chili, summer weather.

One of Dad's R & D guys made this batch of chili seasoning for him last year, and tonight it was deployed in some serious quantities as the Big Boss cooked up a batch of red.

Tonight we were supposed to be dining at Zinc Bistro (eGullet thread here), but half of the family (the half with young children) has contracted some form of Abdominal Death Virus and they are all sequestered across town in what sounds like a House of Horrors. Dad and Pitty each spent half the day over there mopping up after everyone, and as a result dinner has been relocated to Casa Here, and is consisting of chili and green chile cornbread. Yay!






















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Dad and I spent the day driving around in the summery winter hotness punctuated by occasional stops at incredibly expensive grocery stores where we didn't buy much of anything. I swear you couldn't find prices like these in Amsterdam if your life depended on it.

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And then we watched the most unpleasant movie I've seen in a long time, 28 Weeks Later. Unpleasant not because of its relentless and nonsensical videogame gore, but because it didn't make us care about any single element of the nonsensical story before it turned into a videogame. So it was like watching someone else play a nonsensical videogame for 80 minutes...you just kept thinking, "When's my turn?" Boo. Avoid.

Tomorrow, though, even though every single plan we've made for the weekend has fallen through so far, we've made plans to go see the new Coen Brothers movie, mmm, called....No Country for Old Men, maybe? And retry Zinc Bistro. Sounds like a Can't Miss afternoon of entertainment, don't it?

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be prepared, be very prepared.

This is really a continuation of the previous post, because once a post gets to a certain length, Blogger still isn't an awesome editor for mixing photos and text, kind of odd considering that THAT'S WHAT YOU DO WITH BLOGGER.

Ahem.

All I wanted to add was that, yes, there are good examples of healthy-ish prepared foods as well. This soup from Trader Joe's is simple, tasty, and useful not only as a standalone soup, but as a sauce or flavoring ingredient as well. And its ingredient list is refreshingly straightforward:






















OK, well, I think that's about all I can stand to say about this aspect of eating and cooking in America for now...it really makes me a little nauseated and all I want to do now is roll around in a fragrant pile of undressed fresh salad greens until the feeling passes. Maybe I'll go do that.

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prepare to be prepared.

Land of Convenience, is that actually even a catchphrase? I could Google it to find out, couldn't I. Maybe I will someday. But for now, let's assume it is, and that way I can bring this paragraph to a close by finishing its initial thought: America's convenience foods are light years beyond the other developed countries in the world in terms of sophistication and taste.

This, my friends, is not news, is it. Nor is it a particularly good thing under normal circumstances, as it robs the consumer of the satisfying, creative experience of cooking and replaces it with the brainless consumption of mind-bogglingly long lists of chemicals and preservatives that have who-knows-what kind of long-term effect on your body.

However: if you suddenly decide to scrap your dinner plans for the evening only to find out that there's no "real food" in the house, then, mmyeah....maybe it's OK to pop a package of these in a 375°F oven for 26 minutes:

































They were all totally fine, the crab cake was less weird in fact than the crab cake that Pitty had when we went out to dinner a couple nights ago. And, I did not do one creative thing to these, but if I'd made a sauce or two, and been careful about keeping everything juicy, this might even have been an above-average dinner.

The down side would have to be the nutritional content. Pictured at the top of this post is the tilapia ingredient list, and it contains more non-food than I normally consume in a month. And I know that you people out there who work for convenience/processed food companies (and who are reading over my shoulder at the moment) are saying, "Whatever, I'm sure you're eating tons of chemicals all the time that you don't know anything about." I'm sure that's true, but I'm also preparing 98% of what goes into my mouth, and very little of it could be considered "prepared" before it gets to me. After it gets to me, well...I don't exactly know what you'd call it.

up in my grill.

Finally. I have my very own copy of Cradle of Flavor in my hot little hands. One of the things I imagined doing when I was here was grilling constantly, and in most of these imaginary cases I was making Indonesian food.

