Living Off Your Land;

A blog about cooking in America; about eating well, staying healthy, and keeping to your budget in the meantime. Helpful Links: What's all this? Table Of contents

[ichimakesart]

Safe and warm

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[mallowmaenad]

indie studio finally comes out with the ultimate equilibrium between hypercozy petite bourgeoisie queer friendly hopepunk farm management game with dating sim elements and obtuse hypergritty grimdark morrowind inspired kingsfieldlike psychedelic low poly immersive sim dungeon crawler where you play as a nobleman whose mind has been addled by the consumption that relies on huffing fumes to maintain their sanity whilst navigating their huge as fuck castle manor they forgot all the winding paths for, encountering offers of arranged marraiges between hitting on servants in your employ who tolerate it due to the altered state of mind and abusive power dynamic. Critics call it "Kingdom Come meets Disco Elysium" and its a roguelite deckbuilder

[surprisinglynotsuicidal]

"Friends dont look at friends that way" COWARD. I look at my friends with awe in my eyes, my chest is filled with love, im glowing because i get to be near my friends. I look at my friends and i would give them my everything. SO SKILL ISSUE, look at your friends with all the love that you have

[livingoffyourland]

Aside 10: A Handful of Patience

I was a Boy Scout, once upon a time.[1] My troop was a backpacking troop; we did the community service and the other usual Boy Scout things, but when it came down to brass tacks, our troop hiked. At least once a month, sometimes more. We hiked all over California, from the well known haunts--Yosemite, Muir Woods--to the frankly obscure--more than one hike started at the end of several miles of unmarked lumber roads in the ass end of the Sierra Nevada’s. And on the vast majority of those trips, I cooked. I loved it: the mental challenge of building a meal that could be successfully dried, then would rehydrate well and not eat up all my fuel was just the kind of puzzle I needed.[2]

At the core of it, dried food is really easy. You bring an appropriate amount of water to boil you add the dried food, and either leave the covered pot on the stove--which is fuel inefficient--or slide the pot into a special constructed insulated pouch. The latter was our solution, and we ended up building them out of winter curtain fabric. Then you set a timer for ten minutes[3], and wait.

That waiting, as it turned out, was a problem. Telling a group of two to four teenaged boys to sit and wait for ten minutes before eating was hard. Add in that these boys had just come off the trail and a long day of walking, carrying twenty to forty pounds of gear, with nothing but an energy bar and a bag of trail mix to comfort them, and the task got harder. And of course, I was one of those starving boys, having just come off the same six to eight hours of walking. It was practically impossible.

When you get impatient cooking dehydrated food, you end up chewing your way through partially rehydrated food, hitting crunchy and hard pockets here and there. It’s unpleasant, but not dangerous. If you cut the same corners cooking fresh food, like hamburgers or pork roasts, and someone might get sick. In both cases, I needed a solution.

I started carrying around bags of small, savory snacks that I could eat and share while the food was being cooked. I called these snacks ‘patience’, and the name stuck. Not only did these snacks stop the chorused call of ‘Is it done yet?’, it also kept me focused and careful, which are both things you want to be when you’re trying to get a white gas stove to ignite without igniting you.

A successful bag of patience was more complex than just grabbing an extra bag of trail mix. It had to strike a balance between being just filling enough that I could wait the ten minutes for food, while not being so filling that I wasn’t hungry when the timer was up. For me, while I was hiking, this meant no chocolate or candy, which burned off far too quickly. It also meant no nuts, which tended to be far too dense; by the time I’d eaten enough to get back to cooking, I wasn’t hungry any longer. Usually my bags of patience were jerky[4], chips, or salami if the trip was short enough.

All this is nice and all, but why does it matter in the home kitchen? Well, the best stocked pantry in the world won’t help you if you get home from work too hungry and tired to cook[5]. And there is no despair greater than finding an unexpected ‘cook for 25 minutes’ in a recipe when you’re already starving.

So next time you’re out at the grocery store, pick up a bit of patience: Salami, pre-sliced or not; a baguette and some dip to go with it; a little cheese; or even just an add-water-and-nuke bowl of pasta. It may seem wasteful when you’re standing in the aisle, like an insurance policy you can’t see yourself using. But when you get home exhausted and starving, and you eat a bit of patience instead of popping out for fast food again, you’ll be grateful you did.

Footnotes:

[1] Because of how the rank of Eagle Scout works, I may still be a Boy Scout, but it’s cleaner to use the past tense.

[2] The problem with dried food is that fat doesn’t ‘dry out’. If you dry out well marbled jerky, you’ll have dry meat with veins of still pliant fat running through it. And that fat isn’t shelf stable, and will go rancid. In the fridge, this isn’t so much of a problem, but in the bottom of a backpack it can turn into a huge issue.

[3] Some things rehydrated faster, some things like tofu and mushrooms took longer, but in our research, ten minutes was the magic number. It was the point where most of the ingredients we were using would be fully rehydrated.

[4] Once you have a food drier, it seems foolish not to make jerky

[5] And that is absolutely a mental state you can find yourself in. If you yourself haven’t, then good for you, it’s not fun.

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 30: Spoonbread

Cornmeal is a culinary staple across the globe. Everywhere from China to Ecuador, you will find people cooking with it. Unfortunately, when I look for common dishes made with cornmeal, I find congee, I find pap, I find polenta, I find nshima, I find grits. I find cornmeal boiled with a liquid until it makes a porridge which is then served with things to bulk up a meal. And we’ve done two lessons of that already. I want to get away from boiled corn porridge.

Cornbread was my first thought. In fact, there’s a whole lesson sitting on the back burner all about cornbread, stymied by one little detail; I can’t find a recipe for cornbread I like. I don’t know what it is, every cornbread recipe I’ve tried ends up either unappealing dry, or fantastically sticky. I know there is cornbread I like; I’ve had it before. But I can’t reproduce it in the kitchen, and that rather puts a damper on any plans to write about it.

