jen and ken and martha.

"bali burgers".

Many years ago, well around 1996 or so, some very good friends had a dinner party. More of a cookout kind of thing involving a charcoal grill. The male component of these friends is a creative, brilliant man, my favorite nearly-unknown poet in the world. He has a love of complexity, and can get lost in its nooks and crannies for, well, let's say a lifetime. Add to this a certain dreamy scatterbrainedness (which I myself share), and what you end up with is a force to be reckoned with in the kitchen.

His meals tend to be improbably ambitious in scope and uniquely intriguing in concept, but their execution occurs in its own specialized segment of space and time, a hilariously disorganized and utterly chaotic lab staffed by dog run's worth of surrealist chefs.

But on the night in question, we were all blown away by something he made that he called Bali Burgers. Our boy has an ongoing fascination/love with Indonesian culture, see...and a deep relationship with the New York Times. So when the NYT published an Indonesian travelogue along with some recipes, he was all over it.

Like a lot of Asian food, Indonesian recipes can be very time-consuming if you're making everything from scratch. I have no idea how much prep time had been invested before we showed up, definitely hours, maybe days. And, to add to the degree of difficulty, he would be grilling fish, which requires an attentive eye. I don't precisely remember what went wrong during the grilling process...it was about 11pm by this point, but what I thought I remembered was that he took the fish fillets that had completely flaked apart and disintegrated on the grill, and formed balls/patties out of them. And served them with some sort of sambal thingie on top. And they were one of the best things I'd eaten up to that point in my life.

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This meal was filed away under "vaguely recollectable good times" and had gradually become a bit legendary because the fish was truly superlative. So I recently set off on a grand quest for the NYT article. Which ended approximately 8 seconds later when Google Desktop found it in my email archives from 1998. Handy, that.

Having tracked down the source article, our situation becomes a bit more like an episode of CSI: Atlanta, but without Marg Hellenberger's Botoxed lips cracking wise...trying to piece together exactly what may have occurred at the grill station. There are several fish recipes in the article, and the Bali Burger recipe itself doesn't involve a grill. D'oh. It looks like what he actually made was lilit satay.

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TSS' NYT "bali burgers" seafood marinade.

10 large red Thai chilies, seeded and chopped
6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
15 shallots, peeled and chopped
1 4-inch piece fresh turmeric, peeled and chopped, or 1 1/2 teaspoons ground turmeric
1 medium tomato, skinned and seeded
1 4-inch piece ginger, peeled and chopped
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
10 candlenuts
1 teaspoon dried shrimp paste
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 stalks lemongrass, peeled and bruised
1 teaspoon palm sugar
2 tablespoons tamarind paste
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1. In a food processor, combine the chilies, garlic, shallots, turmeric, tomato, ginger, coriander, candlenuts and shrimp paste. Process until the ingredients are well ground but not pureed.

2. In a medium-size saute pan, heat the oil over medium heat and add the chili mixture, lemongrass and palm sugar. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature. Remove the lemongrass stalks and stir in the tamarind paste and salt. Use as a marinade for seafood and as a condiment. Store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to three weeks.

Yield: 2 1/4 cups.

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lilit satay.

1 10-ounce sea bass fillet or other firm-fleshed white fish, skin removed
12 medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
3/4 cup desiccated, unsweetened coconut flakes
1/2 cup sambal mentah (see recipe)
5 lime leaves, sliced very fine
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons salt
5 small green-bird chilies, very finely chopped
2 tablespoons brown sugar
16 6-inch lengths lemongrass, or 16 bamboo skewers immersed in water for 30 minutes.

1. In a food processor, combine the fish and shrimp and process until finely minced. Transfer to a bowl, add the remaining ingredients, except the lemongrass, and mix well.

2. Prepare a charcoal grill or preheat a broiler. Mound a heaping tablespoon of the seafood mixture over one end of the lemongrass, forming a somewhat flattened cylinder. Or for the skewers, mound 1 tablespoon of the mixture around each one. Grill or broil, turning once, until the fish is lightly browned and just cooked through, about 6 minutes. Serve immediately.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

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sambal mentah.

15 shallots, peeled, halved and very finely sliced
4 garlic cloves, halved and very finely sliced
15 small green-bird chilies, seeded and finely chopped
5 lemon or lime leaves, very finely sliced
4 stalks lemongrass, very finely sliced
1 teaspoon shrimp paste
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper.