I have been grilling often, and even better, at odd hours. I was grilling andouille sausages yesterday at 6:30am, as the sun rose, which was beautiful in a number of ways, and I would've taken pictures of the event but the camera batteries were dead...

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But back to Cradle of Flavor. Here is the eGullet thread wherein ultrageeky people like me cook recipes out of this book and photograph the results. I didn't really have time or energy to pull off anything grand, so my first Cradle of Flavor recipe turns out to be something that this site has seen me make before: Garlic-Marinated Tempeh.

Well, in my previous versions I didn't marinate the tempeh. And....I'm not really sure that marinating it made any difference at all. The recipe specified 15 minutes I think, I did it for 30 minutes, but...next time I'll try a couple hours or so.

just deserts.

Something has been been busily nagging at a brother for the past couple of days. It took me 72 hours to acknowledge, then decode, then believe it, but I think I've got it now: uh...I'm happy to be here*.

This is literally an unbelievable feeling...moving to Europe revealed to me so many previously unseeable things about America and Americans that at some point I suddenly felt very much like Roddy Piper's character in the John Carpenter movie They Live.

Like Roddy, once I saw "the truth," my new perspective began to fill me with a hot indignation, and thermos-like, I kept it glowing uncomfortably inside me (yes, quite a bit like John Parr as well) until it just ate away my internal insulation and at this point the thermos metaphor resists easy extrapolation and I haven't had any coffee yet.

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The point of this touchy-feely moment we're having here is: this burning drive to share my findings with everyone else seems to have been extinguished in the two years since I've been here. I can guess why, but it doesn't really matter. The important thing is that 1) the overwhelming feeling I'm enjoying at the moment is less "solemn outrage" and more "sweet relief", and 2) I've extended my stay so that I'm now going to be here for Thanksgiving.

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* Here is strictly limited to this house. I'm spending as little time as possible out amongst the general public.

new mexican platter @ dick's hideaway.

My dear mother had a rare weekday off today and wanted to go out for lunch, so we went to Dick's Hideaway (a next-door sibling of Richardson's) for New Mexican lunch from the folks who got me hooked on the stuff from the get-go.






















Pork tamale, chile relleno, and chicken burro, all happily nestled under a plush layer of red chile sauce that was not kidding around in the heat department.

So how was it? You know how when you try to revisit a significant restaurant from your distant past, the food almost never lives up to your memory? This was not one of those times...everything on my plate was excellent: moist tamale; lightly coated poblano filled with pork and queso blanco; and most surprisingly, superb beans and rice.

It was about twice as much food as I could eat, so the rest followed me home, American-style. Hopefully I'll be hungry again by tomorrow or Wednesday.

















In a nice bit of global synchronicity: in addition to opening Dick's, the Richardson's owners have opened a new place called the Rokerij as a tribute to their time spent in Amsterdam.

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Well...how could I not have these leftovers for dinner:

















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constant craving.

NOTE: these last few posts contain no artfulness whatsoever, I'm generally just bumbling about, trying to attain some kind of "purification through microtasting." Plus I thought I'd take a couple of pictures with this new camera. Artfulness will have to be retrofitted.

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I have some terribly good news in that the cable TV picture now fits on the TV screen, and the DVD picture is no longer mint-green and magenta only. In other words: the home theater system is up and running. That'll be $1600, please! Now all we need is a movie to watch.

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I keep feeling like I should be taking better advantage of the perfectly sunny 33°C weather outside (and not doing things like watching movies), but that's because I keep forgetting that it's sunny like this every day. So there's no hurry, the sun'll be there, though the temperature's supposed to drop to 27°C by the end of next week. Brrr!

Actually, the pool water is freezing, if that's any consolation to those of you wintering in less sunny climes. I didn't find that out until I jumped in today...it's usually substantially more balmy.

I said Balmy.

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One of the disorienting things about visiting the Phoenix outpost is that it takes a few days to get re-acclimated to American-style abundance. Here's half a pantry:





































Part of it comes down to nothing more than available space: this is one of the refrigerators here, and it's itself twice the size of our cumulative refrigeration space at home. And there's another refrigerator of equal size in the laundry room here.

