This Is Why I'm (getting) Fat

Yes, I’ve even eaten Domino’s Three Cheese Mac-N-Cheese. I hate myself.

If mac & cheese is on a restaurant menu, I will order it. In my mind I rationalize eating such a rich and caloric dish as my duty in the never ending search for the platonic ideal of macaroni and cheese, but in truth I just like cheese and noodles in almost any form (as evinced by my previous post).

I enjoy my boxed Kraft almost as much as my own recipe, which until recently was béchamel sauce with tons of cheese and maybe a little roasted garlic and a pinch of dried mustard. It’s pretty good but the quality changes based on what cheese I have on hand and how much I decide to use. Sometimes I overheat the cheese or use too much of it which can make the proteins coagulate which results in a grainy sauce.

I always tell myself to keep track of my hits and misses so that I can get consistent results but it’s like, how consistent can a “cup of grated cheese” be from one time to the next? So recently I bought a kitchen scale and set about to make my cooking more uniform. It makes a big difference and it only cost $20. I highly suggest getting one.

Lynn Rossetto Casper: my new culinary muse, I guess

And then I heard mention of a mac & cheese recipe on “The Splendid Table” cooking show on public radio. When it comes to a dish as routine as this, I tend to pooh-pooh recipes so but the technique was different and the host spoke of it so glowingly. The recipe takes a custard approach to bind the pasta as opposed to the starch-driven béchamel style plus she uses cream cheese to help keep it smooth.

I was skeptical so I decided to make a version of each keeping all ingredients the same otherwise. In the béchamel version, I didn’t use cream cheese and instead added an equal amount of Monterey Jack.

Egg version on the left - can't you tell?

At a friend’s soiree, people said they enjoyed both equally, but the béchamel version went more quickly. The flavors were similar but I found the béchamel version to be gummy while with the other one the sharpness of the cheese was more prominent. I liked the custard version better. I don’t know why people finished off the other one first. Maybe it was in a prettier dish. More likely they were too drunk to care.

My friends are less discerning in party mode

I also like how the custard version holds its shape better. It makes for prettier serving. Lastly, this method is much less time intensive. You put everything in a blender, pour it over pasta, bake. Easy, peasy. My only problem was the amount of raw onion called for in the Splendid Table recipe made both versions overpoweringly oniony. Me not like.

So I set about to come up with a more definitive version that would allow for flexibility and not give you dragon breath. Here are the basic rules:

• For every half pound of dried pasta add use half a pound of sharp cheeses – a blend of aged cheddar, Asiago, gruyere, etc. Whatever floats your boat.
• For each half pound of dried pasta, use one cup of milk, one egg and four ounces of a creamy, smooth cheese, i.e. cream cheese, Fontina, or even Velveeta. I also add a little dried mustard, a bit of paprika and/or cayenne and a clove of raw or roasted garlic.
• If I’m feeling sassy, I’ll toss in a nugget of blue cheese for a little extra punch.
• Where the Splendid Table version uses 3/4 of a raw onion, I just use half and sauté it beforehand to get the stink out.
• Elbow macaroni works best. Its thinner skinned than the traditional pasta shapes which makes for a more tender bite. It’s more Amurican.

Cheese smoothie!

Blend everything together, mix it with cooked pasta in a casserole dish, then top it with more cheese and bread crumbs and bake until nicely crusted.

What could be better than this?

It’s the best mac & cheese I’ve made by far. I think the starch in the béchamel dampens the cheese flavor whereas this version heightens it. Or maybe it's good because I finally used a scale and got some consistency. Or maybe I’m talking out my butt and I owe my thanks to the cloying-voiced lady on public radio for providing such a good recipe. Ugh. No, it’s got to be the scale.

Please share your thoughts on the subject. I love discussing macaroni and cheese almost as much as I love eating it.

I Suck

Imagine a mushy, more orange version of this crammed into a styrofoam cup.
I went to a potluck party tonight and brought two pints of Kentucky Fried Chicken macaroni and cheese.

I have no excuse. I am a terrible, terrible person. I am ashamed.

That said, everyone ate it.

