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So.
Life has taken a turn.
I have been awful about posting. I'm sorry. I got a new job, and my schedule has been slowly but surely adjusting to its new reality.
I expect things will be slow around here for a wee bit longer. I'm planning to return to regular posting soon.
On the positive side: (1) I have an income, (2) I'm learning some cool new stuff that I might be able to put into practice on this site, and (3) I made a really good bison pot roast the other night...
Savory Apple Pie - Actualized
About a month ago, I started speculating about the possibility of a savory apple pie. This weekend, I finally got around to making one. My arbitrarily determined requirements held that the predominant ingredient in the filling needed to be apple and that the pie needed to include some traditional apple-pie flavorings.
I didn't do anything fancy with the pie crust. Andrew Hammond suggested making the pie crust with vodka instead of water. I didn't have vodka on hand, but considered rum, thinking the flavor would complement the apples. In the end, though, I went with a basic crust. The crust wasn't going to be the emphasis here. This was more a proof of concept. We can get fancy later.
The filling was composed of:
- Four apples
- About five ounces of homemade chicken sausage that I had frozen (leftover from making )
- About six ounces of Saga Blue Brie
- Maybe a quarter cup of crushed pecans
- About a cup of caramelized onions
- Kosher salt, a bit of cinnamon, some nutmeg, allspice, parsley, and cumin
I browned the sausage first, both because I wanted to ensure it would cook and because I wanted a bit of malliard action going on.
In the meantime, I caramelized onions and blind-baked the pie crust. I need pie weights. I've been hacking it with small ceramic thingies I happen to have lying around (like the pestle that Angela made me), but we have a kiln and porcelain. I should just make myself some pie weights.
The pie assembly was pretty straightforward. I alternated layers like so:
- A layer of apples
- A layer of caramelized onion
- A layer of cheese
- A layer of apples
- A layer of chicken sausage
- A layer of (1/3 of the) caramelized onions, the pecans, and some chopped apples
- A layer of apples
For the top "crust" I made a lattice of swiss cheese slices.
I actually par-baked it (without the swiss) on Friday and then cooked it for real (with the lattice) on Saturday. If you wanted to do it in one sitting, I'd recommend cooking it at 375F for about 15 minutes without the lattice, adding the lattice and returning it to the oven (lowered to 350) for about 40 more minutes.
The result?
It was really good.
Tagine
So it's yet another East Coast blizzard. As I was at home, in between work and TV, I decided to make chicken tagine. Fortunately I'd run out for shopping before the snow really hit. The classic tagine is an interesting mix of sweet and savory which seems very common in North African cuisine and less uncommon in European cooking. The ingredients are your usual Mediterranean items but combined in very different ways than in Italian food. The mix of spices is as rich as in a curry. I read several recipes to get a starting point and then went with this (amounts are approximate):
-2 broiler/fryer chicken, cut into parts
-2 medium onions, cut roughly
-6 cloves of garlic
-1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes, julienned
-1/2 cup Turkish apricots, julienned
-1/2 cup dried cherries
-1/2 cup raisins
-1/2 cup green olives
-1/2 cup almonds
-1/2 bunch parsley, chopped
-1/2 cup prunes
-1 tbsp each of dried ginger, cayenne, allspice, cinnamon, fresh ground black pepper, paprika, and fennel seed
-2 tbsp turmeric and cumin
-3 bay leaves
-3 tbsp oil
-salt to taste
First brown the chicken pieces (with salt, as usual) in a skillet using the oil and transfer to a baking dish. Soften the onions in the same skillet used to brown the chicken and combine with all other ingredients in the baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees until the chicken is done, approximately an hour and a half. Serve with couscous or rice.
I'm sure this wasn't the best one I could have done but, hey, it was the first try (and it's not bad at all). The chicken should be submerged and to do this right I really need to get an enamel lined Dutch oven or something like that, not a Pyrex baking dish. Also, I think chickpeas would have been very nice.
There are some classic North African ingredients I'd really like to find. Harissa is awesome as is preserved lemon. There's got to be a place to get this stuff somewhere near me....
Back from the Farm
This past weekend, we headed out to visit my brother, who is now living outside of Asheville, NC on a small farm.
The day we got there, they'd just received a shipment of adorable baby chicks. It was, I think, very good timing on our part... even though it was totally unintentional. There were about thirty new chicks, which just about doubled the size of their flock.
Now, I know a lot of people who have said that chickens are disgusting, stupid creatures. I suspect these people have only met chickens over-bred for meat or egg production... that have probably been living under incredibly unnatural conditions. The chickens I spent time with this weekend had free run of about five acres, not all of which was pasture. They could hang out in the barn, but preferred to wander. They had a lot of personality. Some of them were very, very friendly:
The eggs were wonderful. Right now, they are getting about two dozen a day from the chickens, plus a few every now and then from the geese and ducks.
