off guard by showing up to shop? I actually love this because it would never happen in America.

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in the mood for love.

This is a reminder to myself to remix the Tetsuo: The Iron Man soundtrack for my next DJ set. And to buy some hot dogs.

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google taunt: "albert heijn" and "guacamole".

Just to jot down a couple of things I keep meaning to write about, kind of in the vein of last week's vegetable soup horse meatballs:

Albert Heijn is now selling their own "guacamole". If I hadn't already thrown away the container of it I bought, I'd do a review with photos here. Why did I purchase it at all? Mmm, yes. Let's call it curiosity.

And hope. The first ingredient was avocado, and there weren't too too many other ingredients on the list. This made my dangling tentacle of optimism tingle with hope (please refer to the Pandora's Box entry from last month for the backstory on hope). But taste-wise...yeah. Not anything like guacamole.

But...not really quite like anything else, either. Most European guacamoles at least taste like creamy salad dressings or green-tinted creme fraiche, something you've seen before. This was alien and completely inorganic-seeming, like something you might use somewhere in your automobile. Or spaceship. AH, please reconsider.

Here's a good guac recipe.

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Also on the list of "items to be processed": the inconsistency or evolution of Marqt; Dulce de Leche from De Avondmarkt and how perfectly it combines with peanut butter and bananas (similarly, why do white chocolate and salted hazelnuts combine so complementarily?); how easy it is to lose your picnicking chops over the winter and completely botch your first outing of the season (no knife, no mayonnaise, no salt, no plates); what to make this coming Tuesday for a hungry band of musicians...we're doing focaccias but I would love to have some other warm options, something like lasagna or baked eggplant, but lighter....need to borrow Andy's Marcella Hazan book...

Um...let's see: why the amateur big band that practices in our basement every Thursday NEVER EVER GETS ANY BETTER. They are still playing the same songs they were when we moved in, and Holy God Up Above, they are no closer to being in tune or rhythm or in touch with any of the base characteristics of music in general. Have you ever heard the Thai Elephant Orchestra? They're way better than these guys.

ALSO: Secret notation for Mara. Squeak By Scim vs. Good Luck Pumper. IHLOFWYT. WLAL. GMAB. Remember!

PHOTO: This is focaccia dough with one half prune, onion, and pine nut confit and the other half romesco sauce and manchego cheese.

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be little with me.

My BIMhuis debut was fine, thank you, and now I may return to the occasional musing over matters culinary. Unox vegetable soup contains meatballs made from horse. Just wanted to throw that in there. Maybe that was their thinking as well ("Hey, Jos, we still got some of them horse meatballs sitting around? Yip. Well what say we just chuck 'em right on into this here vegetable soup? Sure thing, boss. And throw in a cup of MSG while you're at it. And see them squirrels out back? Yes, boss...etc.").

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A brief technology moment/rant/exorcism: Mara got a new laptop today, which is cause for minor celebration. Her old one was a hand-me-down that (out of spite no doubt) had long ago given up any aspirations about being "a good laptop", somehow managing to constantly overheat while not actually doing any useful work. This new one is our first non-Dell computer purchase EVER in our history of computer buying, because the Dell Inspiron laptops we bought in the years 2000-2005 were seriously awful (this excludes my current Dell laptop, which has been a joy to work with thus far, probably because it's not an Inspiron).

And so here, to cast out the toxic detritus from my aura, I'd like to send out a brief but wholly sincere "fuck you" to Dell for years of deliberately not acknowledging the heat-related engineering problems with the Inspirons so that they wouldn't have to do a recall and/or couldn't be sued. Nice one. "Good job." Anyway, the new member of the family is an Acer Aspire. Wish us luck.

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Sometimes when Mara is working on something around the dinner hour, I like to pepper her with tiny sandwiches. That's what these are: the pointy ends of a baguette cut into petite crostini about an inch wide. Top: mushroom oil and manchego; above is goat cheese, chives, and half-dried tomato. Not shown are the two most successful ones: romesco, mint, and manchego; goat cheese and prune/onion confit.

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And to close, a Scotland moment entitled Attack of the Future Meatballs:

birds of paradise.

Today I am making my own chipotles en adobo. I'm not smoking the peppers or anything, I'm just taking dried chipotles and simmering them for
an hourtwo hoursthree hours with vinegar, onions, garlic, lots of water, and a top secret tomatoey ingredient, after which point I should have the equivalent of a couple cans' worth of useful chipotles.

Today's a good day to do it b/c Mara is out of the house, and though she likes chipotles, she's quite sensitive to chile fumes. I myself am not, so I'm always surprised when she starts coughing and spluttering like she's just run out of a burning building.