A (small) Pizza Revelation

My new friend

I had pizza with a friend at Terroni, a Toronto-based restaurant group with a location out here in West Hollywood. It’s a somewhat upscale Southern Italian joint that prides itself on authenticity as evidenced by the prominently stacked cans of Italian tomatoes and olive oil. They also adopt some snobby eccentricities; you can’t substitute ingredients on their pizzas (thin crust, of course) and they won’t slice it for you as that’s not how it’s done back in the Old Country.

iPhone wants a flash

Thus, the first thing I did when they brought the food was cut the pizza radially into six slices, immediately placing the meal firmly in the U.S.A. Not Sicily, not Abruzzo, not even Ontario – Amurka. It was a delicious, albeit salty, sausage and rapini pizza bianca. But what elevated the pizza to a new level was the ramekin of red peppers they brought us. As opposed the dried flaky business you get at most pizzerias, these were actual minced red chiles in a bit of oil. So in addition to adding heat, the condiment also provided sweetness, crunch and flavor.

Less than a buck’s worth of jalapenos

Why didn’t anybody do this before? I’m sure plenty of restaurants have, but it was a first for me, so when I got home, I took a bunch of red jalapenos, seeded them (they kept the seeds in at Terroni, but I wanted less heat. I like spicy but even just typing about it is making me sweat profusely. Fer reals), minced them and mixed them with a pinch of salt and some olive oil.

Wash hands thoroughly after mincing, especially before going to the bathroom

Super simple, super cheap, but with an air of exoticism. I keep my ramekin in the fridge and have since had it on pasta, bread and even on its own in petit, measured spoonfuls.

Just Bragging About Dinner

As part of my procrastination routine today, I decided to make chicken pot pie for the first time. I had a chicken brining in the fridge that I smoked for a few hours until it was 30 seconds from fully cooked.

My trusty Brinkmann

I boned the chicken into bite-sized strips and then sautéed some mire poix, mushrooms and frozen corn. I made a few cups of thick béchamel except I used one cup of milk to two cups of chicken stock and then mixed everything together in casserole dish.

There might be a bit of dried oregano and thyme, too.

Then I rolled out a cheddar-buttermilk biscuit crust on top. 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven and presto: chicken pot pie.

Cheese Biscuits! 1-1/2 cups flour 1/4 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 stick of cold butter, chopped 1 cup of shredded sharp cheddar 3/4 cup of buttermilk Mix all the dry ingredients thoroughly, add the butter and pinch it in the flour until it’s the consistency of a coarse meal. Mix in the grated cheese thoroughly then blend in the buttermilk and knead until it just forms a dough. Overkneading will make the biscuits tough. At this point you can make biscuits (baked in a 400 degree oven for 12-15 minutes) but here I rolled my dough out until it covered the casserole pan.

Delicious overkill

Maybe it’s overkill for a solo dinner, but it was rather tasty.

The Horror...The Horror..

One of the three in this photo is not having a fun time (hint: it's the one without an Oscar)

There has been a considerable amount of research done about whether crustaceans feel pain or not. Is this actually under debate? When you stick a crab in a steam pot, I’m pretty sure the ensuing clanking is triggered by unmitigated agony and not because they’re dancing a jig. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like cooking crabs and lobsters; it’s never the yuk fest promised by Annie Hall. I want the death of the animals I eat to be as swift and painless as possible and I have yet to find a way to provide that for crustaceans. Chefs suggest freezing them, putting them in fresh water (a slow death that takes over 12 hours) or putting a knife through their heads. The latter method seemed to make the most sense and a few months ago, I tried it.

This sure as hell don't look humane.

I was making grilled lobster with herb butter so we split the lobsters from head to tail. The results were not convincing, probably because the brain halves were still connected to the body halves so the lobsters continued to twitch and squirm as I slathered their insides with butter. At least the dinner guests enjoyed the meal. Then I read about Simon Buckhaven, the Temple Grandin of shellfish. A few years ago, the English lawyer invented the horribly named, Crustastun, a metal bin that sends 110 volts through whatever you put into it – Dungeness crab, crayfish, spiny lobster, a large guinea pig – bringing about death within a couple seconds. Sounds great except the base model is the size of a Xerox machine and costs over $4,000.

