An education in fermentation.(Rhyming is good, right?)

Sorry, mom and dad...
I lived in Utah for eight years, ages 18 to 26. Prime beer-drinking years, right? I guess. I only went on a booze run up to Evanston, Wyoming, one time, and although I had the world's best fake ID, I was so terrified of getting busted on the way back to Salt Lake that I never went again.

I didn't do much beer-drinking after about age 20. Not because of any kind of moral calling or righteous superiority, I just... didn't. A guy who I was with for a long time didn't drink at all. When I did buy a six-pack, four or five bottles often languished in the fridge for months (gross, absolutely; maybe even borderline criminal). I was so, soooooo boring.

At the beginning of 2008, I moved near one of the state-run wine stores downtown, and began cooking the ethnic-inspired meals nearly weekly for my friends. When possible, I bought wines from the appropriate country. Feeling kind of goofy for the last event, Morocco, I bought one wine from Spain and one from South Africa, and we roughly (very roughly) decided to split the geographical difference. There was no method, usually just madness.

Since moving here, and living with wine drinkers, I've been drinking much more thoughtfully. Which is to say, now I do more than buy whichever bottle has the more interesting label.

Right on Main Street in happenin' downtown Beacon is the Artisan Wine Shop, and these folks have helped me immensely. Although I work nights and weekends and therefore have yet to make it to one of their tasting events, the owners have steered me toward some great bottles. Also, I always assumed that good wine equals expensive, and they have shown me that that doesn't have to be true! I owe so much to these people, and they don't even know it.


A couple of weeks ago I walked in with a blank look on my face, and walked out with three bottles of grapey goodness. One was a white zinfandel, my boyfriend's mom's fave; one was a Spanish red with a dramatic label (I'm not totally out of the woods yet) that my boyfriend had bought before; and the third was a sauvignon blanc to pair with dinner's scallops. I'll be honest: I loved it for the cool label, and I was intrigued by its claim to having citrus notes.

But we opened it, and it really, really did have those citrus notes! It was like grapefruit (or, more accurately, grapefruit's cousin pomelo) slapping you in the tongue. In a good way, of course.

So when I walked in there a few nights ago, I knew at least one thing I wanted. But I know that I know nothing about wine, so I kind of crafted an experiment. "Would it be really lame," I asked, "to get another sauvignon blanc so I could compare them side-by-side and maybe learn more about that family?"

I felt really dumb asking. Like, really dumb. Luckily, Mei Ling So (one of the owners) is either used to dumb questions or good at hiding disdain for their askers... She told me it was actually a pretty good idea, and gave me a couple of choices. Most from France, either the Loire Valley or Bordeaux. I asked her what caused the differences, and finally learned how to pronounce "terroir." (The thing about food editing is that although I've learned to spell unusual words, I haven't always learned how to say them right, if at all. For a long time in Salt Lake, "tart-ees tate-in" was a running joke about tartes tatin...)

So I got the Mason Cellars' Pomelo 2007 sauvignon blanc, and a biodynamic sancerres from Bordeaux. She mentioned that it was citrusy, too, and I got all excited about them being similar, but she shut me down: "They're really different." Apparently the biodynamic winemakers don't "mess with" (I swear those were her words) the winemaking process as much. She described the French one as "yeasty," because fewer preservatives are added. Also, the biodynamic guys add infusions of chamomile and nettles, which is really interesting but I don't really get. Yet.

Oh, boy. Have I got a lot to learn...

Picked up sushi on the way home, and cracked open - well, unscrewed, anyway - the Pomelo. Because it was a school work night for the boyfriend, getting though two bottles of wine was out of the question and the sancerres is still chillin'.

Which means, you know, that I have to go back and get another bottle of Pomelo for an advance-planned tasting. It'll be rough, but I think I'll get through it. Here's to more sushi and wine this Tuesday!

¿Yutia? ¿Cómo? or, talking tubers...

Way back when, when I started the ethnic cuisine challenge/resolution, I had this precious little idea that I'd walk into an ethnic grocery with a vague idea of what I wanted to cook, then I'd find unknown-to-me ingredients/items and ask the employees/owners how to prepare them. It would have worked in SLC. I regret never having been to one of the African grocers...

So a few months ago - wow, looking up the photos I see that it's been six months - I went to a new-to-me grocery store that looks a little warehouse-y but is closer than the one I had been going to. The produce selection was broad, and prices seemed good. As I wandered the aisles, I came to a tuber section. Yes, a little area with nothing but brown tubers in various lengths, widths, and stages of hair growth. In addition to yams, sweet potatoes, and jicama, signs read batata, malanga, casava, manioc, taro... and my new friend, yutia. A cute little older couple was picking through these tubers, arguing in Spanish about which ones to were good.