So cornbread is out. But I do have something else, and it’s way better[1] than any cornbread: spoonbread.

Spoonbread is the upcounty cousin of cornbread, somewhere between a bread and a pudding. It’s rich, filling, and has a subtle flavor that needs no fiddling. And those that know my cooking style know that’s a very rare phrase for me to utter.

It’s also fantastically simple.

Vessel: 1 oven safe vessel capable of holding 2.5 quarts[2]

1 can corn

1 can creamed corn

1 box corn muffin mix[3]

1/2 cup butter

8 oz sour cream

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1-2 tsp salt

1-2 tsp pepper

Begin by preheating the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Drain the canned corn, reserving half the liquid. Combine everything except the corn muffin mix, and stir thoroughly[4]. Once the oven has come to temperature, stir the corn muffin mix in until it fully combined. Pour the mixture into the casserole, and bake for an hour to an hour and a half.

Once the spoonbread is done, serve it immediately, or let it set and cut it into blocks like you would polenta. I like serving it alongside chili or other stews.

Footnotes

[1] For your soul, anyway.

[2] The recipe called for a 2.5 quart casserole dish, but in my own kitchen, I ended up using a stainless steel mixing bowl.

[3] This is traditionally Jiffy corn muffin mix, but if you have a favored mix, feel free to use it.

[4] This is what is known as the muffin method. In the muffin method, the wet and dry ingredients are mixed together separately, and then combined directly before cooking. It’s predominantly used in making quick breads, where an early mixing of wet and dry will cause the baking powder to react too early.

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 29: Grits

Or, how to dress up your polenta

I said this whole culinary expedition started with a bowl of grits. Jalapeno Cheddar Grits, served as a side to pulled pork. I’ll admit, beforehand I’d never even thought to give grits the time of day; my previous experience with them was while I was backpacking, where I found that grits were a slower cooking, less convenient version of the instant oatmeal that was my staple breakfast on the trail[1]. But that was because I was expecting a different tasting oatmeal -- expecting grits to compete for speed with heavily processed and engineered instant oatmeal just wasn’t fair.

The real power of grits comes not from their speed, but from their versatility. You can, of course, prepare them with just a bit of salt and butter, and they’ll be just fine. But then you would be missing out on the real power, and the real fun of grits; additions.

There are, of course, as many ways to prepare grits as there are ingredients to try, but there are a few standbys, a few cultural standards. And while I rarely stand by standards, they are excellent signpost, especially in new culinary territory.

All of the grits we’ll be making today start from the same base recipe, and it is as follows:

Standard Grits

Vessel: 1 small pot

6 cups water[2]

2 cups cornmeal

1-2 tsp salt (to taste)

2-4 tbsp butter[3]

Boil the water, and add the salt, cornmeal, and butter if you’re using it. Reduce heat to medium, and cook until a thick paste is formed, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. Anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes depending on your tastes. Serve as close to immediately as possible. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is exactly how you make polenta. Corn porridge is not, as it turns out, all that complex. The complexity comes with what to add to it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the common additions to grits is cheese. Many if not most of the recipes I ran across called for cheese of some stripe, and most of them went something like this:

Cheese Grits

Vessel: 1 small pot

4 cups water

2 cups whole milk

2 cups cornmeal

1-2 tsp salt (to taste)

4 tbsp butter

1 tsp ground black pepper

8 ounces of sharp cheddar, shredded.

Prepare the grits as before, but once the grits have come together, add the pepper, stir to combine, then take them off the heat and add the cheddar in doses, stirring to combine. You don’t want to add the pepper too early, since the high heat and long cook time will drive off the volatile compounds that make pepper taste like pepper. And adding the cheese too early is just asking for it to seize up, or throw off the cooking of the grits.

If you wanted to make the recipe that started this whole affair you’d just need to add the following steps: take one or two jalapeno peppers, slice off the top and then slice the remaining fruit in half. Scoop out any seeds and white pith with a spoon, then use a knife to cut the jalapeno into thin strips, which you’ll then want to cut in half. Place these in a pan with a little melted butter, and saute[4] for a few minutes, until the peppers are soft. Then make the grits, and stir the peppers in as you add the cheddar.

Now, we’ve seen that grits can play very well with dinner. But what about dessert? If you were to take the standard grits recipe, add a bit of brown sugar, replace the water with whole milk, add a bit of cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla, and you’d probably come to a recipe that looked an awful lot like this:

Dessert grits

6 cups whole milk

2 cups cornmeal

1 tsp salt

4 tbsp butter

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp cinnamon

2 tbsp brown sugar

1/2 tsp nutmeg

Prepare the grits as before, adding the spices and sugar after the grits were done cooking. Stir to combine, and serve either alone, or with warm milk over top. The best part about this dish is that, while it’s made for dessert, if you don’t tell anyone, you can pass it off as a pretty darn good breakfast too.

Footnotes

[1] I was in my teenaged years, and knew exactly what I wanted at all times. I like to think I’ve grown out of that, but that’s probably a lie.

[2] If you like your grits looser, increase the ratio of cornmeal to water from 1:3 to 1:4. Me, I like my grits right here, so I stick with 1:3. Also, if you have some milk lying around, you can replace water with milk, in any combination, as long as the total volume remains the same

[3]The butter here can be switched out for any number of other fats. In this dish, olive oil wouldn’t go amiss, as it wouldn’t be getting hot enough to lose it’s flavor (but not extra virgin olive oil). If you were more influenced by the southern United States, then bacon fat might be your fat of choice.

[4] Cook in a little bit of oil over medium-medium low heat, stirring regularly and not allowing the food to sizzle too energetically.

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 28: Polenta

Polenta is an Italian dish, a thick cornmeal porridge. Polenta has a lot of overlap with grits, as they are both corn porridges. The primary difference from grits in that polenta is often formed into firm blocks. It’s also the name of cornmeal sold to make the prepared porridge, as well as the Jamaican term for the dish that most Americans would recognize as grits.

