Putain de merde de courgettes!

C'est le fin d'été et j'en ai bien, bien marre de ce putain de courgette qui pousse, qui pousse, qui pousse. Si par contre il avait un goût bien, mais non. Son goût fade, sans intérêt ne m'attire pas. Son goût est si fade en fait que les gens du potager parle de faire broyer et de le mélanger avec d'autres ingrédients pour le faire disparaître. Pour ne pas gâcher leurs légumes, cultivés avec tant de soin pendant tout l'été. Ceci n'est pas un poivron ou un tomate, des legumes qui vaulent leur poids en or. Non, c'est une merde facile à cultiver, quelque chose que n'importe quel con puisse avoir dans son potager. Qui donne des résultats qui sont (pour un con) étonnants. Des courges grandes,gigantesques, comme si ils étaient des exemplaires de son sexe. L’aspect du virilité, sans goût autre que de l'eau mélangée avec de la terre. Bien, peut-être, pour les jardiniers machos, mais pour les amateurs du goût, décevant.

Today, we had to grill this shit in class. As if that would make it taste better. Zucchini grilled is better than say, boiled, but that's not saying much. Now, if this vegetable had some wonderful taste or could be made into interesting things... like a tomato or a pepper. Or an eggplant. But, no. These things are the wonderment of idiot gardeners everywhere since they produce, produce produce. The garden is a success, measured in kilograms of zucchini spewed forth from even a small number of plants. No matter that it tastes like leafy mud. If not picked young, they grow huge, perhaps equated by some to the gardener's virility; yet still tasteless soggy blobs of vegetable not really worth the effort of cooking.

So, I applied heat to vegetable, searing attractive char marks into its soggy virtually tasteless flesh. In the process, it lost it's crispiness. That was the whole idea, because grilling concentrates what meager flavor these poor things have even if it makes them limp as a wet noodle. Well, not quite that limp, but still not exactly erect. Then I compounded my sin by liberally dousing the things in za'attar spice mix to cover their tastelessness. This was apparently a crime against zucchini, an insult to chefitude, and a total lack of respect for their subtle essence. What f'ing subtle essence? Mud and lawn clippings? No, lawn clippings would probably have more flavor (and pesticides and herbicides and toxins...).

So, limp lifeless zucchini slices grilled to death, drowned in an excess of spice. Is that such a bad thing? At least they didn't taste like zucchini any more. After four months of eating zucchini from the garden, they could have tasted like natto and it would have been an improvement. Alas, I was scorned by all.

The first was the skinny woman, a student. "Too much spice!", she hiss-snarled, wrinkling her nose and giving me a look that would wither, well, zucchini. No, she's not a fan. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The person whose opinion counted, the chef, also hated the things. Overcooked, over spiced. Yeah, that's so it doesn't taste like zucchini. I know, not an excuse. She probably hasn't been eating it all summer, but still.

I scraped the rest into the trash, sending it on its merry way to the landfill where it can no doubt nourish hordes of bacteria, fungi and worms who will enjoy it much more than did my classmates.

Well, fuck zucchini. Who the hell orders a plate of that shit in a restaurant, anyway? $12 for a plate of stuff that tastes like whatever spices you happened to put on it, but not to excess, please. I might order fried zucchini flowers, or quesadillas de flor de calabaza, but that's different. No mush.

Well, that's what cooking school is for. So you can screw stuff up where it doesn't really matter so that when it does matter, you'll get it right.

American food! Fried chicken mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuit

I don't know what came over me, since I don't normally do mainstream American food, but somehow I started with some chicken. Then threw in some potatoes. Hmm. Some biscuits would work well here. If there's potatoes and biscuits, might as well have gravy, too.

Part of this is because we did chicken in class, then we talked about roux. So I suppose this could be a form of studying. If I want to twist things that far. Or is it twisting? This could be on a test!