Aha! I thought. This was my chance to try to fulfill what I'd originally set out to do. I asked them in my crappy Spanish (I may have studied it for six-plus years, but my last class was in 2002) what this vegetable was, and how to prepare it. Luckily this sweet man was adept at charades, because I understood "slice it thinly" and "bake it."

So I bought some, brought it home, and promptly Googled "yutia." Yeah, it doesn't really exist on the interwebs. Results were spotty at best, and basically told me that South American indigenous peoples cultivated it. After that, I'm not sure what they did with it... It came across as some anthropological curiosity more than a vegetable you'd pick up in a suburban New York ShopRite.



So I did what the abuelito said. I peeled it and sliced it as thinly as I could, which got difficult, as this tuber was really slimy. I tossed the slices in some olive oil and salt and pepper, and stuck it in the oven at 350 for about 15 minutes, tossing it again at some point in there.




When I figured my little medallions were done, it looked like they needed something more. Sour cream! That makes almost everything better. And it did, for these guys. They were still pretty chewy. Pretty bland. One big "meh," you know? But they reminded me of something. I couldn't place it for a few days.



Bam. Top left. Thanks to the "exotic vegetable chip identifier" at Terra Chips' website, I had known this previously as taro... Good to know. There are plenty of recipes out there for taro. It seems like a lot of these starchy/slimy tubers are interchangeable, as far as recipes go. But I'd wanted to do something uniquely yutia... Chips, so original, I know.

Today, six months after starting the yutia journey, I re-Googled "yutia recipe." And got results, including this one for a Filipino tapioca stewy-desserty-thing called tabirak o binignit o ginataan. I ♥ Filipino food, so who knows, maybe I'll give this (and tapioca, eek) a shot sometime.

Also among the Google results: "Did you mean: yautia recipe"

Turns out that yes, yes I did mean "yautia recipe." Where the heck was that six months ago?!? Next time I get a bug to buy it, I know where to find recipes.

Except that I ended up switching back to the other supermarket.

OK, OK... this post totally doesn't count...

I really really realllllly meant to do a full post today. Except, see, the boyfriend took a snow day, and you know, really, I couldn't tell you the last time we had an entire day together. So we stayed away from the Interweb in general and walked and did groceries and laundry and cooked dinner. Is this what normal couples do? I'm sure we'd get sick of each other after, like, three days of this.

But - this is what I was talking about when I said the weird stuff came to me.

Or, as my friend S asked when I showed her this picture, "Why did you take a picture of turds?"

Recap

Danielle, aka Fran, gave "Moroccan wine" a thumbs-up.

What I made in SLC, except for the already-recapped Italian (photos here):

Cuban: Cornmeal-crusted whitefish with an almond-butter sauce, and a cinnamon-mango crisp. Caroline (aka Vera) came over and did accounting homework while she ate. This one was so easy - and it must have been good, too, because after this she brought her own Tupperware for leftovers. From this cookbook.

Indian: Chicken vindaloo. Really well-seasoned, with small amounts of many spices. Spicy, but not burn-your-mouth-for-days hot. There's a picture of it in an earlier post somewhere down there...

Thai: I made pad thai and a potato curry. They were delicious. The curry comes together really quickly, too, so I've made it a few times since. From this cookbook.

Mexican: This was so good!!! There was an almond mole, almendrado de pollo. I also made mexican rice because, well, it was easy and we needed something to put the mole on. I think both recipes were from Mark Bittman's book, which felt like cheating, but he seems pretty authentic. (E.g., in Asian recipes, he's not afraid to use plenty of fish sauce.)

Japanese: Teriyaki chicken (unlike any I'd had before), yakisoba noodles, and edamame. The chicken was coated in cornstarch before cooking it, which worked really well. Not a crunchy texture, but not soggy either. The sauce wasn't what I'd thought of as teriyaki - it wasn't sticky sweet like it as at most places.

Irish: I'll be honest, this was an easy pick, as I cooked on St. Patrick's Day. I made an Irish beef stew, and colcannon (mashed potatoes with leeks). Friends brought Guinness and beer.

Colombia: I found this cookbook at the library, and for that one book alone, I miss the SLC library a bunch. I haven't been to the little one here in this little town, but it'll be interesting to check out the breadth of their selection. I made fried bananas, coconut and black-eyed pea rice, and a stew with fish and plantains. The first two dishes were fantastic. The stew, well... I don't know if the plantains were extremely unripe, or if that's just how plantains are supposed to be in savory dishes. The fish kind of started to fall apart. On the off chance I were to make the stew again, I think I'd get riper plantains, and cook only add the fish when the rest of the stew is close to done. Maybe even fry it first for better texture? Anyway, I learned a lot with that one...