Normally this re-ack-tion happens even when I'm doing things correctly in the kitchen, but the last time was especially bad, actually one of my worst kitchen fuckups ever: I was toasting a whole sheet of guajillo chiles in the oven. And for some reason, I still don't know what happened, I set the timer for 8 minutes instead of 2 minutes.

Um, don't ever do this. Dried chiles are...dry. And thin, and prone to blackening very quickly if unattended, and the smoke they emit could be classified as a chemical weapon.

Pictures later. For now, I give you a photo of the two men who opened my mind to the pretty profound amazingness of seriously well-written modern poetry: the oft-cited Terrill Soules and my 2nd-favorite poet, Mark Strand. Here's an MP3 of a nice interview with Mr. Strand that begins with him reciting one of his poems from memory (after he talks about not being able to remember many poems anymore), and then he reads a fucking ruthlessly ruthless poem by May Swenson at the 17-minute mark that you shouldn't listen to too late at night.

Also: I present one of my favorite of Mr. Strand's poems to you here.

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ALWAYS

Always so late in the day
In their rumpled clothes, sitting
Around a table lit by a single bulb,
The great forgetters were hard at work.
They tilted their heads to one side, closing their eyes.
Then a house disappeared, and a man in his yard
With all his flowers in a row.
The great forgetters wrinkled their brows.
Then Florida went and San Francisco
Where tugs and barges leave
Small gleaming scars across the Bay.
One of the great forgetters struck a match.
Gone were the harps of beaded lights
That vault the rivers of New York.
Another filled his glass
And that was it for crowds at evening
Under sulphur yellow streetlamps coming on.
And afterwards Bulgaria was gone, and then Japan.
"Where will it stop?" one of them said.
"Such difficult work, pursuing the fate
Of everything known," said another.
"Down to the last stone," said a third.
"And only the cold zero of perfection
Left for the imagination." And gone
Were North and South America,
And gone as well the moon.
Another yawned, another gazed at the window:
No grass, no trees...
The blaze of promise everywhere.

~Mark Strand

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LATER: I give you a picture now, but not of the chipotles, which took forever to soften. The adobo itself was ready after the first hour, but I had to keep adding water and simmering in order to get the chiles to become even remotely unleatherlike.

The picture I am giving you now is to remind me of this great little Asian bite I've been eating lately when I find myself thinking something fried sounds good. I also think that it's completely servable to guests, which is worth my noting because we always have a hard time thinking of bite-size appetizers.

Basically, it's fried tofu or tempeh with okonomiyaki sauce. Or tonkatsu sauce, or even oyster sauce mixed with a little ketchup. Or ketchup with ketjap manis added. Basically you're looking for a thick sweet sauce with a vinegary component. Though tofu and tempeh are both soy products, they have very different flavor profiles: tempeh heads in a more nutty mineral direction, while tofu makes for the creamy blandness side of things.

So for this reason tofu needs a bit of an assist that tempeh doesn't. Enter furikake, the Japanese sesame seed/seaweed/infinitely diverse other ingredient sprinkle that we tend to use a lot of around here (eG thread here). Really the way to do this is to fry your tofu, blot it, give it a brushing with whatever sauce you're using and then sprinkle it with furikake. I myself was having this snack while my morning coffee was brewing and therefore did not have the foresight to sauce-then-sprinkle. I sprinkled-then-sauced (tee-hee).

And of course since there was a component that had a fish element in it (furikake), the royal taster showed up to make sure I didn't need any help.

help. please.

Something hideous is going on in my basement (?). It's an unlikely mix of two especially unpleasant sounds: on the street, it sounds like 50 eight-year old boys are being pulled apart limb from limb like roasted chickens by some remorseless and hungry satanic beast. I sympathize with his motives and support his efforts, I just wish he would finish the job: the screaming has been going on for about 3 hours now. And in the music venue, there's some kind of long-winded bluesrockmetal band playing almost-familiar tunes at a magical frequency that is oozing through our walls and floorboards and all over me.

I was being productive, practicing in Andy's room (he's out of town), but the band was louder than I was. So I gave up and came back to my room, but right now they're louder than the TV that is on to drown them out. And on TV it's Eten met Bianca, but even her potent cuteness wandering around the Rungis market (largest wholesale market in the world) isn't enough to soothe my aggravated sensibilities.

Ah, I just went to the website to find out what it is: a birthday party for parents of an elementary school in our neighborhood. The parents are the band, which explains why the kids are all outside in the street. They call their style of music "kleuterpop", which is a new term for me. It has something to do with teenybopper music, but what I'm hearing right now sounds like ZZ Top. Music for aged, bearded teenyboppers. Can anyone make any sense of this?