Combine all the ingredients in a deep bowl and stir with a wooden spoon for 5 minutes. Use as a condiment and as an ingredient in seafood dishes. Store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to three weeks.

Yield: 2 1/4 cups.

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practicing, take-out.

Since it's been a weekend of rehearsal, set-up, performance, break-down, set-up, performance, there was no time to cook. Take-out was the obvious solution, but we couldn't agree on what. So, we ended up with Thai appetizers from Top Thai, previously mentioned below, and something from Long Chie, a Chinese-Surinamese restaurant across the street. There's never anyone in there so I was a bit wary, but their Ma-Po Tofu (pictured above) is definitely at least OK...and their fried rice:

















passed the rather strict technical requirements of our in-house specialist (mt).

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titties and beer.

Andy's birthday was last Sunday, and this year 's festive congress was held at Da Damiano, a very attractive Italian on the Jan Pieter Heijestraat opposite OT301. The guests came b(e)aring all sorts of gifts; the kitchen came bearing a lovely antipasti platter of thinly sliced salumi and a great vitello tonnato, and then I ordered the fregola con vongole:

















Which was perfectly toothsome and clammy (here's an eGullet thread about Sardinian cooking that touches on fregola). Another good if not amazing Italian, very slow service but the wholly pleasant scenery and decent house wine makes you not mind so very darn much.

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ageist.

I am now offically old: I really truly like prunes more all the time. This morning I made "real" (as in not instant) oatmeal with maple syrup, pistachios, cinnamon, a little nutmeg, and yes, prunes. And the prunes were my favorite part. After Thursday's gig, I'll include pictures, charts, graphs, etc. to follow, documenting every aspect of my ancientness.

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LYSN: 12 July, 21:30, OT301

A concert of psychedelic drone music influenced by Angelo Badalamenti, Cluster, Gil Evans, Electric Wizard, Matmos, George Russell, Public Image Limited, Slug, Spacemen 3, Velvet Underground. LYSN is a band with a continuously changing line up started by Hilary Jeffery. The musicians play a wide range of acoustic, hybrid and electronic instruments, improvising and interpreting graphical scores to create powerful new music.

Eric Boeren - trumpet
Alfredo Genovesi - guitar + electronics
Franz Hautzinger - trumpet
Ulrike Helmholz - voice + electronics
Gerri Jager - drums
Hilary Jeffery - trombone / tromboscillator
David Kweksilber - bass saxophone + clarinet
Ralf Meinz - electronics
Mark Morse - guitar + sampler

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brutti ma buoni.

Two words: chilequiles rojo. Torn down and reconstructed, expat-style.

1. Make some perfect "basic black beans" (lots of cumin and garlic, also bay leaves, oregano, epazote, a couple of toasted and seeded whole guajillo chiles, tiny pinches of allspice, cinnamon, and clove. Cook for an hour or more until beans are almost done, then add chopped canned tomatoes, remove guajillos, puree them, and add back into beans, cook for 30 more minutes or until done, salt to taste).
2. Make a thin mole rojo (I did mine with pecan as the nut, ancho as the chile, and a shot of maple syrup instead of plantain as the sweetener). Recipe to follow.
3. Lightly crunch up a bag of tortilla chips (meaning don't pulverize it) and soak the pieces in the mole for 10 minutes or so.
4. Line a baking dish with the mole-soaked chips. Grate a thin layer of medium-young goat cheese over this.
5. Then spread a thick layer of the black beans on top of the rest.
6. Chop a sweet onion fine and add a layer of this.
7. Add a thin layer of mole if you've got some left.
8. Then grate some more goat cheese on top, or use another mild white cheese like haloumi.
9. Bake for 20 minutes, broiling the top if'n you want.
10. While it's baking, throw together a pico di gallo, let it sit for 15 minutes or so, strain, and toss/sprinkle this over the top when it comes out, and serve.

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ETA: In my haste to congratulate myself last night, I may have oversimplified the "recipe" above. And I should re-emphasize that this is chilequiles in name and ingredients only: the presentation is 100% dense potluck casserole, I guess Cooking Light would call it Quik 'n Eazy Barely Cheezy Chilequiles Pie or something. But, if you're a careful layerer it can look pretty when cut. I myself am not such a careful layerer.