Last, but not least, Moroccan: I don't know how I decided on this one. It's entirely possible that I just picked up one of the prettier cookbooks on the shelf at the Trib and went for it. In this case, the book was Arabesque, and I could almost smell the spices when I opened it. I made harira, a traditional Moroccan stew, from the book, and a lentil, onion and rice "salad" from a recipe I found online. We had been getting wine from the same country as the dishes, but I couldn't find any wine from Morocco at the state store down the street. So I picked up one bottle from Spain, and another from South Africa, and decided to split the difference. (I didn't say the difference was split equally by geography!)

That turned out to be the final SLC cuisine night, because a week or maybe two later I was packed up and on the road to New York. Even in the new apartment, it's been hard to plan dinners like those because
1) I don't have friends to invite over to eat. There's me, B, and the puppy.
2) I work nights and weekends.
3) It's harder to find weird ethnic ingredients because this is a smallish city. What I should be doing is planning way ahead, so I could go down to the city on one day off and get ingredients, and on the second day off, cook my brains out.
That said, with No. 3, it's not as hard as I thought, and sometimes the weird stuff comes to you... More about that tomorrow. (Yes, tomorrow. Wednesday, January 28.)

Italian

Week one of the challenge was, well, certainly a challenge.

A bunch of old friends from my days at Starbucks were weaving in and out of town, and many of them started school on Monday, January 7. I wanted to host a shindig at my new place. Consensus was that Saturday night (which I usually work) would be best for most people.



(bradley, left, lexi, back of caroline's head, danielle, and ryan. it was late; we were tired. except brad.)

After looking through a cookbook one of my cousins put together with recipes from family friends, I decided to start with Italian food. Jamie's compilation, The World in My Kitchen, includes recipes from Raffaele "Lele" Malferrari, who grew up outside Bologna. Apparently Lele loved bean soup as a kid, so Jamie included its recipe. She also included one for lasagna verdi al forno (baked spinach lasagna) that included bechamel and a ragu.

The pasta di faggioli, Lele's Bolognese bean soup, looked easy enough on paper. I soaked the navy beans overnight, and then some. The aroma of olive oil and garlic filling the kitchen was heavenly. Things were going well until the oil started splattering all over! I hurried and turned it down, but that front right burner runs extra hot. After I added parsley and tomato puree, the saucepan calmed down. I cooked the beans in the FLAME! oven, which also runs hot, and I can't believe those didn't burn.

After running the beans through the mini-chopper (oops! I guess when I read the recipe the first time, I didn't see anything about a food mill - which I don't have), with cooking water, I set the mush - not exactly puree - aside in a big china serving dish. I was trying to cook for the lasagna at the same time (I'll get to that) and was running out of stovetop food receptacles! After rinsing the oval oven and pouring the lasagna sauce into it, I rinsed the big pot and reassembled the beans and tomato/parsley/garlic sauce in it. I followed directions and added the rice and potatoes, but after waiting a while it seemed like the potatoes weren't cooking. So I covered it and turned up the heat.

If you're a real cook, you may have just winced at that.

I burned the soup. Didn't realize that was possible. And I didn't realize what was happening for a while, either. My phone was ringing off the hook and I was trying to concoct lasagna, and I probably didn't like the song on the radio, all at the same time.

As soon as I figured out something might be wrong with the soup, I pulled it from the heat, after playing musical chairs with the other pots on burners, and stirred it. When you can tell that the entire contents of the pot are rotating together, things are very bad. I used a spatula to pull up from the bottom of the pot, and there was my charred pasta di faggioli. I'm sure it wasn't the worst thing that could have happened, because it was surprisingly easy to scrape the soup from the charred part and keep cooking - after adding more broth, and going back to low heat.

The lasagna didn't give me any trouble, really. It was just more complicated than I expected.

Ragu alla bolognese - was supposed to be made with freshly ground chuck, which sounds like it would be damn good. But one of my presumed guests was vegetarian, so I substituted finely chopped (minced? I should learn the difference) portobello mushrooms. It turned out great - Danielle, the veg, loved it, and no one else noticed what was missing.

One of the ingredients for the lasagna was bechamel, a sauce made from butter, flour, milk, salt and pepper. It sounds fancy, and there are only a few ingredients, and it involves whisking constantly, so I was pretty intimidated.

Bechamel is the most forgiving sauce ever. I was mid-whisk when I noticed the soup crisis. I turned down the heat on the bechamel and dealt with the soup, and when I went back to whisking, the bechamel recovered marvelously. And I couldn't stop "tasting" it - next time I'll double the recipe, so there's extra for the lasagna.

I wanted to have dessert ready for my friends, too, but there was no way I could make something else. The boxed tiramisu (in keeping with the Italian theme!) from the frozen foods aisle worked GREAT.

Went well: Lasagna prep and cooking, chopping all the veggies the night before, substitutions. And we had such a good time!!
Didn't go so well: Figuring cooking times - when Caroline started into the soup, the potatoes still weren't done. Pot and pan and burner management - musical chairs on a stove is no fun. I went through the saucepan, the frying pan, the big pot, and the oval oven (that's all I've got) multiple times each before the meal was done. I hope that was a one-time thing.

