What's French for Douchebag?

So I was asked to prepare a high carbohydrate meal for some people who are running the L.A. Marathon tomorrow. I remembered the television coverage of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal (damn, I'm old) where marathoner, Frank Shorter, was showing Jim McKay his pre-race meal of bowls and bowls of spaghetti. It was pretty impressive; sort of like the 1970s version of Michael Phelps' 12,000 calorie diet.

The biggest difference is that Phelps won a zillion gold medals (yes, a zillion) and Shorter only won the silver that year. So my thought was to make the spaghetti and augment it with the protein dimension of meatballs, clearly the missing gold medal element from Shorter's game.

Meatballs in a nutshell:

1 pound of 20% fat ground beef 1.25 pounds of ground turkey 3/4 cup* of bread crumbs 2/3 cup of grated Parmesan Reggiano 1/4 cup of minced flat leaf parsley 1/2 tsp of dried thyme Salt & pepper

* I don't really measure so you should add "-ish" to all amounts.

Mix well, form lump into 1.5 inch meatballs, brown well on all sides (very important), simmer in marinara for 30 minutes.

Notes: I used turkey because Trader Joe's carries neither ground veal nor ground pork and I was too lazy to go to a proper butcher. I also used the fattiest beef I could find because as the fat renders out, it leaves the meatballs more tender. Other recipes call for eggs, but they make meatballs denser and bouncier. They stay together without the stupid egg as long as you're gentle with them in the browning stage.

I served the spaghetti and meatballs up with some deliciously overly buttered garlic bread and a crips Caesar salad (homemade dressing is the way to go: a couple anchovies, an egg yolk, juice of a lemon, clove of garlic, half a teaspoon of sugar (optional, kinda cheating) - zap it with a hand blender and a bunch of olive oil). It's the dinner of champions.

So Elaine says as she bites into a gooey, yet crunchy, slice of garlic bread, "Oh, you used sourdough. Awesome." And without thinking, I say, "Yeah, I was going for more of an Italian-American aesthetic more than a true old country meal. You'd never get spaghetti and meatballs in Tuscany and the Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana." I mean, duh, right? "The spaghetti was not even close to al dente. This is total East Coast quasi-Italian fuggetaboutit pasta. The Lambrusco? The Gabbiano Chianti? We might as well be eating in Bridgeport."

Everyone looks at me, speechless, and I quickly realize that I sound like a complete jackhole.

I try to play it off like I have too much time and too much broadband on my hands but the damage is done. I sound like a foodie. Horror of horrors. After everyone leaves, I look in the mirror. Am I a foodie? To quote Charlie Sheen's character in Wall Street, "Who am I?"

Why do I cringe whenever someone says, "Oh, Marty's a total foodie?" Because I don't want to be that guy. The guy who asks the butcher at Von's where their Porterhouse steaks were sourced from. The guy who asks to speak to the sommelier instead of trusting the wait staff with the wine list. The guy who uses terms like "wait staff" instead of "waiter" or "waitress."

If only I had done a little more research in planning this meal and I would have discovered that Frank Shorter won marathon gold at the '72 Olympics, where he snacked on M&Ms and beer beforehand. I could have saved myself a lot of embarrassment (and cooking time) by serving that menu. But did Shorter eat peanut M&Ms or plain? And the beer: was it made in the Pilsner Brauart-style, as the Olympics were in Munich that year? Or was it a bottom-fermented ale in the British style? Or was it a wild yeast lambic? Yeah. I guess I am that guy.