I did mention that the nomenclature for this whole culinary area was a mess right? I did? Good.

I’m starting with polenta because it’s traditionally left simple. Grits can of course be as simple as water and cornmeal, but most recipes I find for grits dress up the resulting porridge with cheese, or spices, or cooked meat, or whatever else one finds in their pantry. Polenta, by comparison, is expected to stand on its own. You can put it with sausage or serve it with a sauce, but at it’s heart it’s a block of cooked cornmeal, and maybe a little salt. Even if I usually don’t stand for, by, with, or even adjacent to tradition, there’s something to be appreciated in that kind of simplicity.

Vessel: 1 small pot

6 cups water

2 cups cornmeal

1/2 -- 1 tsp salt (to taste)

1 tbsp butter (optional)

Start the water boiling and add the salt. Add 1/3 to 1/2 of your cornmeal to the boiling water, drop the heat to medium -- medium low, and stir until a paste is formed, usually two to five minutes[1]. Then add the rest of the cornmeal, and stir regularly to keep it from sticking to the pot and burning. The polenta will be ready in about ten minutes, but depending on your personal tastes, it may not be done. More time on the stove will create a softer texture, though overdoing it will result in mushy polenta. Only you can decide where creamy ends and mushy begins, but for me, anywhere from ten to thirty minutes is a good range.

Once the polenta is ready, you could scoop it out of the pot, put it in a bowl and eat it like grits. Polenta does very well with strong, assertive flavors, like beef stew or tomato soup. But if you ate it fresh, you’d be missing out on the true talent of the polenta.

If, rather than eating it fresh, you spooned the polenta out into a bowl, or a casserole, or some kind of mold, and you let it sit until cool, you’d make a corn cake. It would still be very tender -- you could break it into pieces with your bare fingers and a bit of careless pressure -- but it would stand up on it’s own. Once you had this block of what I usually think of as polenta, you could cut it into small blocks, toss it in a pan over medium heat with a bit of oil in the bottom, and fry for two to four minutes to a side, until golden brown and delicious.

If you did all that, you’d have fried polenta, which is a culinary chameleon on par with tofu. While it isn’t meaty, exactly, it has a complex and rich flavor all it’s own that means it can stand alone in many a meal, while being just subtle enough that it can also seamlessly transition into a supporting role. Lately I’ve taken to replacing the pasta in spaghetti with meat sauce with a large hunk of fried polenta, but I’ve also been known to sprinkle it with hot sauce and eat it as breakfast[2].

Footnotes

[1] This step appears in several polenta recipes I have found, though it isn’t universal and the reasons for doing so are never explained. I think the staged adding of cornmeal creates a texture difference in the final dish, with some of the cornmeal being completely rehydrated, soft and mushy, while other pieces of cornmeal are just raw enough to give a little texture to the final dish. It may also have something to do with creating a starch-rich liquid that will allow the polenta to stick together more firmly, but that’s purely conjecture on my part. I do know that it doesn’t really slow the recipe down, and doing it does produce very good polenta, so clearly it works.

[2] As my parents will certainly attest, I never did get the knack for breakfast.

[livingoffyourland]

Actual Aside 9: Ground Corn Headaches

It all started with a bowl of grits.

It was actually a really good bowl of grits. Corn porridge, served with some melted cheddar cheese and what were probably pan fried chile peppers, chopped fine. It was a filling and simple dish.

But if I was to go to the supermarket to get the ingredients to make it myself, I would run into a problem. The peppers and the cheese I could find with no problem. But I’d run into a problem with the corn. Grits are made from coarsely ground corn, known broadly as a corn meal. That doesn’t sound like a problem, until you realize that there is a linguistic snarl surrounding cornmeal that makes barbecue seem straightforward and civil.

If you were to go to the supermarket and look for ground up corn, you’d find a few market varieties. There’s the fine white powder known as corn starch, which I use in the kitchen to thicken sauces. It’s very useful in the kitchen, but it’s useless for making grits. Pass it by.

You’d find bags of corn flour. They’re usually a slightly coarser grind than corn starch, but a porridge made of this stuff will be too smooth and milky to work.

Finally, you’d find corn meal, which generally looks like very clean sand. You might even see flecks of corn germ[1] in the mix. This stuff is great for making porridge, like grits, and also the thickened technically still a porridge known as polenta.

Seems simple, right? It would be, if every cornmeal was named cornmeal. But on my grocer's shelves, and probably yours, cornmeal is sold as grits, hominy, polenta, or some combination of the three. All of these words denote a different way of preparing cornmeal, but the problem is that no one, to my knowledge, can agree on exactly what they mean.

Let’s start with the word that seems to have the most stable definition: hominy[2]. Hominy is corn that has been soaked in an alkali[3]. Doing so dissolves the heavy outer seed coat on tough field corn[4], not only making it easier to eat, but also making a far greater percentage of the corn’s nutrients bio-available. This, as it turns out, is really quite important. Corn that has been treated this way becomes a source of niacin, which prevents pellagra[5]. In untreated corn those amino acids are bound up in the tough seed coat of the corn. Over all, hominy turns corn from a grain that can keep you fed to a food you can actually live on. And while it’s hardly as important as it was in the days before year ‘round fresh fruits, if you’re looking to get the most bang for your nutritional buck, you’ll want to look for hominy.

Good luck finding it though. Some well stocked stores will sell just ‘hominy’, the treated corn kernels, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it in any store I frequent. ‘Grits’ are sometimes made with hominy corn instead of untreated corn, and sometimes the mill will call the resulting cornmeal ‘hominy grits’. But there’s no standard there, and you’re just as likely to see grits made with hominy just labeled ‘grits’. And reading nutritional labels are hardly helpful, as niacin isn’t one of the nutrients that usually shows up on those labels.