I was given china when I got married that I had never used in three years. Well, why not now? We went through all eight place settings. I've never been happier to do so many dishes. Friends I hadn't seen in ages came by and ate and drank (and disregarded the vaguely squatteresque feel of the apartment). Dyson took pictures of the food, but I still haven't seen them. I only have the party pic, which is fine. Even though it felt like my head was spinning for hours, once my friends were over and food was done, it was SO worth it.

new year, new kitchen

I recently moved out of a long-term apartment and left a lot of things behind. My new apartment looked and felt naked, and I felt like it wouldn't be home until I made a meal there. The kitchen, especially, depressed me – drab white walls with a high ceiling and poorly designed "country kitchen" cabinetry, which probably magnified the empty feeling, because I could see what was missing behind the glass doors. It looked like there might be potential, but it was difficult to identify what was missing. Needless to say, I kind of avoided it.

Then a dear friend called on Christmas Day, asking if I'd received a large box in the mail. I said I hadn't, and he was upset because "they said it would be there by Christmas." I didn't know who this "they" was. We hung up, figuring the package had just been delayed. Leaving later that day to go do some laundry, I happened to look around the staircase that goes up through the center of the building, and caught a glimpse of a box in front of my apartment's vestigial door (it's probably left over from when the building was a house, or each floor was its own flat). That door doesn't have a number on it - it could be a closet as far as anyone's concerned. But there it was, the missing box.

I hauled it inside, and called him back to let him know I'd been mistaken. As I opened the box, I ended up leaving a long, rambling message of flabbergastedness – as close to speechless as I've ever been. The return address was The Chef's Shop, in Great Barrington, Mass., and inside were many goodies:



COLOR was what my kitchen was missing! It's funny how much of a difference that made once the tea towel and oven mitts were arranged just so by the stove, and of course that Le Creuset oval oven in FLAME! (which looks too small in the picture; must have been the angle) will stay on the stovetop. The gifts were an unbelievably generous move, and I can't wait to cook for the giver.

Its been very chilly here lately, so the first thing I made in the FLAME! pot was chili:


The super-high quality of the pot, and maybe even just the brand's reputation, really intimidated me! I still handle it very gingerly, even though that thing has more tough in its plastic oven-safe-to-450-degrees-lid than I do in my whole body. But the chefs at work assure me that I won't ruin it, and it'll cook everything. Kathy, the food writer, said, "You can even braise in it!" I replied that I don't even know what that is, yet. The coworker behind me assured me that I've done it a million times, whether I knew it or not. I looked it up in Food Lover's Companion, and nope, I've never braised. But I'll see if I can do that in week two of the...

...Food/cooking-related New Year's resolution! It got figured out Sunday with lots of help from my coworker Erin. I'll be cooking food from a different country every week. If I go out of town, I don't have to do that week (but probably will). Instead, I'll do at least two dishes the preceding or following week. Erin, a world traveler herself, had lots of good ideas about procuring recipes, so I'll only head for Bittman's World's Best Recipes if I abolutely have to.

I have this vision of heading to the African grocery store (I know the Salt Lake Valley has at least one), ingredient list in hand, then talking with an employee about me trying to cook, and hopefully getting suggestions for side dishes (such as injera, a flatbread – I'm learning already!) or cooking techniques that might help.

For week one - Italian! No, I'm not boiling up some Bertoli and throwing in some Prego (not that anything's wrong with that). On the menu this week, for a long-overdue shindig for old Starbucks coworkers, are pasta e fagioli (that's how FLC spells it), lasagna al funghi (subbing chopped portobello mushrooms for chuck in the ragu alla bolognese recipe) with handmade sauce and béchamel, and probably some combination of salad, bread and wine. I hope to have pictures of this - ideally with a digicam, not just my phone.

This is all happening in fewer than 24 hours, so I should probably get on the ball about it. Or at least start soaking some beans.

two

I have a love affair with Nutella.

Found this recipe for Nutella bread pudding last month, and made it just as soon as I could go to the store and snag the ingredients. I didn't wait for the brioche to officially be a day old. Heck, I wasn't even sure what brioche was when I set out. (This foodie thing is still new to me. I'm learning on the fly.)



Apologies for the camera phone picture, but even if it had been professionally styled and shot and all of that, there's no way it could look as divine as it tasted.

And if you decide to try and make it, it really does fit in the 8x8 dish. (I was skeptical.)

On another blog I read, someone attempted a 52-week baking challenge. I've been inspired, and maybe I'm warming up for my own challenge in the New Year because over the past six weeks, I've baked six pumpkin pies, one coffee cake, and Nutella bread pudding. Maybe my challenge won't be baking, but it'll be fun nonetheless.