I made this for a dinner party last night whose guest of honor was a roasted kid (goat, that is). This was supposed to be a side dish or vegetarian main. It is almost as dense as it looks (pictured above is a cold and therefore denser-looking leftover piece), but it's still very healthy-feeling, there's almost no fat in it except for the cheese. And the tortilla chips.

Anyway, there are some fine tweaks that make a big difference: a little mint and a fresh clove of garlic in your pico de gallo, and straining the pico after it sits for a bit; a couple of guajillo chiles in your beans, etc. The biggest question we had over here was: how would the tortilla chips work texturally? I was hoping that they would disintegrate into the mole and end up something like a tamale crust and that's pretty much what happened.

Here's the mole recipe, designed to emulate the flavors of a real, day-long mole by using cheats on top of cheats. The sesame oil actually works, if you add it at the beginning. There are so many shortcuts in here that (colorful hyperbolic statement goes here). Note: watch your salt on this, because the the tortilla chips are salty themselves.

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quick 'n lazy mole rojo.

3 ancho chiles, toasted for 1 minute per side in a sautepan
1 guajillo chile, toasted for 1 minute per side in a sautepan
1-2 cups vegetable broth, boiling hot
8 cloves garlic, pressed
3/4 cup pecans, toasted

1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tbsp ground cumin
1-2 tbsp roasted sesame oil or walnut oil if you don't believe me about the sesame oil

1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp pimenton
1 tsp allspice
1 tbsp good Dutch cocoa powder
1 tbsp maple syrup or a bit more if you're like me
salt to taste

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OK! Pour the boiling vegetable broth over the chiles to cover and hope that your chiles don't generate bitter chile water. Let them sit for 15-20 minutes in the broth, then remove them (reserving the broth) and puree them with the garlic and pecans, adding broth to facilitate if necessary.

In a wok or similar, toast the oregano and cumin for 30-60 seconds until just fragrant. Add sesame oil, stir to incorporate toasted spices, then add garlic-chile puree and saute everything for a minute or so until the garlic gives you "that smell" (but not That Smell).

Stir the reserved broth into the chile puree mixture, then add the cinnamon and remaining ingredients. Salt to taste, and simmer for 30 minutes or so. The main goal here is to mellow the garlic and reduce the sauce slightly. You're going for a consistency that is barely thinner than a standard tomato sauce. This recipe should make a cup or two of faux-mole.

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kweekvlees, or: yes, i fucking ate this.

I've just about recovered from the dish pictured above, and the picture really only tells half the story. This was the first "controversial appetizer" served at the Voedsel, Kunst, and Wetenschap symposium at Utrecht's Centraal Museum Friday night. The thrust of the evening's programme was to examine the issues surrounding stem cell-derived cultivated meat, or kweekvlees, and to serve some artful and, yes, controversial preparations of "kweekvlees-inspired dishes". Since I couldn't stay for the whole symposium, I missed the explanation of what was actually in these dishes, from a flesh perspective. I approached them from the perspective that they were lab meat, which was much somehow more challenging than the truth.

The first one was actually controversial, in that I experienced a personal controversy over how much of it I could actually eat. It's a marrow bone, but something about the presentation of this dish led to a deceleration of my enthusiasm, perhaps it was the clear, em..."juice" oozing onto my hand as I held it. But I could've carried through I think if there'd been enough salt to enhance the fattiness of the gooey contents, but as it was...(I'm trying to be kind here)....sigh. Let's just call it controversial.

















The second bite of the evening was completely and thankfully enjoyably edible: bloedworst with a sweet apple vinaigrette. Nice. And then...I had to leave to get back to OT301. Good thing I'd had a bite to eat beforehand with Ed and NICOLE (whose name will be typed in capital letters until I can be sure that I'll never ever forget it again) at Pronto Pronto: duck rilettes and a bruschetta sampler with seared tuna and tapenade, taleggio, and a few cured meat combos. Very tasty, and substantial enough to where I wasn't even sitting there all starving on my way back to Amsterdam. Ultimately, however, it proved to not be enough of a belly ballast for the evening's beer consumption...morning came early the next day.

