Some of this storage area is devoted to toddler food, which we won't be test-driving much of on this trip (though we may cast a morbidly curious raised eyebrow at its nutritional content at some juncture).

The rest of it, however, is fair game for this tooth of mine. Many of the edibles are either officially "bite-sized" or individually portioned for convenient snacking, and this allows for equally convenient curiosity nibbles. I've tasted teaspoon-sized portions of, oh...about 30 different snack foods since I've been here, most of which don't deserve our attention really, but a couple of recent noteworthy subjects include:






















The first actually tasty rice crisp product I've ever put in my mouth. There's none of that vaguely chalky and insipid texture that many "healthy" rice snacks have, it'd be a lovely vehicle for some kind of equal and opposite cheesy product.

And another rather delicious healthy product is Ben & Jerry's frozen yogurt variation:






















You'd never mistake it for ice cream, but it provides a satisfying dessert moment on its own terms.

Something completely unsatisfying and verging on disturbing was Gianna's Artisan Baking Company's Coconut Macaroons with Chocolate:

















Um: eeewwww. They smell like coconut, but how to describe their taste....imagine if you could isolate the nasty sulfur-y taste of cheap dried fruit and somehow imbue a dry, grainy biscuit with that flavor and then drizzle tasteless plastic chocolate over top of it. And then charge 6 dollars for 12 of them. NOT a coconut macaroon, people.

ETA: This is a coconut fucking macaroon:

















Made by Bakker Bollebof and sold at the Dirk, they're very much like the macaroons I grew up with, moist and fantastic, if the tiniest bit oversweetened. I can only eat one of them per day, whereas I used to be able to go through a whole tin of macaroons in my youth. And the price is probably 1.20 euro for 320 grams' worth (almost a pound by my careless estimate).

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turnkey systems.

There's nothing quite like spending all day reading badly-translated technical manuals. I always wondered why people paid other people to set up their already-expensive home theater systems...12 hours of creative cursing later, now I know.

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In happier news, I'd like to present a brief survey of what went into my mouth yesterday. During the breakfast hour, I made some bulgur that did exactly what I was just bragging about mine never doing (turning out gummy and useless), and Dad presented his first exotic American grocery item of the day, ice-cold pumpkin-flavored soy milk:






















....which was very unusual and actually very good. It's hard to believe that enough people thought that this was a good idea to turn it into a released product. Yet it exists. Nice!

For lunch, my dear mother put some more ribs on the ol' grill:























...while I had some more of my gummy bulgur (mmm!) and a leftover spring roll from Friday.

For dinner, there was a bunch of already-cooked shrimp strewn about, so I used some of them for a shrimp + habanero-pineapple salsa quesadilla or two:

















...and the rest went onto the grill for a minute, after which they chilled out on top of a nice salad.

















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When I first listened to the new Radiohead, I thought it was something that I couldn't really imagine listening to again, or more like I couldn't imagine where I'd listen to it. But it now sounds like it belongs here in the vast sandy-colored space we call the kitchen, looking out into the rocky foothills behind the house.

It makes me wonder how this jibes with their intentions....would they be juiced to know that In Rainbows is one of the few whole CDs on my laptop that I thought my parents (average age: 57) and I (mental age: 5) might both enjoy (or at least not find obtrusive or disagreeable), and that I thought it adequately soundtracked the expensively beautiful suburban kitchen in which I'm currently situated? Are we the target audience?

intelligence.

I'm not kidding: 10 minutes before this picture was taken, this room was spotlessly clean. This is what can happen when two very well-behaved, quiet twin 2-year-olds come home to find that someone has cleaned their room. Their vengeance was righteous, it reminded me of what happens when we clean the catbox...the kitties have to immediately run in there and fuck it back up again, reclaiming it as Feline Turf. Granted, the kids did not shit on the floor (this time).