Buttermilk fried chicken
Ingredients

• The marinade
• Buttermilk
• Minced garlic
• Chicken, dark meat pieces, skin on
• Salt
• Puréed onions (you can throw the garlic and onions in a blender with the buttermilk for this)

The dredging flour

• A bit of salt 
• Nutmeg to taste
• More minced garlic
• Black pepper

Process

1. The day before, marinate the dark meat pieces of a chicken, skin on, in a mixture of buttermilk, puréed onions and garlic, salt, fresh thyme and black pepper.
2. The day of the feast, preheat the oven to 375° F.
3. Heat some oil in a pan, about enough to come half way up the chicken pieces.
4. Put some flour in a more or less deep, wide bowl. Add a bit of salt, a dash of nutmeg, some more minced fresh garlic, and some black pepper.
5. Dredge the buttermilk-covered chicken through the flour, making sure it's well coated, then slowly lower it into the hot oil.
6. Cook the pieces until browned, turn over, then take out and place on a parchment paper covered baking sheet. 
7. When all the pieces have been fried and are waiting on the baking sheet, place the sheet in the oven for about 20 minutes. This will finish the cooking, and also allow some of the cooking fat to drain off.
8. The chicken is now ready to eat.

That seems like a lot of steps. I suppose I could have followed the sneaky practice I've seen in some cookbooks to combine several steps in one paragraph, thus lowering the count. Well, seeming to lower it. You still have to do all that stuff if you want to make the chicken this way. If you'd wanted simpler, you could have just sautéed the pieces and finished them in the oven, right? 

Garlicky mashed potatoes
ingredients

• Russet potatoes, peeled and cut into medium dice
• Duck fat. Yes, you could use vegetable oil. Or lard. I happen to like the flavor duck fat gives to potatoes that no mere vegetable oil could ever hope to match without a lot of chemical additives that would probably be worse than the duck fat.
• Salt
• Minced fresh garlic (paste)
• Chicken stock
• Buttermilk, cold.

 Process

1. Heat a deep frying pan.
2. Put in a bit of duck fat. Add some more. Hmm. That might be a bit dry. A smidgen more won't hurt. 
3. Throw in some fresh garlic paste, just enough for it to sizzle a bit and release its aroma. Burning it would be a faux pas here, making it bitter. A bit of light browning is fine, though.
4. Throw in the potatoes. Add some salt. This will lower the pan temperature and stop the garlic from burning.
5. Let them sizzle a bit, then add some chicken stock. Turn the heat way down, cover and let things simmer gently until the potatoes are cooked and just starting to get a bit mushy. 
6. Scrape all the potatoes off the bottom of the pan, stir them around a bit.
7. Mash the spuds with a fork, then slowly add some buttermilk. Don't panic, it's only 1% milk fat, so it's actually leaner than whole milk. Add bit by bit until you have a smooth, creamy consistency. Cover and reserve.

The gravy

Ingredients

• Flour and butter (equal amounts by weight) for the roux
• Salt
• Chicken stock
• Nutmeg
• Garlic, minced fresh

Process

1. Make the roux with the flour and butter (I use butter, but who would object to duck fat?). Mix them together and put them in a pan on low heat. Stir frequently so nothing burns or sticks. You want to cook the flour to eliminate any raw taste, but beyond that how dark you cook it is up to you. I went for a light tan, a bit beyond white. I want some color in my gravy so it doesn't just look like Bechamel sauce.
2. When the roux is your favorite shade of tan, get a whisk and add the cold chicken stock and the nutmeg. Whisk frantically and pour moderately so everything blends together happily.
3. Put the pan on low heat until it thickens. Remember to keep stirring. If you made thick gravy stir more often. If it's thin and watery you can relax a bit since convection currents will do some of the stirring for you.

Fire-roasted pepper biscuits

Ingredients

• All-purpose flour
• Salt
• Baking powder
• Butter
• Bell peppers, seared 
• Buttermilk

Process

1. I wanted something a bit more fun than normal biscuits, so I added a brunoise of flamed bell peppers. 
2. First, burn the peppers over a gas burner, on a grill or blast them with a chef's torch. You could also use another type of pepper, but would get more heat in the biscuits.
3. The peppers have a lot of moisture content, so I reduced the liquid in the recipe to compensate. I weighed the peppers and subtracted a bit less than this amount from the liquid. If you forget, you may need to increase cooking time to compensate and dry things out.
4. The biscuits go together the usual way: mix the sifty stuff together dry with a whisk: flour, baking powder, salt. These are savory biscuits, so no sugar. Then add the butter and mix it in well. Then the pepper brunoise. Finally, the liquid - in this case, buttermilk. Knead lightly until the dough firms up, roll or smash it down (if it's too wet, smashing works better). Cut into whatever size you think is appropriate, place on parchment paper lined baking sheet and pop them into a 425° F oven for about 15 minutes. 

You can do the biscuits in advance. If you want, pop them in the oven to heat them up - or just smother them in gravy.