In addition to the birds, the farm has some other livestock. Here's a picture of my brother with one of the two horses:
There were also some lovely (if vaguely creepy) Icelandic sheep. The sheep were surprisingly graceful, and seemed to enjoy playing with the dogs (they chase each other back and forth). I think it will be a few more months until they are ready to be milked. Then, I believe, there will be cheesemaking. I am researching now so that I can be fully prepared to offer unsolicited advice. If anyone has any suggestions on sheep's milk cheesemaking, let me know.
Use Your Microwave to Calculate the Speed of Light
Over at Gizmodo, there's an article about calculating the speed of light by melting chocolate in your microwave oven. Basically, you remove the spinny-thing from your microwave and begin to melt some chocolate in it. Take out the chocolate, and measure the distance between the melty-points. This is the half the wavelength of the microwaves in your oven. Why half? Think of a sinusoidal wave. One of the melty spots is a peak and the next is a low point and the next is another peak. The wavelength is the distance from one peak to the next peak.
So, you measure the distance between two melty spots and multiply that by two. That's your wavelength. Oh. Measure it in meters. Be civilized.
Now multiply that by 2,450,000,000. This is the frequency (in hertz) of the microwaves used in microwave ovens.
Your result should be the speed of light.
(Well, not really. If you were doing this in a vacuum and measured really carefully, then it should be. With this method you should be vaguely in the ballpark, though. That's still cool, right?)
Why does this work?
Because I'm sleepy, I'll give you the oversimplified version:
When we say that 2,450,000,000 is your microwave's frequency, what we are saying is that that the wavelength crosses the space 2,450,000,000 per second. Wavelength is a unit of distance. If the microwave moves that distance 2,450,000,000 times each second, then that tells us its speed. The speed of microwaves (which are a sort of electromagnetic energy aka light).
Two observations:
1. I already know the speed of light. I do not, of the top of my head, generally know the frequency of microwaves used by my microwave oven. Why not use it to calculate that, instead.
2. Why waste good chocolate on this? Anything that melts (or browns in the microwave) should work.
via Serious Eats
It won't make you skinny but it will make you happy :)
"It" is pulled pork. Ordinarily you'd need a smoker to do this right and that's not a winter kind of thing to do in general, certainly not in the snow-blanketed Northeast (or Mid-Atlantic). This recipe lets you cook pulled pork indoors using your oven. A crock pot will make pulled pork but it won't have any Maillard reaction or crispy bits, which are pretty major disappointments. This recipe looks promising....
I suspect you could adapt it to chicken or turkey reasonably well, though you'd need to alter times, etc. Any thoughts on this?
Jamie Oliver @ TED
If you haven't done so yet, you should watch Jamie Oliver's TED talk about fighting obesity. I've never really been a Jamie Oliver fan... and, yes, this video is almost a half hour long, but the topic merits your attention. Really.
When you're done, head over to the TED Prize site and join in the effort to help the world eat better.
Trader Joe's Whole Bean Coffee...
...is a bargain.
It's really good for the price. I bought 24 oz of Bay Blend (essentially an Italian roast) for about $10. That's a lot of coffee but I go through a lot so it's not likely to get stale in the time I have it, as I make a quad espresso every morning. I don't know how good the lighter roasts are because I don't drink lighter roasted coffee, just French, Italian or, my favorite, Sumatra. (To my palate, origin flavor <<< caramelization. :) Anyway, if you shop there check it out.
I really wish there was one closer to my apartment. For some reason I seem to live in a "hole" and the closest is in Rego Park (five miles away, with ugly parking and crowds) and the next closest is about ten miles away. I find that kind of bizarre because I would have expected TJ's to go over pretty well in my neighborhood, but evidently not.
Food for Valentine's Day
When most people think about food-related holidays, Valentine's Day probably isn't the first one that comes to mind. Still, food and love are intimately tied in many people's minds. I don't hold much to the idea of aphrodisiacs, but food can be seductive in its own right.
Image by Paul Irish...so can the care, effort, and skill that go into producing it.
Last year, for Valentine's Day, I posted about a cheese and chocolate concoction that is still one of the most popular posts on the site.
I was thinking about what to make this year for Valentine's Day. Perhaps steak with a mole-inspired chocolate-based sauce? As I was thinking about possibilities, I realized that I kept coming back to ideas centering around chocolate. It seems like most people associate Valentine's Day with chocolate. I know that my mind automatically associates the two.
Are there any other foods that you associate with Valentine's Day?