There is one corn product that I know is always made with nixtamalized corn, and that is the Mexican staple masa. It’s not technically a corn meal, it’s more of a corn flour, and it’s used in tamales and tortillas and all manner of central and south american dishes. It’s delicious, I have a bag of it in my kitchen and I use it regularly. Unfortunately, since it is ground too fine to be classified as a cornmeal, it’s stone useless for making grits. So sadly, my one reliable source of hominy won’t help here.

Polenta, by the way, is normally just untreated corn meal. It’s also the name for the dish made from polenta-meal, which is a porridge of cornmeal so thick that it can be cut into blocks, which are then either eaten or further cooked. It’s also the name for a dish in Jamaica made, annoyingly, with hominy.

If you don’t care about the nutritional content, or the different texture that hominy brings to your grits, then any cornmeal will serve you, polenta or grits. If you do care, then ignore the names altogether, and look for cornmeal with either niacin in the nutritional label, or that mentions lye treatment, or mentions nixtamalization. Relying on the names will only lead to confusion and headache.

Now that that linguistic snarl is out of the way, over the next three weeks I plan on exploring the realm of corn, hominy or otherwise. Hopefully this little digression didn’t drive you away, because corn is really cheap, really plentiful, and really good for you. And since dry corn, properly kept, will stay good for years, it’ll always be there when you need it.

Footnotes

[1] The part of the corn seed that grows into more corn, not some obscure disease.

[2] I stay the most stable, but you’ll still see it misused on packaging.

[3] This process is known as nixtamalization, which comes to use from the Aztec language Nahuatl.

[4] Which is distinct from the softer ‘sweet’ corn that we eat at the dinner table. To get a good image of field corn, think of the rainbow colored maize you see around Thanksgiving, the stuff that feels like rocks.

[5] A disease of malnutrition, cousin to scurvy. We don’t usually see it these days when fresh fruits and vegetables are available year round, but when un-nixtamalized corn became the staple for many Europeans, pellagra because an unfortunately common way to die.

[livingoffyourland]

Aside 9-ish: The Future

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I mentioned this a while back, but I have a new job. And as you can see by my update schedule, it has been whupping my butt. I have no intentions of stopping this blog, but given how the past two weeks have gone, I think some changes are in order.

With that in mind, let’s talk about the future.

Let’s talk about the future of next week. Given that my work is proving to be far more taxing than I anticipated, Friday updates just aren’t happening. Instead, the blog will be updated on Sunday from now on, to at least give myself a free day to pull everything together. Hopefully that will stabilize things a bit.

Let’s talk about the next few months. I’ve always wanted to make a living writing, and though I hardly think that this tiny blog could support me, one always has to start somewhere. To that end, I’m going to be making a patreon account that will probably become a hub for projects I’m working on. I’ll have a blog post about it when it actually comes online, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear from my readers, either things they’d like to see out of the blog, or experiences they’ve had with Patreon. Actually, scratch that, I’d love to hear from my readers, regardless of context. Sometimes it’s just nice to know you’re not screaming into the void.

Let’s talk about the next year. This project started because a college professor told me that my idea for a cookbook was solid, and I should pursue it. And though I’ve come to enjoy the blog as a format, this was always sort of a testing ground for an eventual book. Not that this means that the blog will be stopping -- another part of the original book plan was to have it be regularly updated with strange and interesting recipes as they cross my life. And while someday, yes, this project will draw to a close, I’m not anywhere near done yet.

In the almost-a-year since I started this blog, I’ve been thinking a lot about the eventual book it would become. At first I just wanted to get recipes down on the page, to get things written. Now that I have a reasonable collection of recipes, I’ve been thinking about how to organize them. This blog is about cooking cheap, fast, easy, and well, and going forward I’ll be altering my three recipe to a theme format, making one cheap recipe, one easy, and one fast per theme, whenever possible. This will help me focus in on what’s important for the blog, and hopefully help those of you reading to find the recipes that suit your needs.

No recipe this week, I’m afraid. But instead, thank you, to everyone who has read this blog. I’ll see everyone next Sunday with more recipes.

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 27: Ramen

Ramen. [1]

Oh boy ramen.

I have been avoiding talking about ramen.

And for a blog like this, about eating on a budget, neglecting ramen seems practically unthinkable. College students and poor twenty-somethings tightening their belts and living off of ramen is so ingrained in our culture that it isn’t even a joke any more, it’s just become accepted. The poor and the young eat instant ramen. Hell, I started this blog by saying I’d tried the ramen diet.

And I haven’t wanted to talk about it. And there are a few reasons for that. This is, after all, not just a blog about eating on a budget. It’s a blog about eating well on a budget. It’s about foods that are cheap, fast, easy, and good for you. Ramen is blisteringly fast, staggeringly easy, and cheap, though not as cheap as we all think[2]. What it isn’t is terribly good for you. Instant noodles come in two market varieties: fried noodles that are prepared and then fried for a minute or two in 300 F oil to cook them and drive off their internal moisture, or air dried noodles, which are prepared and then dried under hot air for a half hour or so. Because time is money, and consistency is king, fried noodles are far more popular than their slower, more finicky air dried cousins, and you’re more likely to find it on your shelves. And while frying certainly isn’t evil, it does mean that your instant noodles have a great big dollop of fat in what is otherwise a nutritionally devoid meal. There’s plenty of calories in a brick of ramen, but for vitamins, minerals, proteins, basically anything else that your body needs, you’d best look elsewhere. And this isn’t even taking into consideration the packet of salt that comes with most ramen in the guise of a flavor packet. A packet of ramen every now and then certainly isn’t going to kill you, but living off them certainly isn’t a recipe for a long, healthy life.