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P.S. If, like me, you've been trying to figure out if Sonic Youth is still trying hard enough to age gracefully, here's your answer.

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vlees-less.

It seems that the end of the music season has generated a sudden thunderclap of social activity...everyone has apparently been pretty busy for the last couple of months, and is now ready to blow off some steam. Unfortunately the weather has been generating some (ha HA!) thunderclaps of its own lately, so obvious summertime venues such as the Westerpark or our rooftop remain impractical at the moment. Hopefully (I think...maybe a little less hot than last year would be nice) that will change soon.

What this means immediately for me is that it's time to create another one of my semi-annual lists of vegetarian dishes that I will probably never actually cook. In order to fail less substantially, I'll only list something that I'm planning on "cooking" for a dinner on Tuesday. I got this recipe from somewhere embarrassing, but the reviews of it were unanimously excellent.

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summer fruit and fire-roasted peppers with chimichurri.

fruit
1/4 cup diced pineapple
1/4 cup diced watermelon
1/4 cup seedless green grapes, halved
1/4 cup diced cantaloupe
1/4 cup diced roasted red peppers

chimichurri
1 tablespoon red chili flakes
1/4 cup EV olive oil
1/4 cup lime juice
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
1/4 cup chopped parsley
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
1 teaspoon chopped shallot
1 cup chopped fresh mint leaves

Combine fruit and red peppers with chimichurri sauce to taste. Mix well to coat all fruit. Cover and set aside to allow to marinate for 10-30 minutes.

Optionally, serve over spinach:

2 cups chopped spinach
3 tablespoons olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup shredded young Goudse cheese

In a large bowl, combine spinach, olive oil and lemon juice. Toss gently to combine. Divide spinach between plates. Arrange fruit mixture on top of spinach and garnish with cheese.

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File under Barely Relevant: my ever-more-occasional work venue OT301 has been awarded the 2007 Amsterdam Cultuurprijs, whatever that means (the opening moments of our June 16th AUXXX night are pictured above). Congratulations to all! Here's a pretty old YouTube compilation of OT301 events from 2005, back when I spent a lot of time there.

UPDATE: I certainly shouldn't have been so "whatever" about the Cultuurprijs. It's apparently 35,000 euro. Pardon my skepticism.

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season's closing.

As the two regular readers of this blog are already aware, the building in which we live contains a restaurant, bar, art gallery, and performance spaces (among other things). The cooks and music programmers take the months of July and August off (as do most live music venues in town), so this week is the last of the season, and it always serves to remind us how easy it is to take the whole thing for granted. So, this week not only did I go to Tuesday night jazz/improv like I usually do (pictured: Oscar-Jan Hoogland, Ig Henneman, and Alan "Gunga" Purves, one of the most reliably outstanding drummers in town and a fantastic comedian as well):






















But I also went to the vegetarian Wednesday night meal (3 courses for 4.60). Unfortunately, I didn't reserve, so I got the "backup food" instead of the real menu. But if it was the same cooks behind all of it I think I get the picture. Let's just say I got my money's worth. Still, a very convivial atmosphere and good music on the stereo makes for a nice social Wednesday's grubtime, followed by an evening of music from the Corrie van Binsbergen crew.

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pom rising.

Image stolen from Wikipedia.

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I've been putting off an in-depth pom post for gee almost two years now because I just know it has the potential to be a time-consuming suckhole, but apparently it's Go Time because Surinamese food is somehow enjoying a bit of a surge in press coverage, more than just the annual Kwakoe reminders. Pom is everywheres all of the sudden. I could just spit.

I would say that maybe it's that the widespread explosion of food writing on the internet is just finally reaching us here, and many foodies in our little neck of the woods are interested in our local version of Caribbean food...but, there are two new Surinamese/Indische cookbooks out this year, just about doubling the number of readily available Suriname cookbooks on the market. So what I'm saying is...it's not just 'net writing.

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I was pushed (and kicked, frankly) into starting this post last week when, while flipping channels during an idle moment of waiting for Mara's pain medicine to kick in, I bumbled across a Pom Cook-Off in Amsterdam on AT5 that I knew nothing about (it was on a cooking program called etenmetbianca, there should be a video from that episode up soon). That's seriously stupid, since pom is where my interest in Surinamese food began. It's as if someone dreamed up an ideal food event just for me and then didn't tell me about it.