It also plays a lilting lullaby right before they're zapped

Enter eBay, where you can get a pocket-sized rechargeable stun gun that delivers 2.7 million volts for under $20. So I did. This doesn’t mean that the stun gun has thousands of times the killing power of the Crustastun; stun guns only deliver milliamps where the Crustastun chamber hits its targets with 600 times the current (4-6 amps). My hope was that the delicate crustacean nervous system wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I decided to name her "Mercy"

The day the post office delivered my instrument of death, I hightailed it over to the crazy Chinese market where they had stone crabs for a few bucks a pound. I took a couple of them home and then thought, “Oh shit. What do I do with them until killing time?” It’s not like I have a saltwater holding tank next to the sink. So I tossed them in the fridge and walked away, rationalizing to myself that they were napping peacefully. Yay, death with dignity!

I highly recommend using rubber gloves.

When it came to cooking time, I made sure the steam pot was hot and ready to go should the crabs survive their tasing. I took them out of the fridge and zapped each of them for a few seconds. The animals barely reacted despite the arcing current and tiny wisps of acrid smoke. After that, they seemed thoroughly and completely dead. Rather than do an autopsy, I tossed them in the pot where they cooked away soundlessly. Mission accomplished.

Now that’s what I call a dead crab

I made my friend shell the carcasses while I rolled out pasta and I made a green curry-like sauce substituting cream for coconut milk and tossed it all together with some corn and cilantro. My plating sucks

While stone crabs don’t yield as much meat as a Dungeness crab and they’re more of a pain to shell, they were nonetheless delicious and I didn’t have to shell squat (thanks, Steve). Boiled down with shrimp shells to a paste for a future bisque

Obviously, there is nothing scientific about my method and maybe it didn't even work. Maybe the tasing put the crabs into a state of paralyzing agony. But it seemed more humane than any method I've tried in the past. And since lobsters die from electrocution even more quickly than crab, I can't see why it wouldn't work on them, too.

My only regret is that I didn’t tase the giant shrimp I also cooked. They didn’t die as instantaneously in a hot pan as I thought they would. But if it’s any consolation, they might have been the best peel and eat shrimp I’ve ever eaten – tossed in a hot wok with ground pasilla and chipotle powder, cumin, sliced red jalapeno and garlic and salt. Sweet, spicy, sucked the heads...amazing. Sorry, shrimpses.

Jamie Oliver: This Is Why You're Fat

Jamie Oliver apparently ate his $100,000 prize money

At the most recent TED Conference (technology, entertainment and design), celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver was given some kind of award for his work in food and obesity education. How that connects with technology, entertainment or design, I’m not quite sure, but he’s hip and telegenic so he fits right in.

To encapsulate his 18-minute talk: people are fat because they stopped cooking food and eat processed crap instead. Nothing groundbreaking, but the message is delivered with Oliver’s manic enthusiasm so it’s fairly watchable without being too sanctimonious. The presentation happens to coincide nicely with his upcoming TV show, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” where he goes to America’s most unhealthy city and tries to get them to eat a green vegetable. He is so sucking in his gut.

He makes a couple interesting points: At the 11:15 mark he plays a clip from his show where kids in a kindergarten class are unable to identify beets, cauliflower, eggplants and even tomatoes and potatoes. He believes that people won’t eat food that they can’t identify and will therefore never eat healthily unless they’re better educated. Fair enough. A companion to Michael Pollan’s rule, “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

an ABC promo for the show

Continuing, Oliver maintains that for the past three generations, the family tradition of cooking skills being passed down has ended. His goal as an educator is to get every child to learn 10 recipes so that they can live independently, healthily and economically as adults. Neat idea. As a kid, I learned to make soup from a can of V8 juice – add Worcestershire sauce and Parmesan cheese from a green tube et voilà! In high school, I took Independent Living where I made an apron and learned how to make (bad) bran muffins. So by the time I turned 18 I could make really salty soup and greasy baked rocks. Two recipes - 20% of the way to an independent life according to Jamie Oliver’s vision.