And yet, for all my bad mouthing, I still have a twenty pack of ramen in my cupboard. I still cook with them, though not exactly as the manufacturers intended. I still use them because, if my time in the Boy Scouts taught me anything, even the simplest food can be delicious if you’re hungry, and sometimes you just need to eat. They may not be healthy, but some nights they are just the right combination of fast and tasty, and that’s all you need.

And so, with all that in mind, consider this post ramen, a primer.

First off, get rid of the styrofoam cup-of-noodles. They’re mostly air and salt anyway, and it must be some very special air to increase the price like they do. If you’re buying instant ramen, stick with the plastic wrapped bricks, they are consistently the cheapest. In most markets you go to, the flavor choice will probably be beef, chicken, shrimp, and maybe something odd like ‘spicy’. I don’t often use the whole flavor packets, but I still pick based on flavors that I actually like. After all, if I’m caught in a bad spot in the kitchen, with naught but ramen to feed me[3], I don’t want to eat blank noodles because I didn’t like the flavor packet they came with.

If you are fortunate enough to live near an asian market, I’d do yourself a favor and take a look in their instant noodle section. In Japan, instant noodles were originally an expensive novelty food, and you can still find noodles that are marketed as fast meals for busy people on the go, and not the survival food they’ve become in American markets. And leaving that aside, the flavor selection in even the most modest asian market dwarfs the limited pallet of chicken, beef, and shrimp we’ve become accustomed to. Not all of those flavors are good. Not all of them will be to your taste. And they are just as much a salt-lick as our domestic fare. But a little variety now and then is a virtue all its own.

When cooking with ramen, divorce yourself from the noodle soup concept and focus on what you have instead: a brick of quick-rehydrating noodles. And that’s a serious culinary swiss army knife. Most ramen noodles are skinny, spaghetti like noodles, so they’ll respond best to lighter sauces, like olive oil and light cream sauces. And, due to the nature of their production, instant noodles are very receptive to sauces, moreso than most dried pastas. They’re a bit nutrient thin, so be sure to serve them with other food: meats and vegetables.

Recently ramen has made its way into my diet at lunch time. It’s fast, energy dense, and I can prepare it with very little extra equipment. And while this particular plate isn’t unique to any particular cuisine, I got the idea reading a menu from an East German restaurant, which offered Sausages in the Thueringer style; a sausage served with sauerkraut, mustard, and mashed potatoes. I didn’t have any mashed potatoes, but I did have ramen.

Vessel: 1 non-stick pan and 1 electric kettle (If one is not available, hot tap water will do)

1 tsp oil

1 sausage, any kind will do.

1 ounce sauerkraut, roughly one heaping forkful. More if you’d like

1 package of instant ramen

1 dash (maybe 1/16 a tsp) of ramen flavor powder,

Or

1/2 tsp old bay powder

Or

A spice mixture of your own invention

Mustard

Start by slicing the sausage along the side, to break the skin and preventing it from bursting during cooking. Two or three slices on each side will do the trick.

Place your pan over medium heat, and add the oil. Fry the sausage until both sides have taken on a nice golden brown hue, probably four minutes to a side. Flip as few times as necessary to get the quickest browning

Once the sausage is done, add your sauerkraut, allowing it to take on a little heat and soak up any of the oil left over. Then push everything to the side of the pan, and place the block of ramen on the pan. Sprinkle the spice powder over the top (and be sparing, there won’t be any water to dilute this when you’re done), and then add just enough hot water to come almost half way up the block of ramen. Kick the heat to high, and cook for two, maybe three minutes, flipping the ramen block and stirring to rehydrate it quickly and fully. Err of the side of not enough water in this one; you can always add more, but if you add too much, you’ll either water down the resulting dish, or be left with unappealingly overcooked noodles.

Once the ramen is cooked through and all the water has cooked off, slide the whole pan onto a plate. Place a little mustard on the side, and serve hot. Total cook time, maybe ten minutes. Not bad at all for a fast lunch.

Footnotes:

[1] When I am talking about ramen in the context of this post, I am not talking about the hot noodle soup that includes everything from hard boiled eggs to extruded tuna. That ramen is delicious, and I’ll sometimes make it when chicken noodle soup sounds too lacking. I am talking about instant ramen, those blocks of dried noodle you can buy in fourty packs down at your local bargain market.

[2] At time of writing, one package of Maruchan Chicken flavored instant noodle will run you $0.58 a 3 oz. pack. Which isn’t bad, but other foods certainly have it beat for price. 3 oz. of lentils can run you as little as $0.17

[3] This has yet to happen to me, but someday it might, and wouldn’t I feel silly then?

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 26: Hot Tamales

This week’s lesson is a bit of an odd one, as it’s more complex than my usual kitchen repertoire, and it’s considerably more involved. And, unlike most of the recipes I post here, I’ve only made this recipe once. But even with those downsides, I do believe I have found a kitchen regular in the humble tamale.

For those of you who’ve never seen one before, a tamale is kin to a pasty: a flavorful filling is wrapped with a corn flour dough, which itself is wrapped with a corn husk[1]. The resultant device is steamed, or boiled, or baked until the dough firms up and turns from a loose wrapper into a firm brick of deliciousness. Tamales seem to be as old as people living in the Americas; we have example of them in Maya cuisine, as well as Olmec and Tolteca. Today, tamales have spread throughout the Americas to the point where just about every nation in America, north and south, can claim a particular kind of tamale as their own. The ones I made for this week are actually of Louisianian extraction, having come to North America from migrant workers.

I was hesitant to include these in this blog, because tamales take time. A lot of time. Provided that you’re practiced in the construction, and have friends to help you assemble, tamales take four hours to make. If, like me, you’re working alone, and haven’t quite gotten the knack down for the construction, you may have take five hours to get it all done. On the other hand, this recipe makes four to five dozen tamales. Which, given that they’re energy dense little things, means that you’ll have enough tamales for a month of lunches.