But as I've been trying to emphasize: these are very calm kids. They performed this task with a ritual seriousness, methodically, in complete silence, like very small ninjas in sneakers. I can't even imagine what kind of daily cleanliness negation is possible with the kind of unruly, malicious little demons that you see asking for domination on a daily basis in Amsterdam (I'm singling out Amsterdam toddlers only because I haven't seen many American toddlers on this trip, and frankly I'd like to limit my exposure to these two who already know me by my name, which by the way they think is "Uncle Monkey").

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Meanwhile, in my secret hidden lair (which by the way I just realized is exactly as messy as the boys' room), I am compiling a list of targets for external meals. I'm definitely keeping it minimal, but there are some things I'm going to need to eat while I'm here: New Mexican (as in, from New Mexico) and real Mexican is at the top of the list, closely followed by some eGullet-touted locations. I figure if I divide my time evenly between free weights, the elliptical trainer, and New Mexican food, I can still come out of this trip a kilo or two lighter.

Driving around in Phoenix is just terrible, and quadruply so on the weekends. Unfortch, my dad is really only reliably home on the weekends, so part of the strategy here is to figure out which destinations he'll enjoy and are also reachable on Saturday or Sunday without becoming involved in a road rage incident. Here's what's Mexican on the viewscreen right now:

El Nopalito, 2831 North 24th Street, Phoenix. Real strip-mall Mexican that looks perfect from the outside. Chowhounders have good things to say about it, and the pictures look like what I'm looking for.

Rosita's Fine Mexican Food, 960 West University Drive, Tempe. I would really love to get there for their Dia de los Muertos celebration, but that means that we would have to go there today, a Saturday, in Tempe, which is a definite no-no as far as traffic goes. Maybe I'll just go for huevos rancheros whenever I eventually end up in Tempe.

Pepe's Taco Villa, 2108 West Camelback Road. Looks like good, standard Sonoroan Mexican food.

Los Dos Molinos, 8646 South Central Avenue, Phoenix. This place is a Phoenix institution, you should never go on a weekend, the food is not spectacular, etc. But, it is very consistently above-average Arizona Mexican food, and if we're in the neighborhood on a weekday, I don't want to forget about it.

Dick's Hideaway, 6008 N 16th St, Phoenix. Not Mexican but New Mexican actually, this is the lunch counter version of Richardson's, the kitchen responsible for my now decade-old obsession with southwestern cooking.

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I'm also doing some exotic chile shopping on this trip, and eG has suggested that Phoenix Ranch Market III, 1602 E Roosevelt St in Phoenix is where I need to be heading.

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pho king, ace.

Today's Surreal American Moment found me pushing a gargantuan shopping cart complete with Ritz-cracker-eating toddler in it through a suburban Phoenix Asian megasuperstore called Lee Lee's, and seeing the very same Verkade cookies that I see every day in Amsterdam (literally marked up 500%) on the shelf, along with stroopwafels, marzipan, poffertjes, speculaas, and a full-height shelf of other Dutch products.

Actually, the most surreal part was that I had 1) a shopping cart with 2) a toddler in it. A very well-behaved toddler in fact, who spent much of our time there helpfully pointing out things he thought I might find interesting such as pineapples or live catfish. My own attention was caught by a wealth of fresh herbs and produce that I haven't seen very often in Amsterdam: pea shoots, shiso leaves, mehti (fenugreek), curry leaves, chrysanthemum leaves, and lots more that I didn't recognize.

After which, the boys and their grandmother went to McDonald's for Happy Meals (I'm shrugging helplessly here), and I went next door to the Vietnamese restaurant attached to Lee Lee's called Pho 68, and picked up some pho to go. This was the only Asian restaurant I've ever set foot in that didn't have a paper version of their menu available for you to take home with you. You know, for take-out.

Anyway, I mention that bit because it's why I don't have the proper nomenclature for anything here, so I'm reduced to describing things in "American". Along with our pho I picked up some fresh spring rolls and a spicy chicken something. Spring rolls:

















The pho was very good after a healthy shot of sriracha, but while all the rest of the food was fine, fresh, competently done...it was a little on the bland side (Mara's spring rolls are better). Still, a nice inexpensive and unexpected light lunch from a cuisine that isn't very prevalent in Amsterdam.