When the chicken comes out of the oven, it's showtime. Spoon some mashed potatoes into a plate, arrange the chicken on top, pour a bit of gravy around the potatoes, and garnish with a biscuit and whatever other garnish you have around. I only had flat leaf parsley. Not too original, but a bit of green is better than none.

How to amortize a deep fryer and make some pizzas in the process

We backed out of the driveway. The button pressed, the garage door lowered. What is that? Some jerk had stuck an advertisement on our garage door. There must be some school of marketing that says obnoxiously sticking ads on people's garage doors is more effective than simply stuffing mailboxes. Now I have to get out of the car, rip the thing off the door, and dispose of it properly.

What kind of jerk would do this kind of thing? A pizza place, strangely enough. Looking at the ad, this place looks like they have a big freezer full of ready to cook kibble, a deep fryer and a pizza oven.

They have eleven "delicious appetizers" on their menu. Seven look like things that come in bags, get dumped into the deep fryer and served. The others look like they come in bags, get stuffed into the pizza oven and served. But I could be wrong. Some could come in a box instead of a bag.

They have cinnamon rolls, too. They don't look appetizing in the ad, and even though they're easy to make, my psychic powers tell me these aren't made in house (although my powers been known to be wrong from time to time in the past).

They have ten pizzas on their flyer. No mention of fresh ingredients, home made dough or other words that indicate quality. Lots of low prices, though. Their pies are pretty much the usual gang of suspects, only heavy on the chicken, with four bird-based pies. There's a Hawaiian 'za, presumably "delux" because it has both Canadian and regular bacon - but thankfully no chicken.

One or two have ground beef. Why? Do I ask for pepperoni, mozzarella and tomato sauce on my hamburger? No! It's even combined with sausage, basically ground pork with spices. So, ground beef plus spiced ground pork but still sort of separate. Why not just make meat balls out of the beef, slice them, and keep things Italian?

Call me opinionated, but there are only a few kinds of meat that belong on a pizza: pancetta, prosciutto, pepperoni and sausage. If we expand the term to mean "animal protein" then I'd add shrimp, mussels, anchovies and maybe even oysters (imagine parsley, cream sauce, chives, oysters, garlic, chili flakes, lemon zest and you'll get the picture... damn. Now I'll have to make this and see how it turns out). Probably not mainstream enough for Main Street USA. But ground beef and Canadian bacon don't add much flavor, especially when overpowered by spicy things like pepperoni, sausage and linguiça.

Linguiça? No, that really shouldn't be there. I love linguiça, but it's really something that should be grilled so that the grease can run out of it and go away instead of running all over a pizza. Think next morning here. Congealed white fat mixed with tomato sauce. Breakfast, cold? I think not.

Two garlic-based pies, a strange thing if you stop to consider that garlic is normally a flavor enhancer and not the star ingredient. Unless you drizzle some olive oil over a bulb, add salt and pepper and bake it slowly until the garlic is meltingly soft and mellow. Not likely to happen in a 600° pizza oven in ten minutes or less.

Wisely, no eggplant on their vegetarian pizza. Eggplant pizza is usually a disaster. Eggplant doesn't cook in ten minutes, even in a Vesuvius-hot oven. It needs time, preferably spent in hot oil. If you do that first step, it works fine on a pizza.

One pizza lists salt as a topping. Salt? Why not list all the other stuff, too? Like oregano, pepper, chili flakes... you could probably top out with fifteen more ingredients that way. Like there's no salt in the meat pizza, loaded with cured meats, each packing a hefty dose of NaCl?

Since when is salt a pizza topping? Bet you'll never see this on a menu: Five salt pizza, featuring French gray sea salt, Himalayan pink salt, Hawaiian black and red salt and my personal favorite, Spanish smoked sea salt. Also features tomato sauce, onions, potatoes, egg and anything else I can think of to mellow out that dose of salt. They could call it the Medusa because if you eat enough of it parts of you could very well turn to stone.

They have four almost identical photos describing their salads. All look like they came in a bag, à la Trader Joe's. In fact, the toppings on the pizzas all look like they came in bags.Uniform cut, sprinkled uniformly over the tops of the pies. Artists, they're not.

They say their pizzas are hand tossed. They also say they're gourmet, but until someone puts gormeh sabzee on a pizza I'll just consider that a hollow marketing term. (yes, that was an Iranian food joke. Feel free to laugh or not, as you please). The real question is why bother to hand toss a pizza if the ingredients really fell pre-cut from a frosty bag delivered in bulk from some wholesaler? Maybe they take a pre-formed, frozen crust and toss it like a Frisbee. Would that qualify as "tossed"?