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Let's backtrack for the uninitiated or previously uninterested. As detailed here in earlier posts, pom is a well-known oven casserole party dish from Suriname (formerly Dutch Guyana), made from chicken parts, citrus juices, and a root vegetable called pomtajer in Dutch, or malanga or new cocoyam in English. It has its roots in the cooking of slaves on Jewish sugar plantations in Suriname. According to at least Debra from Culiblog (and who knows where she stole this information from)(i'm totally kidding), Pom is "reminiscent of an Ashkenazic potato kugel". The slaves, not having access to their own potatoes, grew tubers on the sly, most successfully when it was a tuber their owners had no interest in, such as....the pomtajer.

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The most remarkable thing about the overall sensation of eating pom is that, for such a simple homestyle dish, it has a complex flavor that doesn't really remind you of any one thing. The first impression is an intriguing mixture of sour/tart citrus with a rich, sweet buttery note from the, well, butter...combined with a bit of earthy smokiness from the zoutvlees or spek. And the pomtajer itself is terrific, with a texture kind of something like soft polenta and a taste that's hard to pin down. When I first had it, it was on a toasted baguette with pickles and a swipe of scotch bonnet sambal...the much-maligned broodje pom. Anyway, I was smitten from the first bite.

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When I first became a pom stalker, I scoured the internet for information, and folks let me tell you it was slim pickins. Maybe 10 pages total. That was back in 2003 or so. Cut to veritable pom press explosion in progress: Culiblog's post on pom was the first time I realized that there was "new pom work" afoot. Which led me to Karin Vaneker's Pom op het menu. Which led me to Pom in Nederland. Which is leading me to all kinds of other places. Eventually, though, I hope that all of this will lead me down to the Bijlmer during my eGullet foodblog week, where I can visit Imagine IC and the Pom op het menu exhibition in person.

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top thai.

Top Thai, the takeout/delivery restaurant across the street from me, just served me the best Thai food I've had in maybe 5 years: every bite I thought would be my last wasn't. The secret was careful prep and excellent wok technique: each vegetable was cut and cooked nearly perfectly, mushrooms bursting with...whatever would be inside mushrooms (water?), red peppers and green beans still proudly crisp, and my favorite little bitter green eggplants in there doin' they thing as well. The kaffir, basil, and cilantro were fresh, the fish sauce was very strong in all the right places, and the fresh red chiles were thrown in by the tiny Asian fistful. Top Thai's always been good, but tonight was like a different kitchen altogether. Yay me.

UPDATE: We've now eaten there twice more since this post, and...it appears that this night was a fluke. It's been fine every time, but more like the same level of quality it's always been, with none of the subtlety of this first night.

mmmmmmm.

Lazy sonofabitch though I am, somehow I'd never made this mistake before: mashed potatoes using an immersion blender. I really had no idea not to do this, I guess mostly because I've made mashed potatoes start-to-finish about 5 times in my entire life...usually I let someone else do the mashing.

Last night, I was very pleased to be making some lovely roasted garlic mash for the Elephant Moop since she hasn't eaten much hot food lately, and well I just thought I'd save some time with the old Braun stick blender. The resulting food item was very interesting and possessed many unexpected qualities but ultimately, eating it could not really be considered "time well spent".

This handy article from the BBC explains what happened. And actually, the BBC Food section has quite a few nifty and helpful resources: for example, here's what's in season right now.

sonik tooth.

What a weekend. Mara developed an abscessed tooth on Friday night, just in time for it to be impossible for us to find anyone who could/would treat her for it: oral surgeons don't work on weekends in Nederland, or if they do they're real secretive about it. Finally we saw somebody yesterday (Monday, yes, that's 48 hours' worth of severe dental pain later) who could do something about it, but the swelling is still (actually even more) gigantic and my little mooperbird looks like she's been cruelly Photoshopped into the Elephant Moop.

Dus, there has been no eating of anything other than yoghurt, mashed potatoes, and pindasoep (Surinamese peanut soup) for the past couple of days. I'm trying to get more creative with it now that the crushing stress has been lessened.