And yes, those are Holiday Plates.

in america.

I've been here about 12 hours, and I'm marveling at my ability to marvel anew every time I come back here: at the size of everything (big), the cost of everything (very different), the weather (sunny and 25C), the incredibly comfortable furniture, and the sheer breadth of consumer choice that is present in every conceivable niche of retail goods.

I'm still at the point in my acclimation where I just shuffle around like a bobbleheaded doofus soaking up the feeling of simultaneous sensory overload and absolute easyness, punctuated by bouts of feeling like a totally retarded alien, for example when I don't know how to check out at the grocery store anymore (they bag your groceries for you and take everything out of your cart for you), or buying something with a credit card (I guess you sign digitally these days) etc. etc. etc.

I had a very nostalgic salad last night with poppyseed dressing, which I'll talk about in detail the next time I have one, probably in about 5 hours. I also had a baby back rib or two from the outdoor grill (tasty), and a chicken wing from Costco (less tasty). In fact, the Costco wings were pretty gross, flavor-wise...some kind of black pepper concept that tasted like a Scratch and Sniff book.

In general, lots of food plans 'n' shit coming up, still trying to work out the camera situation, both of our cameras died in some sort of unexpected murder/suicide deal last weekend...luckily there are unused digital cameras just lying around the house here, so I should be back to photo-ing pretty soon.

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haute pom.

How to tell you're a food geek: you have all the ingredients to make two kinds of gumbo in your fridge, but you instead have to make catfish pom because your malanga is going south (anyone who can reveal the undiscovered punchline hidden in this last sentence "wins" a seat at the next SnL). BTW, another indicator that you're a food geek? You're not Surinamese and you can make pom without looking at a recipe.

Today's pom will be my first truly customized version, mostly because I'm lacking the correct ingredients: we'll be using fresh-squozen mandarin orange juice instead of reg'lar, and lobster stock instead of chicken stock. We'll see what happens.

UPDATE: it tastes very much the same as the original...further reinforcing my belief that the dominant taste of pom is the taste of malanga, which is why pom's flavor is simultaneously so unusual and so unfuckupable.

I also cooked up and ate separately a piece of zoutvlees, and it tastes very much like a highly salted piece of beefsteak. Not spiced at all as far as I could tell.

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In the Housewares department: we desperately need to re-evaluate our fridge/freezer setup, it's completely useless as is.

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In the Entertainment department: I've enjoyed Eten met Bianca since I first watched it (even before I knew someone who worked there). It's so not like most food shows: there's a certain calm, honest, informed interest about it that I find really appealing. I also like Bianca's personal tone, which to me comes off as quietly smart and, eh...unobsequious, maybe, in all the right places.

Anyway: I just watched an episode that I'd known was in production, but hadn't seen the finished product: Pannekoeken! Wherein they talk to Joachim from Japanese Pancake World and film him making okonomiyaki (among other things)...great stuff.

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the sound of silence.

Jiminy Cricket, what a weekend. Friday's 6-guitar swordfight turned out to be fun and not boodley-boodley-boodley at all (mime Eddie Van Halen fingertapping here) at all. IIRC more than 100 people paid, which is a lot for the Music/Dance series...

...and then Saturday was just hard work from 3pm to 5am. We were already operating with a minimal crew, hoping that we'd be able to power through an unusually crowded night with our usual rag-tag team of misfits, but one of our bar staff fell ill and another one of them ended up unexpectedly playing in the first band of the evening, after said band's guitarist/founder's wife fell down the stairs back in England causing him to not make the trip (ehh write much?).

So with all this falling about, we were forced to go all Transformers for the night, everyone doing 3 different things simultaneously: the place was utterly packed, we had a record-setting bar night (for our events) to boot, mostly beer, at least 30 crates of Grolsch (and Palm and Koninck). Thus our most successful evening yet in terms of consistent musical quality and sheer profit, but we were so understaffed that it was difficult to fully enjoy it while it was happening.