Could they actually make their own dough, in house, shape it and adorn it with wholesome locally grown produce, artisan meats and natural cheeses? It certainly does not look this way in their ad. Sticking the thing on everyone's garage door definitely does not make me think they're a class outfit that cares about quality. More like a pizza mill that buys in 95% of everything they sell pre-made, so some uncaring pimply-faced minimum wage slave can put it together without ever pondering what would happen if they made a real effort to create wondrous pies to the delight of all.

So, here's the Big Question: does buying in 90% of what goes out the door, presumably at the lowest possible cost, truly maximize your profit margin, more than if you created everything fresh, from scratch, with love, striving to bring forth unique pizza variations that could draw the faithful from miles around (or let's face it, fail due to it's nonconformity but live on forever in your die-hard fans' memory)? Does serving something that everyone familiar with the cuisine in question has seen dozens of times ensure your profitability? Or does it cause your establishment to fade into the background of "me-too's" and disappear? I guess I'll find out if no more ads appear stuck to my garage door.

Fat, salt, carbs and flavor. Two ways

The French don't mess around when it comes to enjoying a bit of bone marrow (os à moelle). They slather it on some bread, sprinkle on some coarse gray sea salt and consume. On the other hand, I felt that a bit different approach might work well

Strangely enough, both use almost the same ingredients, although crafted totally differently. On one hand, the French purist approach: Flour, water, salt, yeast (in the bread), marrow, salt. On the other, the somewhat richer Yorkshire pudding: flour, milk, salt, eggs, stock, marrow. The French probably gets you higher sodium, since the crunch of that sel gris is much of the fun; the Yorkshire pudding probably gives you a bit more fat, but this is like saying that Everest gives you a bit more mountain than K2. Yeah, at what point does it matter?

My mother used to make Yorkshire pudding at special occasions like Christmas, when she'd roasted off a nice piece of beef. Her main complaints were the smoke, subordinate to the the crucial "Do you have any idea what goes into this? This is not good for you" concern of mothers everywhere. To which I always wondered, "if it's really so bad, why do you make it and, more critically, enjoy eating it so much?". Perhaps its part of the food guilt ritual.

We started with the French version, since it's easy, fast and direct. It also gave us something to do whilst the Yorkshire pudding was rising ("Whilst" sounds so British. We really should say it more here in the States).

First the smoke question: traditionally, the pan is heated with the fat in it to the point where the fat starts to smoke. This, clearly is stupid. A waste of flavor. And the smoke point is well above the temperature needed to puff things up. So, I preheated the pan quickly in a 450° F oven while warming the marrow and fat in a pan on the stove. I just wanted to get the chill off the pan, basically get it over 212° and maybe a bit more. The reduced beef stock went directly into the Yorkshire pudding batter, since it had already been degreased and should not greatly affect anything in the puffing and rising department. The pan went in, warmed up, came out, got dosed with hot marrow off the stove, popped back in the oven for a couple of minutes to make sure everything was hot enough to flash the steam and puff the pudding. Out came the pan, not smoking hot but good enough. In went a bit of batter into each well, and the whole thing got popped back in the oven for twenty minutes to puff and brown.

In the meantime, we enjoyed the French style marrow, warm from the pan, with some French bread and coarse French sel gris de Guérande. With some beer, since this food a bit too salty to accompany with wine.

I walked by the oven after about five minutes. No puffing. Had there been a miscalculation? Would we be greeted with greasy hockey pucks instead of wonderfully browned, puffy Yorkshire pudding? Fifteen minutes more would tell.

We retreated to our table for some more moelle, bread and beer. The timer ticked down to its inevitable finish. Time to check the oven! Besides, we were out of moelle.

I peeped through the oven glass, straining to see the pan placed on the top rack for maximum heat. Yes! Where things had been flatter than the Devil's golf course, there were now mushroom-like shapes sprouting from the top of the pan.

Out they came, deflating like the stock market after the latest unemployment figures. The photo captured the pudding at about the three-quarter point, but since it was already browned, better deflated than carbonized. The pan was hot enough to kill a parrot, so we carefully brought it to the table where we'd placed potholders to protect the tablecloth.