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that explains it.

As someone who revels in the grammar-rule-thwarting creative possibilities of profanity, I'm generally unamused when uptight people begin to autoclench in the presence of the unholy word. I'm also tinily depressed when otherwise intelligent-seeming people expend a lot of effort arguing that cursing is a "crutch" to hide the fact that one can't think of anything truly creative to say. To which I of course unimaginatively say, "bullshit".

So it was with intrigue and a measure of satisfaction that I read Steven Pinker's highly informative piece on human swearing called What the F***. Join me, won't you?

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The screencaps here are from a movie that wouldn't be the same without its bad words, Me and You and Everyone We Know.

))<>((.

Forever.

¡cocina!

As The Hypothetical You will recall, a few weeks ago I went through a re-immersion into my old Mark Miller cookbooks and ate chipotles every day, etc. etc. etc.

(By the way: this "etc. etc. etc." thing you see here is pronounced "ect ect ect", in tribute to [the formerly very funny but now crippled by stardom-related pressures] Angry Alien's Amy's Diary animation. The November 2 entry should clear this up.)

One cookbook that I totally spaced on was ¡cocina!, by Leland Atkinson, which may have been the first southwestern cookbook I actually bought, having (now that I remember) stolen the Coyote Cafe cookbook from my poor parents.

The Atkinson book is attractive and educational, packed with instructional segments and non-autopsy-looking photography (unlike the Coyote Cafe book). There aren't really that many recipes, maybe 40 or 50, but I don't think we've ever cooked anything disappointing out of it. And it contains some of our very favorite recipes of all time, one or two of which we'll be revisiting in a couple weeks for some non-southwesterners.

The reason I mention all of this is to remind myself to pick up another copy of this book whilst Amazon has it listed for 0.52 cents (in US dollars, which I think is too insignificant to even be converted to Euros. I think probably just looking at or thinking about a Euro coin is worth 0.52 US dollars at this point).

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antisleep.

Good afternoon everyone. No time for blogging at the moment: it's the crush of the music season, everyone is either recording, playing, or releasing music like there's no tomorrow. Well, at least they're playing like there's no tomorrow. There wouldn't be much call for recording and releasing music if we found ourselves in a "no tomorrow" situation.

Yes'm, that's what you get for using lazy cliches: utter nonsense. Welcome. We are operating under a sleep deficit, people. We've gotten hilariously bad at getting a good night's sleep if we have early morning appointments, and we both did both of those today (early appointment, bad sleep).

On my way home from mine (early appointment), I stopped at the much-ballyhooed Marqt for the first time (here are some photos of Marqt from someone's Flickr account). My initial impression was that I liked it but I found myself not buying much when I was there. The produce was not so amazing, though they did have fresh papaya, chervil, sorrel, thai basil, and a couple other things that you don't see too often here. Little minus: only one chile pepper variety, which is disappointing.

The highlights were the fish, meat, and cheese counters. There was some really gorgeous fish, and with lots of smoked options and homemade fish salads (instead of the ubiquitous industrial brands like Johma). I bought some good-looking wild salmon which wasn't outrageously pricey, and couple of pieces of cheese for Mara, a Taleggio called La Cascina, and something called The Red Love of Antoine (pictured above). For those of you silently noting the "light food" and "cheese" incongruity, all I can say is that these are very small pieces of cheese. Small and "light".

Ultimately, I guess I would've considered doing more of my daily shopping at Marqt, but most of what I buy these days other than fish and Surinamese condiments is produce, and I was not totally blown away by theirs.

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Elsewhere, for dinner tonight I'm adapting a recipe from Lang Leve Vis!, and it seems like it might work out well. Just to remind myself of how it goes together, it was something cooked in smoked butter, but since we're lightening things I thought I'd put the butter somewhere more controllable: a sambal/butter mixture that just gets "dotted" here and there, 1 tbsp per plate maybe. And another tbsp of butter for the salmon itself. The sweet and sour leeks were really easy and they're delicious. Let you know what happens with the whole thing...

UPDATE: If I were a real foodblogger? I would never let you see this separated sauce. But this is what happens when real life intervenes. You plate, the phone rings, your sauce separates, and you briefly consider de-plating your dish and re-whizzing your sauce, until you realize that that's utterly, unhealthily insane.

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pimenton-dusted wild salmon.
lemongrass broth, sweet and sour leeks, sambal butter.

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UPDATE II: The results were OK, but I think I'll use the individual components in other preparations instead of making this again...not really my style. It probably would've come together better if I'd served it with potato mash, but, really...we could say that about many dishes.

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