UPDATE: There is one bit of food-related news here: the only thing that helped Mara's pain on Sunday was the blisteringly extra-super hot Surinaamse sambal mentioned here. She would soak a Q-Tip in the oil on top of the sambal and then rub the Q-Tip on her tooth/gum area. Good ol' capsaicin to the rescue. We were obviously totally desperate for relief, but it did actually help a bit, plus it was the best-smelling dental treatment ever.

up on the rooftop.

Click, click, click? One fewer click and you've got yourself a Wu-Tang puzzler, featuring the immortal verse:

These are the bones, bones from the grave of Houdini
G-Dini, Ronzoni noodles sprinkled on your embry'
Climb like the deficit, profits, death threats to Israel
slid through Bethlehem bong on one wheel
Syringes, rubber bands, needles, the 60's
Grandaddy Caddy was coppin 6 Gs
Be-gosh all that Osh Kosh jumpers
Pink Champale, brown paper bags, wall-to-wall bumpers

Thank you, Ghostface Killah.

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We had a barbecue on the roof last night, really our first since we've lived here. Sure, we've eaten on the roof before, but we've never actually cooked on the roof before...Mara bought me a little Weber grill for our anniversary, and I broke it in this week. Unfortunately no pictures of the food, things got out of control at the last minute and I was lucky to get the fish off the grill in one piece (I had sticking trouble...I'm out of practice!).

We had a beautiful piece of salmon (thank you mister fish), cut into portions and rubbed with lots of ground coriander seed, brown sugar, a little garlic powder and salt and pepper. Super good, and no time at all to prepare. The only thing you have to remember is that coriander has to be cooked at very high heat to mellow and caramelize it, at least that's what I've been told.

il cibo dell'impossibilità.

Klary has a nice post today about the frequent impossibility of recreating on a whim ephemeral taste experiences from your past. And, unlikelihood of unlikelihoods, she illustrates this with (among other things) a quesadilla I made for her last month or so, and the process of trying to (on a whim) recreate that quesadilla. And by reminding me of that first quesadilla with her second quesadilla, her post reminded me of a third quesadilla from my own past that I myself cannot currently recreate.

Flashback to Miami, 5 months ago. In our little beach apartment we ate quesadillas for breakfast every morning (pictured above) for two weeks, because we could: the tiny, packed-to-the-gills Cuban grocery store around the corner had very fresh corn tortillas and excellent queso fresco. In the pan with a little butter, add to that a squirt of lime and a dollop of salsa verde and that's all you needed. No spices, no caramelization, no duck....no nothing, save for quesa and dilla (actually, the quesadilla pictured above also contains some leftover Argentinian steak from Big Pink, a one-time-only modification...).

And yes, it's impossible for me to make it this morning: no queso fresco, my corn tortillas are frozen and a bit old, etc. And plus, this negro ain't even supposed to be digging on cheese seeing as we're on some serious health food shit these days (sorry, Pulp Fiction was on TV last week [unsurprisingly uncensored, yay Nederland], reminding me just how much more acceptable it became for white people to adopt non-rap-derived African-American speech patterns after Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega hit the screen. Or at least it became more acceptable for this particular white person). So, instead, here's the recipe for the not-so-impossible duck confit quesadillas.

Komijnekaas is young Gouda with lots of whole cumin seeds in it. It's a great shortcut for Mexican cooking in general, except that you don't get to toast the cumin seeds like you would if you were using them separately.

Also, this recipe probably makes more onions than you'll use, but you'll find a use for the leftovers, trust me. An omelet with chorizo is a good place to start.

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Photo by Klary:





















duck confit quesadilla with caramelized onions, komijnekaas, and salsa verde.

onions
2 sweet onions, diced
1-2 tbsp butter
1 tsp. maple syrup
pinch ground cumin
pinch ground cinnamon
pinch salt
1-2 tsp adobo from a can of chipotles

duck filling
100 gr duck confit meat (no skin), shredded
pinch pimenton
pinch ground cinnamon
half-pinch ground allspice
half-pinch ground cumin

corn tortillas
sliced or grated komijnekaas
walnut oil for frying (hazelnut oil also does nicely here, but yes they both smoke a bit. duck fat also works if you don't give a shit about cholesterol...butter for once doesn't really work with this quesadilla...too rich.)
ground cinnamon
mild chile powder

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Caramelize the onions: melt butter in sautepan, add onions, adobo, and maple syrup, stir to coat, add spices, stir again, turn pan as low as possible and cook for 20-40 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes or so, until onions are dark but not burned. Salt to taste and set aside.