We were so torn up at the end of the night that we didn't even clean; the 5 of us looked at the rather gross devastation around us and quickly decided that it would actually be smarter to return 6 hours later at noon and clean then (and, actually, it might have even been the right decision). But hey I guess this is what makes the OT301 the OT301...if you want an overstaffed place with underseasoned music, Paradiso is right down the street bitches...

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Right. But anyway, Saturday's event expanding into Sunday afternoon kind of trashed the SnL as well...I have to just laugh at my gumbo plans...I was so not even close to making gumbo this weekend. I'm going to try and knock it out before I go to America this week.


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gumbonics.

For those of you not plugged into the VDuck Mojo Wire, the Smell 'n' Learn originally scheduled for this weekend has had its topic changed from cassoulet to gumbo in the interest of prep time and to account for the distinct possibility that it won't actually happen: since we all have a late night Saturday, we're not sure how we'll feel about cooking, eating, drinking, etc come Sunday. And gumbo ingredients take up a lot less fridge space.

Usually, that is. Except I'm thinking of making two gumbos (you know, to compensate for the simplification of switching to gumbo). Definitely one duck gumbo, and maybe a seafood gumbo? I had thought that the recipes would be coming from the Gumbo Pages, as they have in the past, but somehow I forgot about the treasure trove of opinionated gluttony that is eGullet.

After a "bit" of browsing around out there (Gumbo Pages' advantage over eG is that there's no need to browse around, everything's just right there), I've decided that if Gumbo SnL happens (and probably even if it doesn't), I'm going to do a duck and sausage gumbo with a medium-dark roux, and a roux-less shrimp and okra gumbo, using the sadly departed Fifi's recipe for the fowl and My Confusing Horoscope's nice-looking okra tutorial for the seafood version.

great balls of tuna.

By the bye, the "tuna meatball" recipe I talked about here is enjoying a bit of the limelight here on MSNBC. The featured version is not Kenny's version (though it was good), or Mara's version (pictured above), but Mr. Oliver's original version. Try it, it's great...I think it's what we're having for din-din vanavond.

EDIT: Regarding different grades of tuna for this recipe and baking vs. frying, Mara had the following to add in an email to a friend (and since she has been the polpettrice every time "we've" made this, well we should listen to her):

i think they want you to use fresh tuna, but mark and i have made it only with good quality canned (or even just john west) and there was no discernible difference from the time our friend made it with fresh. also, in the recipe i think you're sauteing the fresh tuna with the cinnamon and the spice gets infused in this way - if you're using canned, just increase the cinnamon by at least another tsp (maybe more). and toast the pinenuts separately. also, i have always baked my meatballs, so this is another option instead of frying which can be a god-awful mess. maybe 175C for 25-35 minutes?

And to answer your unasked question: yes, I've been reduced to rummaging through Mara's sent emails to get cooking tips.

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silent felinity, ha: in your dreams.

While Mara's genius shrimp and sage risotto from last night is being assembled above, let's take a brief detour via an alluring behind-the-scenes peek into the glamour-soaked home life of the Vegetarian Ducks...

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Jo3n kitty has just resumed a habit she developed when we first moved into this apartment: beginning at about 4:30 in the morning, she becomes obsessed with waking Mara up.

















We found this very cute at first because Jo3n has always been a little shy and solitary, so her unstoppable need to be close to Mara was initially interpreted as very sweet by us. Two factors, however, seriously mitigate the sweetness of this gesture: 1) she does it EVERY MORNING. 2) she will not stop until Mara gets out of bed.