The flavor? Just like Mom used to make, except with almost no smoke in the cooking process and more of a marrow flavor than roast beef. I'm sure if I had a cardiologist, he'd call me after reading this and yell so loud I'd need an audiologist to fix things up again.

Less Smoke Yorkshire Pudding

Ingredients

• Equal parts flour to milk, by volume. I used about 3/4 cup of each.
• salt
• eggs, three worked with the above flour/milk amounts
• brown stock, reduced down almost to dampness (au sec).
• reserved bone marrow, warmed in a pan to liquid (basically bits of flavor drowning in beef fat).

Process

1. Preheat the oven to 450°F.
2. Sift the flour and salt together.
3. In another bowl, beat the milk and eggs together until things are frothy like a wave by Hiroshige.
4. Fold in the flour to the milk/egg mixture.
5. Put a cupcake pan in the oven for about three minutes or so to take off the chill
6. Take out the pan, pour a bit of the bone marrow into each well and pop the thing back in the oven for another 3-4 minutes. The marrow mixture is already quite warm, as is the pan - so you don't need to risk crossing the flash point here. You just need to get it over 212° F so that the water in the batter will turn to steam and puff things up.
7. While the marrow is heating, scrape the reduced stock into the batter mixture and fold it in. By separating the water based stock from the oil based marrow, we avoid cooling the pan by boiling off liquid.
8. Whisk the pan out of the oven, ladle in the batter to about 3/4 full, and slide the pan back in the oven for twenty minutes. No opening the door and peeking! You want to keep that oven hot to maximize the amount of puff-producing steam in the pudding.
9. After twenty minutes, you should have a nice crop of mushroom-like puddings growing out of the top of the pan. As soon as they're removed from the heat, they'll probably start to deflate, but as long as they're well-browned all is well. They'll still taste great, since all that fat has now magically combined with the batter to produce an alchemical blend of crunchy, greasy and savory. 

To atone for your sins, there is probably some strange diet you can follow or exercise regimen that will make you feel like you're in charge of your health. None of this will change the fact that you just devoured large amounts of saturated animal fat. You can leave the grin on your face. I'm sure you won't make this stuff again for at least a week. I won't.

A Tale of Two Cabs

"What kind of wine would you like? We have two Cabernet Sauvignons - a reserve and another one that the Wine Spectator loves for the price."
"Which one is your favorite?"
"We've never had either. I know! We'll bring them both!"
"That works for me!"

Since the wines are both from California, and one is a reserve odds are they'll be big, bold monsters that would overwhelm a poor chicken or pork dish. Grilled beef, however is another story. Why not with a bold reduction sauce like moelle... yeah, that should work.

Let's use up the meager end of season tomatoes, throw in a variety of peppers from the garden, add some fresh mozzarella and extra-virgin olive oil for a starter. Top the thing with a basil chiffonade. No vinegar, so that things are ready for some wine right off the bat.

Luckily, tri-tip was on sale at the market. Prepped with a salt, tarragon and black pepper rub, it waited until the mesquite coals were sparking then off it went, seared over coals with direct heat, then moved to indirect heat to finish. Nothing like meat and potatoes, so some fried Russet potato cubes with a bit of truffle salt to round off the plate. I knew that truffle oil would be useful!

This week's quiz in cooking class will include brown stock, so might as well make some, reserve the bone marrow and use a bit of it with a reduction sauce, throw in some tarragon, add a splash of red wine to liven things up and drizzle it over the beef. Not bad. The sauce worked well to elevate the meat into something more haute cuisine than backyard BBQ, adding complexity and depth that enhanced the beef. It also tested how well the wines would cut through the fat to cleanse the palate and bring forth more flavor.

The reserve wine had lots of vanilla and oak. The other was more fruit-centric. Both were good, but didn't have much in common at the end, other than being grown in California and being mainly Cabernet Sauvignon. Both went well with the beef, but one brought out the char-grilled flavor while the other favored the meaty saucy notes.

Just to give those wines a chance to show their harmonizing skills, some cheese. We just went to Nicasio Valley and had some washed rind and some Swiss style cheeses, along with a piece of Roquefort to challenge things. Roquefort really isn't a red wine cheese - it's better with Port or sweeter wines like Montbazillac. Nobody seemed to mind, though.

To finish things off, celebrate summer's last hurrah of strawberries with a mousse. Cool and refreshing, and never mind the fat content. This is dessert, so not a good time to diet. Besides, rowing four kilometers should help us atone for our gustatory sins. Somewhat.