Make duck filling: turn a sautepan on high, when hot add duck and spices. Saute for 5-10 minutes until duck is crisped and browned to your liking.

Assemble quesadillas: put a splash of walnut oil in the pan, then a tortilla, spread a thin layer of onions across it, then some cheese, then some duck (all thinnish layers so that your quesadilla is still rather light and flippable) and close. After my tortilla is closed, I like to sprinkle the outside with a very light dusting of cinnamon and chile powder. I'm not sure if this significantly contributes to the taste of the finished product, but this step definitely fills the kitchen with a most excellent scent-waft.

Serve with your favorite homemade salsa, or whatever reasonable store-bought salsa you were able to locate in Amsterdam. I tend to like green salsa with this for some extra acidity, but Mara prefers red, and it's worth trying both.

Another great variation on this is to use goat cheese instead of komijnekaas. I don't mean the soft stuff: they sell sliced goat cheese here that is perfect for this.

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And finally: all of the above reminded me of one of the fundamental reasons why this webpage even exists: to try and capture the ephemera of cooking and eating, and to facilitate future nostalgia over meals past (and not just the food component). I said to Klary after her post that it reminded me of why we like being cooked for, and one of the reasons travel can generate such powerfully nostalgic memories: because in many ways the whole experience is impossible to recreate, and that's what makes us nostalgic for it. Thank you, I'll be signing autographs after I get done punching my own pompous-yet-barely-coherent lights out.

x x x

happy anniversary baby, etc.

Though Miss Mara and I'se been friends for, um...25 years or so, Thursday was officially our official 10-year anniversary. Luckily, not 200m away from our front door, someone was throwing a party with free food and drinks and we were invited!

Above: cucumber and lobster shooters, serrano ham/pine nut/pesto and smoked salmon/caper crostini. Below: Hollandse Nieuwe (the first herring of the season)...this was in fact the second day of the season, and these were just really perfect at the moment...I am now at last finally a convert to Hollandse Nieuwe...I guess it was only a matter of time, really.

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Above: ice-cold korenwijn. Below: the face it makes you make when you taste it for the first time. It's a version of jenever that has a higher-than-usual percentage of malt wine added to it. Speaking of jenever, this subject contains one of my favorite Dutch colloquialisms: a jenever with a beer chaser is called a kopstoot, or headbutt. Without a beer chaser it's just called another one of my favorite (fake) colloquialisms, harsh realm:

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Then, after she stopped making this face, we came home and had a petite steak and garlic mashed potatoes. Cool! And I have been on the wagon for 16 days now. Woot.

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ok, we start now.

So, for real, healthy eating has started again this week. No recipes or pictures, but tonight was salmon with a crust of pistachio and cornmeal, tamarind-raisin chutney, yoghurt, and zucchini with lemon and mint. In a word, eh...boring, but it's my fault...I was in a hurry and didn't have much time to sexify things as I went. And I was trying to err on the side of extreme healthiness. We'll try this again.

smell and learn.

Foto: stolen from here.

There's an eGullet thread about trying to cook your way through a single cookbook front to back.

Part of what I like about cooking in general is that it's a very immediate way to be spontaneously creative which other people can enjoy very tangibly. A further part of the allure is that it seems like there are very few rules about what's possible...you're only limited by imagination, skill, time, and cost. OK, and the human palate. OK, so that's a lot of limitations actually.

My point: the idea of cooking solely, monogamously from a single cookbook goes against the perceived freewheelingness of improvisational cooking and surely threatens to suck the joy out of the creative process faster than you can say "introductory paragraph closing witticism/hook", right?

Sorta, but after thinking about it a wee bit, I decided that I might like to try it as a way of escaping from my recently acquired bad habit of looking for new things to cook on the ol' Web. Now yes, I do realize that the internet is designed for this kind of research, but there comes a point where one's "research time" begins supplanting one's "actual life", and this is probably not what the internet was designed for. And if it was, well...that's just plain mean.

So I've decided to do this one-book thing, and the one I'm doing is last year's book from José Andrés, Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America. I cooked through a lot of it (for me, anyway) last summer, inspired by this eGullet thread, and I found it to be (as Early Cuyler would say) outstandiner n' hell. Mostly very healthy, simple recipes, but I learned much from the sheriff's formless ramblings (as Early Cuyler would say), and turned out some bangin' summer grub as a result.