At Last, Pizza - Part 1

Quick garden update: Just wanted to show off the front EarthBoxes as I didn’t include photos in the previous post. They’re doing great guns relative to the DIY boxes thanks to better sunlight and that they were planted earlier. It couldn’t possibly be that their patented design is superior to zip tie and hacksaw jobs. You don’t need to know that two of the DIY plants have already died. See, they were just genetically weak varieties. Yeah. Future marinara Not yet Big Boy Anyhow, I’ve been meaning to do a post about making pizza and I keep putting it off because it’s such an expansive topic so I thought the best way to tackle this is in stages. We’ll start off with the dough. I know everyone says that it’s all about the water, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the flour, the salt, the kneading, the yeast, the proofing, the olive oil and whether Mercury is in retrograde or not are more important factors than the water. I’m not saying that water isn’t a factor, but there are so many other obstacles working against the home cook than the mineral content of your water. As an aside, there was an interesting experiment about water and pizza crust done on the Food Network show, “Food Detectives.” Compelling stuff but if you make pizza in a toaster oven with Bisquick and Velveeta, it ain’t gonna be good just because you used Manhattan tap. Over the past year and a half, I’ve experimented making dozens of pizzas with good ol’ L.A. municipal and I think it’s tasty stuff. And my pizza making skills are developing nicely, though a friend of mine said, “Man, that reminds me of when I worked in a pizzeria. 160 pizzas a day.” Basically John made more pizzas in a day than I’ve made in 18 months. Only 9,935 hours to go until pizza mastery! I was always wary of making pizza from scratch because I thought my kneading skills were sub par. My bread was always dense and crumbly and the dough was tough to handle. Once I got a Kitchen-Aid standing mixer with a dough hook I thought all my worries would be over. But it turns out my problem was, in fact, with the water - quantity, not quality. I may still be a shoddy kneader but my dough just wasn’t wet enough. It's got to be like sloppy, sticks-to-everything wet; dough that's a couple ounces of Evian short of being batter. It's a quality that I couldn't grasp in a recipe or a cookbook. It wasn't until I make several botched batches until I got a feel for the dough. Which sounds horribly wax on/wax off New Age-y, but...there you go. And because flour types vary and most recipes use volume measurements instead of weight, no recipe is going to get the same texture every time. You just have to play around until you get it. If you think, "This is way too gooey to be right," then you're probably there. Now let me explain that my method is one that I sort of made up (as opposed to all my other meticulously researched recipes). I’m pretty positive that this is not how they do it at Domino’s, but it’s yielded me consistent Neapolitan-ish crusts. I take a plastic tub and add about six cups of flour. That’s enough for about eight 10” pizzas, which is a lot, but you can keep the extra in the fridge where it will get more flavorful as the yeast autolyzes or you can also freeze the extra balls. Then, I take a cup and a half of hot tap water – about 100 degrees – and add a tablespoon of dry yeast and a teaspoon of sugar and let that proof for a few minutes on its own. If you’re not using bread flour, which has more gluten in it, then you’ll want to get some wheat gluten from the market. It’s the gluten that gives bread its chewy texture whereas cake flour has very little gluten, thus making delicate and tender cakes. I got a bag of Bob’s Red Mill at Whole Foods for like seven bucks. A 22 ounce bag will last for a zillion pizzas. That's right, a zillion. Back to the plastic tub: pour in the yeast, add two tablespoons of kosher salt (only one if it’s table salt) and stir it with a big spoon until it’s uniformly mixed. It should be wet and sticky. You might have to get a hand in there to get the dry bits at the bottom but you don’t need to knead just yet. Once it’s mixed, put a towel on top and let it sit for a couple of hours. A word on kneading: I heard this guy on the radio a few months ago going on about no-knead bread and how kneading is totally unnecessary. I tried it. It kinda sucked. But then as I’m writing this, I'm noodling around the Internets thinking that maybe I didn't do it right. I’m seeing that even the great Harold McGee subscribes to this method. Wow. And they even say that the secret is “to make a very wet dough.” I was just about to go into what bull crap this is but I guess I’m wrong and I’ve kind of been doing this method all along except with extraneous kneading. Huh. Wonder what I did wrong the time I tried it? I’m a jerk. Before After (forgot to rotate camera. Doh!) Back to me and my stupid kneaded dough. After a couple of hours on the counter, the dough will have more than doubled in size. Toss this lump into the mixer (or not, apparently), slap on the dough hook, add around three tablespoons of olive oil and let it knead on low for about ten minutes (or zero minutes. Damn you, McGee!). It should come together into silky skinned blob. Before needless kneading Beautified by superfluous dough swirling Pull it out, roll it into a fat worm shape and cut it into eight pieces. Each should weigh around 200 grams, which will give you a modestly sized, thin crusted pizza. Look out for that knife! Oh, the humanity! At this point, you get to the storage phase. I will just toss each lump into its own sealed plastic container and then stack them in the fridge and have pizza every day for a week and a day. Just make sure the container is big enough to accommodate the dough’s expansion as it ferments. As the days go by, the dough develops a more yeasty, bready flavor, which is a good thing. I just pull a ball out of the fridge, give it a couple kneads to make it uniform and then let it sit for a couple of hours with the container inverted on top of it so it doesn’t dry out. If you want to toss the dough in the freezer, that works, too. I use Ziploc bags so they will expand if the dough expands. I also suck out all the air (yes, with my lips) to help prevent freezer burn. Who needs a sous-vide machine? So that’s the first part of the pizza making process. Your results may vary. Heck, the crust is the most important part, as far as I’m concerned. Just like the Sushi Nazi insists that the rice is the most important part of sushi, a pizza with a bad crust sucks no matter what you put on it. Which is why I don’t understand the appeal of Casa Bianca, which many hail as the best pizza in L.A. It’s literally a block from my house and I almost never go there because the crust is like stiff cardboard. I eat it maybe a couple times a year and even with their excellent homemade sausage on it, it's kinda meh. Yet people line up every night for hours. I just don’t get it. If only they made it with New York water... Also how serial killers store body parts