The photo above was taken in pitch black darkness at 5am. Take note of Jo3n's "I Love Mara" face: whiskers forward, glazed, dreamy eyes, etc. Also note Mara's head directly beneath Jo3n's paws. After Jo3n stands on Mara's neck for a while, she then moves to the back area:

















And "kneads" for 5-10 minutes. Apparently, this is done to stimulate milk production in the mother cat's teats. We have been trying to show Jo3n where Mara's teats actually reside for some time now, but Jo3n shows no signs of modifying her approach. After a few minutes of this, Jo3n realizes that shit ain't happenin', so she enables the distress signal (a plaintive meow every 20 seconds) and then assumes a "wait and see" approach:

















Then she starts from the top, occasionally mixing things up a little by scratching around frustratedly in her litter box for 10 minutes at a time before returning to the head/neck position. I have many more pictures of Operation Early Bird in progress, but they all tell the same story: bad kitty.

















The good news is: we've recently discovered an effective defensive maneuver: if Mara and I switch sides of the bed, the Jo3n unit becomes confused and cannot execute her fiendish plan. Why this works is a bit of a mystery. Oh right: it's because Jo3n's brain is roughly the size of a large prawn.

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Last night, actual prawns made an appearance at the dinner table, as they had on Friday when I made shrimp carbonara, using Antonio's recipe: bacon, 2 eggs, a little cream, black pepper, and Parmesan in the sauce; caramelized onions were added to the shrimp as well:



















This was meh, OK...I don't make non-red-sauced Italian things very often, and this was further evidence that I should just leave that to Mara, she's much better at it, which she potently demonstrated last night with a downright exemplary shrimp and sage risotto.

Really great, difficult to stop eating, and done using a "no-stir" risotto technique that we've been using for years and yet we're still amazed that it seems to come out awesome every time. The other double secret moment in Mara's recipe was halving the shrimp and marinating them for an hour or so in garlic and olive oil. Oh, another secret? Next time you're making fantastic food, just keep announcing "I don't know if this will be any good...I don't know what I'm doing," etc. Sneaky, that. Whatever, I'll get the recipe up here whenever I get in a recipe-typing mood again....

BTW, I would never have put shrimp and sage together in a million years. I have sage filed under "herbs that go with meat" in my 10-prawn-sized brain, and it seems to be filed there for good. But apparently (at least according to Food and Wine) shrimp and sage are a "popular Italian combination," so I guess that just shows you how full of diddley my 10 prawns are, doesn't it. Doesn't it?

UPDATE: This recipe has now been added to this site, here.

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practice eating.

Got some practicing going on at the moment, and if I'm practicing, I'm really just eating for fuel and not research, so the products of the Practicing Kitchen are highly unphotogenic generally speaking, and are also more likely to involve ingredients from a jar or tin. For example, last night's dinner and today's lunch were generic-looking piles of virtually identical turmeric-colored "grain". Their menu descriptions read a trifle more attractively: last night was mackerel in ras-el-hanout; tomato-harissa sauce; bulgur with green olives, carrots, and walnuts. Today was the same thing with sardines.

















Comparatively speaking, the mackerel is the easy winner in this North African showdown, its more resilient texture makes you feel like you're actually eating something with distinct components rather than an undifferentiated mass of vaguely Moroccan origin. But there are no pictures, because...it just doesn't look good. Mr. Jamie Oliver, when talking about cooking with tinned fish, recommends that you reserve some of the filets to garnish each plate with, but...I'm not so sure.

kitty litter.

I'm catsitting at the moment, though so differently from the way I was catsitting back in August that one of the two should be called something different (the latter, I'm guessing). One of my charges this time around is Loki the Destroyer, and she plies her trade with truly exceptional craft. Things I wouldn't have guessed were movable at all have been strewn around the apartment as if by high winds. I no longer remember what the apartment looked like when I showed up, it's been madeover in the style of a feline monkey launching pad.

One of the books littering the floor this morning was Sri Owen's Indonesian Regional Cooking (in Dutch). It would've been downright cinematic if my stumbling across this "randomly" placed object would then lead me on a series of unexpected and (of course) humorous adventures having to do with Sri Owen, Indonesian cooking, catsitting, monkey launching, etc.

But instead I just took the book down to our apartment, put on my miner's hat (is there really not another word for these?) and tried to learn something from an Indonesian about Indonesian cooking. It's a good easy read for my Dutch, but who knows what it really sounds like to someone who speaks the language.