Obviously, he doesn’t mean a specific list of exactly 10 dishes, but these are what I would choose:

• Spaghetti sauce – that just seems like a gimme. It’s cheap and easy and everyone likes it.
• Chili – Again, cheap and easy. Feed a family of 4 for a few bucks.
• Stir fry – I suppose this is more of a technique than a recipe but it’s healthy and has infinite variations.
• Rice – This could accompany the above two recipes, I suppose. Billions of non-Americans subsist on rice. We can, too.
• Roasted chicken – I’m not a huge chicken eater, but I like a good roast chicken. Plus, you can scale this up for a turkey and be the star of every Thanksgiving.
• Pasta – Here, I specifically mean the Italian method of sautéing a few ingredients and then adding pasta and some pasta water in the last minute of cooking. It’s one of the first things I learned how to cook well. Essentially the Italian version of stir fry.
• Steak – This is technique more than recipe, but good to know for cookouts and hot dates.
• Meat stew – Knowing how to braise is a cheap way to live well.
• Chicken soup – So people don’t waste their roast chicken carcasses.
• Macaroni & cheese – Yes, this is a dish that contributes to American obesity, but, come on, can’t we live a little? We have Chef Jamie's blessing.

Did I miss any?

Preparing for the Apocalypse (or Surprise Dinner Guests)

Your guess is as good as mine If you were to look at my freezer, you’d think I was a really sloppy Mormon . In truth, I probably don’t have food for more than a couple weeks, but in those two weeks, I’d live like a goddamned king. I’ve got lamb stew, veggie chili, various meat stocks, frozen scallops, bacon, and tomato sauce, not to mention the dried goods – the saffron, chiles, porcini mushrooms and fermented black beans. My only issue is that I need to be more vigilant in labeling my foodstuffs. Too often, what I thought would be spaghetti Bolognese turned out to be brisket on noodles. No matter what the caption, you'll think salted duck eggs are disgusting but they're not. Honest I think this hoarding behavior stems from my mother who used to keep stores of brandied fruit and salted duck eggs in the cupboards so us kids would never be wanting for (weird) food. The brandied fruit really sticks in my memory. It was stored in this very ‘70s smoky purple glass jar – a fermenting mass of various canned and fresh fruits every week by equal amounts of additional fruit and granulated sugar. We’d have it on ice cream or on pound cake; it was a convenient and handy way to make a pedestrian dessert instantly exotic. Or at least alcoholic. As an adult, as I developed more of a taste for the savory over sweet, I decided to try keeping a store of duck confit. Basically, these are cured duck legs, cooked in duck fat and stored for several weeks in the fridge in duck fat. When done correctly, they are luscious, salty and gorgeous, with a fantastic depth of flavor that comes only from meats that are cured, cooked in fat and stored for several weeks in flavorful fat.This isn't the actual spice mix (it's one for bacon), but it's a pretty picture, no? Recipes abound. But the key elements are: cure the duck for a day or so in salt and very aromatic herbs, cook the duck in duck fat for a couple hours at a low heat, then store in the same duck fat in the fridge for at least a couple weeks. In my herb mix, I used coriander seeds, pepper, bay leaves and Szechuan chili peppers known for their distinct flavor and tongue numbing qualities. In the final result, the numbing effect was deadened, but the distinct floral-herbaceous notes were very present. Duck cooked in duck fat now crisped in duck fat. Jon Cryer beware But the biggest obstacle was keeping the duck legs in the fridge without eating them. While most recipes say that the legs will keep for up to a month, I read somewhere that Nancy Silverton (or was it Alice Waters? How embarrassing, but seriously, all you white women chefs look alike to me) liked to serve duck confit after three months or longer, as the legs become more tender and complex in flavor. Alice Waters, Nancy Silverton, clearly separated at birth I managed to wait three months at which point I served mine over blanched Brussels sprout leaves with a really gummy and lousy mustard/blueberry sauce. But any flaws in the presentation were mitigated by the reheating of the duck legs – crisped in their own fat to a golden brown on both sides. In my mind, this is the best way to serve them though you can also use them in a cassoulet or shredded on pizza or in stuffed pasta or some other chi-chi preparation. In the crispy incarnation, the sauce and bedding become completely cosmetic and superfluous. It's hard to go wrong.Please ignore the gooey smudge in the background The crisped legs were truly gorgeous, if I do say so myself. I’m sure some native from the Dordogne would scoff at my Asian treatment of the duck, but that was my choice. I’m Chinese. Bite me, François. I’d encourage readers to ignore the Frenchies use their own spice mix. It's really not that hard yet it's something you'll never get in a restaurant because, in general, they can't afford to keep food that long. Your results may vary but if you find a combo that works, please post.