Tamales can be best thought of as two recipes, combining at the end. There is the filling, and the dough. The filling can be whatever you want, from hot stewed pork to fresh peaches. The dough is more standardized - it is in many ways a biscuit dough. It is a quick bread, meaning it’s leavened by chemical reactions rather than the actions of yeast. It is also assembled first by combining the dry ingredients, then adding the wet and quickly mixing.

Hot Tamales[2]

Vessels: 1 large sauce pot with a lid, 1 medium sauce pot, 1 large mixing bowl, 2-3 extra bowls for holding materials.

60 Dry Corn husks

Butchers Twine

Filling

1/4 cup chili powder

2 tbsp kosher salt

1 tbsp paprika

1 tbsp smoked paprika

1 tbsp garlic powder

1 tbsp onion powder

2 1/2 tsps cayenne pepper[3]

2 tsp  black pepper

1 tsp ground cumin seed

2 pounds Pork Shoulder

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 large onion, finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced

Dough

2 lbs yellow cornmeal, approximately 6 cups [4]

1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt

1 tbsp baking powder

7 1/2 ounces lard, approximately 1 cup[5]

3-4 cups reserved cooking liquid

Start by filling your sink with hot tap water, and setting the corn husks inside to rehydrate. You may need to put a wet towel over the top of the husks to keep everything wet. The husks will be ready to use in an hour, but can be held in the water until you are ready to use them.

Next, combine all of the spices in a bowl. Use a fork to stir them together, then separate the spice mixture roughly in half. Cut the pork shoulder into four to five chunks. You can certainly make the pieces smaller, as I did, but it does make it harder to trim the gristly or fatty chunks. If that is not a concern of yours, then don’t worry about it. Place the meat into the larger sauce pot, and add half the spice mix, along with enough water to cover the meat completely. Stir to combine, then place over high heat and cover to bring to a boil. Once the pot comes to a boil, drop the heat to hold at a simmer, and cook for two to two and a half hours. Yes, two and a half hours. The long, relatively high temperature cooking time allows not only for complete collagen to gelatin conversion, but it also breaks down the pork enough that it can be easily shredded. During this time, I’d chop the onion, garlic, and jalapenos, taking care to remove the seeds and the white pith from the peppers. At the end of the cook time, drain the pork, retaining any cooking liquid that remains in the pot. Let the pork cool off, and once it has cooled shred it by hand or with a pair of forks, picking out any large chunks of gristle. Once the pork is shredded, set it aside again, and turn your attention to the onions. In the smaller saucepot, add your vegetable oil and onions, along with a pinch of salt. Cook over medium heat until the onions have soften, and gone slightly translucent. Once they have reached that stage, add the garlic, the jalapenos, the remainder of the spice mix, and the shredded pork. Stir to combine, and cook for two to three minutes to let the flavors meld together. Then take the pot off the heat, and set it aside.

Once the filling is done, turn your attention to the dough. Combine all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and then add the lard. Using your fingertips, knead the lard into the flour. This step is a standard practice in biscuit making, and the early integration of fat leads to a softer overall dough. Once the mixture looks a bit chunky, like a very, very loose dough, add three cups of the reserved cooking liquid. If you don’t have that much of the reserve liquid because it cooked off, like mine did, just add water to make up the difference. Knead the dough until it comes together into an almost play-doh like consistency, adding the remaining liquid if needed. Once the dough comes together, you’re ready to assemble.

Start by pulling the corn husks from their soaking liquid. Pat the moisture off of them as best you can, and set them on a plate. Make sure you have a work surface clear in front of you, as you’ll be assembling these like, well, an assembly line. Place one or two corn husks in front of you. Using an ice cream scoop or a measuring spoon, add two tablespoons of the dough onto the corn husk, and mash it flat with the palm of your hand, forming a broad, flat dough disc that’s resting on the corn husk. Once you’ve got it open enough, start a pile of corn husks with pressed dough on them, until you’ve run out of dough. Then, working from your pile of prepped corn husks, add about a teaspoon or two of the filling onto the disc. Grip the corn husk, and use it to fold the dough in on itself, so that it at least roughly forms around the filling. Then wrap up tight, fold up the bottom, and set aside. Once you’ve got three of these completed bundles, tie them together with some butchers twine. It makes them far, far easier to handle when it comes to cooking. Do this until you’ve run out of prepared corn husks. This step, I discovered, is one that works best with friends, as alone it takes ages.

Once all the tamales are assembled, it is now time to cook. You can do this one of two ways. Tradition, as far as the hot tamale is concerned, dictates that you place the tamales upright in the pot the meat was cooked in, with the openings up. Enough water or reserved cooking liquid[6] is added to not come up over the tops of the corn husk, and the whole pot is boiled. But older tradition dictates that the tamales should be steamed. In which case, you’d add enough water to just come up over your steamer basket to the same pot, pile in your tamales, and steam them. Either way, you cook until the dough is firm and pulls away cleanly from the corn husks, about an hour to an hour and a half. I’m a fan of the steaming method, mostly because in my attempt, some water jumped over the tops of the tamales, and I lost four or five tamales to soggy, mushy, gooey dough. But the boiling method does bring a whole new layer of flavor to the party.

Either way you cook them, at the end of it all you’ll be rewarded with forty eight to sixty tamales. More than you’ll likely eat in one sitting. So what do you do? Well, you can store them in the refridgerator for a few days, or you can schuck off their corn husk wrappings, wrap them in plastic wrap, and freeze them for up to two months. If you freeze them, just pull them out, steam them until warm[7], and enjoy. It’s a bit of a heavy time investment up front to make them, but they will reward you every lunch time, for at least a month[8].

Footnote:

[1] Or banana leaves, or parchment paper. But corn husks are cheap, long lasting, and permeable. That permeability, in this case, makes them preferable to parchment paper.