I'd like to just start at the beginning and go, but the chapters are organized along the lines of "Cheese and Eggs", "Potatoes", "Mushrooms", et cetera, and I don't think that either I or my dining companions can sit through 8 egg dishes in a row. So, I'll be jumping around. Today's entry will be either Escarola con sanguina, queso de cabra, almendras y vinagreta de ajo tostado (endive with oranges, goat cheese, almonds, and toasted garlic vinaigrette), or Pisto Manchego (zucchini with peppers, eggplant, and tomato). Or both.

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Last year back when Head and Body were still living in Amstrodam, we had a series of dinners together with Andy and other assorted special guests very loosely based on an extremely fictional cooking show called Smell and Learn. For example, there was a risotto episode, a pot roast episode, etc. I cooked the Spanish episode, mostly out of the Tapas book above. Here's what I put together:

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Arbequina olives.
bread with Garcia olive oil and membrillo.
chorizo al sidra.
tortilla route 11 with brava sauce.
marinated sheep's cheese ("We say 'you can taste the farmer in this cheese'" is what the Spanish girl who sold it to me said)

Asturian-style salmon with apples, Cabrales, and chives.
mushrooms in escabeche with serrano ham.
Catalan-style spinach with apples and pine nuts.
garlic shrimp with aioli and romesco.

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90% of this was great, the rest was at least good. Another shrimp letdown, not enough garlic. But everything else on this list has become A-list material, and hopefully the whole-book approach will add to this list. It's very careful cooking, because the recipes are so simple...your goal is to extract maximum flavor from each element blah blah blah without letting your maximal tendencies complicate things, a good lesson to smell and learn.

UPDATE: Soon after this post was completed, I realized that there is no fucking way my attention span will support this endeavor. It was nice while it lasted though, wasn't it.

crash and broil.

Apparently my system wasn't quite ready for that health kick idea thing that I mentioned a few posts back. My pesky substance abuse issues came out of almost nowhere to rear their knobby little ugly unpleasant heads again, and this time the lucky winning substance was.........

It seems I'd fallen victim to a wicked pork jones. I dug the uncooked pork shoulder out of the freezer (leftover from last month's jerk-a-thon), I braised that baby and finished with a hoisin glaze...dug in, and.....uh...nothing. It was fine, but I was left unsatisfied. I still felt the heavy hand of a pork jones resting uncomfortably on my own (uncooked) shoulder. WTF.

I eventually turned to the internets for distraction, but matters were not improved by photos like these (good and accurate quote from the Comments section on this page: "You could make a plate of shit look appetizing."), and before I had any idea what happened I was in the tenacious grip of a nascent Hot Dog Binge. Fuck! It wasn't a pork jones at all, it was a total barnyard slaughter refuse meat sausage jones!

LOL (and I mean that in a tone of voice you cannot hear, but I assure you that it is completely, crushingly ironic and emotionless, possibly the utter opposite of laughter). I have not had a hot dog or any sausage in some time, excluding the, ahem, France trip, so this started out as a "treat". But the hotdogs I was using here were very small, about the size of my index finger. So a "binge" on these babies was kind of like a binge on, I don't know, say....falafel balls. They're 50 calories each (the index finger hotdogs)!

Anyway, my point is, the other reason that this turned nutritionally ugly and grim was that, while nothing fancy, they were really great hot dogs: yeasty bun, ketchup, mustard, pickles, onions. And thankfully, just in time really, they just about matched my crazed wiener junkie mind's hot dog...but you know, about 1/6th the size (yes, I just talked about the diminuitive size of my wiener, and called myself a wiener junkie, LOL again)...

I'd waited for my man. And he turned out to be made of chicken separator meat, among other things.

Number eaten in past two days? 10.

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UPDATE: I just realized that all this trauma could've been brought on by the Lemmy Kilminster arrangement I've shaved my lush facial hair growth into:

























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blankfilling upcatcher.

What you see here are leftover pics from the France trip, foisted upon you semi-indiscriminately. Directly above and below is the kitchen area at the gig in Nancy. This place was a bit disorienting, as you can see.