My Victory Garden

O.K., it’s been awhile since I wrote anything but I’m back and with a purpose. I’ve got tons of things to talk about from molecular gastronomy to sustainable eating to Mini Sirloin Burgers. But today I’m all gung ho about my upcoming bounty from Mother Nature. In the past, I’ve had mixed successes with my gardening endeavors. When I lived in a crack house (or so my friends called it), I had a huge harvest of tomatoes in my otherwise barren backyard. In my current, less crack-y house, I’ve had more misses than hits despite two raised beds full of expensive soil. One of the problems is that the backyard is on the north side of the house and surrounded by tall trees so it gets somewhat limited sun. But mostly, I would get lazy about watering because I don’t spend a lot of time in the backyard. I tried to do a drip system but it was pretty shoddy. As a result, my tomatoes tended to shrivel up and yield only a couple of tough skinned fruit. The only thing that flourishes is arugula in the spring because it’s basically a tasty weed. So this year, what with it being a drought year, I was hesitant to plant anything. But then my sisters gave me an Earthbox. I kind of dismissed it as a plasticky, faux-terracotta planter, but it’s actually a pretty clever hydroponic system. Basically, you have a reservoir of water at the bottom of a planter and two plugs of soil are dipped in it so it wicks up the water to the rest of the soil. It doesn’t waterlog the plant roots, you don’t need water it very often and the soil moistness stays at a pretty constant level. Plus it has a plastic covering on the top of the soil so you don’t get weeds or lose excess water from evaporation. I got totally excited about it so I bought two more boxes. The problem is that you can only grow two tomato plants per box and they cost $55 apiece, not including soil and seedlings. You can reuse them so it’ll probably pay off in the long run but it’s still pricey. Thus I did the logical thing and did a Google search for DIY Earthboxes. Turns out there are tons of designs out there from fellow nerds who have created whole urban rooftop farms based on this type of planter. Basically, you just take a plastic bin and rig up some sort of platform for the soil so you can maintain a water reservoir underneath. I found one design that looked pretty sturdy and clever involving using a plastic grid on some PVC tubes. I decided that bigger was better so I used two 30 gallon bins where I could plant three tomato plants per bin. I’m really happy with how they turned out but they’re a little too voluminous and it seems like the water is having trouble reaching the shorter roots. It shouldn’t be a problem as the tomato roots grow deeper, but I should have used a smaller bin. Plus, it was kind of a pain in the ass to make. Lots of power tools and sawing and flying shards of plastic. And the cost per box was about $20-25 per bin. I need them to be cheaper if I want to this on any sort of scale. But all in all I’m still really happy about the finished product. Please ignore the surrounding dirt and dead weeds. So I planted a dozen tomatoes, everything from Early Girl to Bigger Boy to Arkansas Traveler to Momotaro. Nothing crazy exotic; I just want big yields. But I still was thinking about more planting. So I went for a simpler design that involves fewer parts and easier assembly using 18-gallon bins. It works out to be about $10 per finished bin so it’s more economical. However, the build is kind of flimsy since all the parts don’t really fit together snugly. I think it’s still going to work but it’s just kinda inelegant. In those I planted squashes, melons and eggplants. I'm not what you would call "handy." But I did create a clog-free/mosquito-free overflow spout. We’ll see how this summer’s harvest goes. If all goes according to plan, next year I’m going to take out the raised beds and replace them with rows of plastic bins. Won’t be the prettiest solution but if it means having low-maintenance vegetables year round, then I don’t care. Eggplant in the back, zucchini in the front. Ooh, one more thing: I was listening to some woman on the radio talking about edible landscapes and so I pulled out the decorative plants in the front of my house and planted herbs instead: parsley, cilantro, two types of thyme, two types of sage, lemongrass, epazote and bunch of basil plants. Again, not very pretty but as long as they grow, I don’t give a crap. I will post updates as the summer goes on.