[2] This recipe was taken from Good Eats. Usually I like to use recipes that I’ve either come to myself, or at least added a bit more personal flair to, but in this case I wanted to build the recipe as it was presented, and learn how to do it first before altering it. While this recipe isn’t mine directly, it does provide an excellent basis to work from.

[3] In my attempt to make this, I accidentally misread teaspoons as tablespoons. The end results were just fine, even if they were quite hot.

[4] In most traditional tamales, the dough is made out of a specially treated corn flour called masa. However, in Louisiana, where these tamales hail from, cornmeal was far more common, and was thus used. I ended up using masa in my own cooking, but I know that both will serve you well.

[5] Yes, lard. I know, it’s not a very popular fat, but it’s honestly probably better for you than butter, and until the outbreak of world war two and the intating of rationing, it was our nation’s favorite fat, in the form of bacon drippings. You could use shortening if you must, but the flavor will be all wrong.

[6] Or honestly spiced broth.

[7] Or, as I have done, microwave for three to four minutes on half power.

[8] If you eat like me. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 25: Minestrone

At time of writing, I’m just starting a new job. With new employment comes new challenges. Learning the ebb and flow of your workplace, meeting your co-workers and getting to know them, and figuring out how best to do your new job. But chief in my mind of late has been a completely different problem: what, exactly, am I going to eat for lunch?

Now sure I can run to some fast food joint, but they’re not exactly close, and 30 minutes doesn’t last as long as I remembered it. Besides, a lunch worth eating at one of those places isn’t exactly cheap. And I am not, as they say, made of money. I could bring some kind of pre-packaged ramen cup or their kin, but they are honestly not very good for me, nor are they filling. And while cold-cut sandwiches certainly would hold me over, in these chilly winter months they are cold comfort.

No, what I need is a hot lunch I can cook well in advance, in vast quantities, and store for quite a while in the fridge. It needs to be simple to revive from its storage, and either needs to fit in a thermos, or be comfortable sitting in the fridge at work until lunch.

And it needs to not be a three ring circus to prepare. A lunch that takes eight hours of constant tending in my off time to prepare is a lunch that isn’t going to get made, at least not very often.

Easy, right?[1]

Given the recent weather, soup would be nice. Something substantial would also be nice, but nothing as heavy as a stew. And something comforting, because your lunch should do more than nourish. And for me, there’s one soup that fits that bill, and it isn’t chicken noodle soup. It’s Minestrone.

Minestrone soup is a comfort food for me for the same reason broccoli and cheese is; in my childhood I ate a lot of chicken noodle soup, some good, some bad, but minestrone was always there, and always good. It was a stable dish, which is ironic because while authorities can all agree that minestrone is a type of soup, exactly what goes into a pot of minestrone is a point of contention. Minestrone is a purely vegetarian soup, except when meats are included. It’s a vegetable soup, but sometimes pasta or potatoes are added. Sometimes the vegetables are cooked until they are fall apart tender, sometimes they’re blanched and thrown in broth. It’s a rural food, so it’s not surprising that it’s made with whatever is on hand. These days, modern food infrastructure means that I rarely have to worry about not finding the ingredients I need, but when minestrone was developed, that was hardly the case. And these humble origins mean that, if you want to add rounds of zucchini or meatballs, it wouldn’t be wrong. After all, there are many minestrones, why not make this one yours?

Vessel: 1 large non-reactive pot with a lid, 1 insulated or vacuum flask vessel (for lunch the next day)

1 cup micropasta (Orzo, Pastina, Anelli, or other small pastas)

Olive oil

Kosher salt

1-2 onions, chopped

3 large carrots, chopped

3-4 stalks of celery, chopped

1 can of navy beans, drained [2]

1 can of diced tomatoes [3]

2 bay leaves

1 tsp dried thyme

1 tsp dried sage

1 tsp ground black pepper

3 cups of chicken or vegetable broth

Once all your cans are drained and your vegetables are chopped, add enough salt to a pot of water that you can just taste it, and cook your pasta as per the manufacturer’s directions. Drain it once it is done, and set it aside.

Add olive oil to the bottom of your pot, enough to just coat the bottom. Place the pot over medium heat, let the oil get hot enough that it just shimmers, and toss in the onions, carrots, and celery, along with two pinches of salt, roughly two teaspoons. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions have gone slightly translucent, and the other vegetation is starting to soften. Then, to this mix, add the tomatoes, and a little bit more olive oil. Stir to combine, and let the tomatoes just fry a little bit in the oil, maybe three or four minutes. It will wake up their flavor[4]. Once the tomatoes have saute’ed a little bit, add the beans, the spice, and the bay leaves, along with your broth. The broth should cover everything. From there, jump the heat to medium high, and bring the whole pot to a light boil. Once everything has come up to boil, lower the heat to maintain that very slow bubble, cover, and hold it until you’re ready to eat. It will be edible right off the boil, but twenty minutes simmering will give everything time for the flavors to marry and meld.

Before you take it off the heat to serve it, take the pasta you cooked way back at the beginning and drop it in, stirring to combine. Let it warm up, and simmer for no more than five minutes before you serve it, lest the pasta go from cooked to gruel.[5]

If you, like me, are preparing this for lunch the next day, let the soup cool off, and put it in your plastic containers of choice. In the morning, when you’re getting ready for work, take your thermos, and fill it with soup, leaving just a little air space so the soup isn’t sitting on the lid. Pour the soup into a microwave safe vessel that will hold it, and nuke it until it’s nice and rocket hot. In the meantime, pour boiling water into the thermos to prime it, so that when the soup goes in, the whole vessel is warm. If you have a thermos in good repair, this will stay warm for four to six hours, though I wouldn’t test it much beyond eight.

Top with shredded parmesan, and enjoy in good health!

Footnotes

[1] There are already a few recipes that I’ve covered here that would fit the bill, but a post where I just told you to make bao until your fingers fell off wouldn’t be very fun, now would it?