The first thing that my carbide lamp revealed was a rich seam of duck dishes, which was completely unexpected and great news: we do love us some duck (speaking of which, maybe someday I'll get around to writing about this lovely specimen [the duck]).

I'll come back to finish this entry with a duck recipe, but until then, Ms. Owen has an informative piece on rijsttafel here, complaining (justifiably) about advertisements for "traditional Indonesian rijsttafels" by restaurants in Indonesia (rijsttafel being a completely Dutch fabrication and not traditionally Indonesian at all).

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gulai itik (sumatran duck with green chiles).

4 duck breasts, thinly sliced
3/4 cup hot water

2 large green chiles, de-seeded and chopped
5 shallots, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
4 candlenuts, chopped
2 tsp chopped ginger
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp chopped galangal or 1/2 tsp laos powder
2 kaffir lime leaves, shredded
1-inch stem of lemongrass, outer leaves discarded, chopped
4 whole black peppercorns
4 tbsp thinned tamarind concentrate
2 tbsp peanut oil
salt to taste

Blend paste ingredients until smooth. Transfer the paste into a saucepan and simmer, stirring often, for 5 minutes. Then add the slices of duck, and continue cooking, stirring often, for 5 more minutes. Add the hot water, and bring the sauce to a boil. Continue cooking on high heat for 5 minutes. Salt to taste, and serve at once with rice.

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commemorating 10 weeks without alcohol.

These are actual photos of actual Tokyo bidnessmen enjoying some well-deserved "downtime". Enjoy!

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this is super black.

Had an important educational moment at dinner Tuesday night. We were having dinner with a certain disk jockey mentioned in the previous post whose name I'm not mentioning again for reasons which will become clear in a moment, I asked him if he'd enjoyed the music the other night, and he said: oh yeah, I read your blog about it. And I was like what? No one knows about this blog. How is that possible (this last sentence I screamed clench-fisted into the heavens)?

And he said: Google Alerts. He gets an email any time Google finds a new mention of his name on the public internets. Blimey (I screamed this into the heavens as well)!

***

















(hours later)

Man, I just emerged slack-jawed from one of those Googholes where you really have no idea how you've ended up where you have, and need to consult your history to detangle the thread. The last thing I remember is "none more black", then the blackest manufacturable color pictured above, then...then...45 minutes of absence.

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Made something excellent last night: tempeh rendang. Based on a RecipeZaar recipe, but tweaked for nutrition. It's basically a simple, quickish vegetarian Malaysian-ish curry. I feel OK calling it a rendang now (vs. the original version) because the sauce is actually being reduced for a while.

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tempeh rendang.

1 stalk lemongrass
3 shallots, quartered
3 garlic cloves
2 long fresh red chiles

1/4 cup dried unsweetened coconut
2 tablespoons peanut oil
200g tempeh, cubed
1 teaspoon ground star anise
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 white sweet potato, cut into cubes
3/4 cup unsweetened coconut milk
1 cup water
salt 'n' pepa
2 scallions, greens chopped

1 tbsp ketjap manis (optional)
1 tbsp sambal trassi (optional)

Cut off bulbous bottom third of lemongrass. Remove and discard the tough outer leaves and chop remainder into thin rounds. Transfer to blender and process. Add the rest of the paste ingredients and puree to thick consistency, adding a tablespoon of water or two if you need to.

Elsewhere: In large skillet, toast coconut over medium heat, shaking pan and stirring constantly until uniformly golden brown, then remove from skillet a reserve. In the same skillet add oil and fry tempeh until dark golden brown, salting as you flip the tempeh over. Add the ingredients from the star anise to the cloves and the paste and cook for 2 minutes more.

Add the potato, coconut milk and water. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes. Uncover and simmer for 10-20 min or until potato is tender and sauce is reduced. Remove from heat and add toasted coconut. Salt and pepper to taste (this will probably require quite a bit of salt. I used 1 tbsp each of ketjap manis and sambal trassi instead). Add the scallions just before serving with something like rice.

Serves 4.