[2] You can, of course, use dry beans. You can even skip that massive pre-cooking soak that most recipes call for. Speaking practically, all it does is rehydrate the beans and speed their cooking, saving you a bit of cooking fuel. If you’re watching your gas bill, maybe go for it. Either way, if you’re using dry beans, you’ll just need to keep the heat a little higher, so that the whole mixture is held at a very slow bubble, and cook covered for an hour or two, stirring every half hour or so to prevent burning. While there are flavor considerations to be had, the main trade off that dry v. canned gives you is that dry beans are cheaper, and canned beans are faster. Use whatever is best for you.

[3] Much like the beans, you can just take a tomato and hack it up yourself at home. But for my personal needs, the price of convenience is low enough that I don’t worry on it. It’s all getting cooked long and low anyway, how fresh it was when it went into the pot won’t really evidence itself.

[4] If you wanted to further enhance the flavor of the tomatoes, and had a little vodka or some spare white wine kicking around, I’d add just a splash of it now. As a deglazing liquid of sorts. But if you don’t have any vodka, or open bottles of wine around, the recipe will not suffer for their absence.

[5] If, at this point, you had a bit of steamed broccoli, or sliced thin zucchini, or some beets, or a bit of leftover carrot, you could add it with the pasta. It’s a bit of a concession to the ‘fresher’ style of minestrone, and the texture difference can be quite pleasant. But it’s hardly necessary.

[livingoffyourland]

Aside 8: Wine in the Kitchen Pt. 2

Last month we talked about wines, and red wines in particular. I left out white wines not because they serve a radically different role in the kitchen, but simply because a post that went in depth on both red and white wines would get unwieldy, fast. And now we’re back, to complete this two parter.

White wine and red wine behave very similarly in the kitchen. Both add aromatic components to your dish, both add alcohol which frees up alcohol soluble flavors in your foods, and both usually add sweetness or tartness to your dish[1]. The big primary difference from a cook’s perspective is that red wines have tannins in them, the same things that make tea and acorns bitter. White wines, which are prepared out of the pulps of grapes with their skins removed, lack these bitter compounds found in the skins of grapes. This allows them to play much more subtle roles in your dishes, as there’s no subtle bitterness to build around.

In the glass, white wines do take a little bit more attention than reds, which are best served at room temperature. White wines almost always want to be served chilled. But as I learned in my previous employment, they don’t want to be refrigerator cold. A good bottle of white wine should be chilled in the fridge, then pulled out a few minutes before serving, to let it warm up a little. This allows some of the more delicate aromas time to warm up and become evident.

In America, there are six major market varieties of white wines, not counting blends. While there are other white wine grapes like Sauternes, they tend to be rarer. These six are the ones you’re most likely to encounter in your wine expedition.

Chardonnay was something of a big deal when I was working. It was the most popular kind of wine that we sold. It’s fairly straightforward and bold for a white wine, and as long as you didn’t go for the top shelf stuff, it was pretty cheap to boot. Chardonnay gets a little more complex when you learn that there are actually two faces to Chardonnay wine. There’s the oak and buttery style that is so very popular in California and it honestly probably why Chardonnay is a big deal these days, and the lighter apple-y style found in white Burgundy's, which by law must be chardonnay wines. How do you get two vastly different wines from the same grapes? Well, it comes down to a secondary fermentation in the wine, called malolactic fermentation. Chardonnay grapes are rich in malic acid, which is also found in apple skins and tastes, unsurprisingly, an awful lot like apples. In older style chardonnays, this acid is left alone, leading to a very fruity wine. However, most California Chardonnays undergo some amount of malolactic fermentation, which converts the malic acid into lactic acid, which  leads to a heavier feel on the tongue and an almost buttery flavor. All Chardonnays are somewhere on this spectrum between complete malolactic conversion, and none at all. Your personal taste, and mileage, will vary.

Sauvignon Blanc is a sweet and usually quite acidic grape. It tends to have light fruit or floral flavors, while managing to be light on the tongue. A well made Sauvignon Blanc balances its acidity with its sweetness, making a wine that doesn’t seem nearly as sweet or tart as it is. Curiously, it’s one of the few grape wines that pair well with sushi. In my kitchen, it’s an honest toss up between this and a Chardonnay for my ‘average’ cooking wine.

Pinot Grigio is a very nice cooking wine. It tends to be subtle, unobtrusive, with very mild flavors. It does quite well in any italian cooking that doesn’t include tomatoes. Flavors can include floral, almost honeysuckle flavors, and also mineral notes. Its only downside for me is that it is so unobtrusive that I often forget it’s an option

Riesling and Gewurztraminer are both traditionally German grapes. Both are usually sweeter wines, with Rieslings being less sweet than Gewurztraminers. Both play very well served along side spicy dishes, although neither would be good in spicy dishes, as their sweet nature would diminish any heat you worked to build. Rieslings also age very well, but in my kitchen, I don’t tend to let wines get that old. Save these two wines for a nice fruit salad or dessert, or use drier Rieslings in places where a Pinot Grigio would work.

Moscato is usually used to make white dessert wines, and thus is very sweet and almost syrupy. I don’t usually use it in the kitchen, but it is one of the common white wines.

So, we have our wine list. What do we make with it? Well, since white wines knock out the tannic side of the flavor equation, we’re left with the other acids you’ll find in wine: citric, malic, lactic. All of these acids do very well with fat. And most of them have a fruity flavor any way, so a food that would take advantage of that. And something that isn’t going to demand a long cooking cycle, so you don’t cook off the aromatic compounds in the wine. Something like…

Fish Piccata

Vessel: 1 frying pan

Oil enough to coat the bottom of the pan

1-2 fish steaks, from your sustainable fish of choice. Farmed trout or catfish would work.

1 tsp salt

1/2 cup white wine: Pinot Grigio, Sauv. Blanc, or Chardonnay will do.

1-2 tbsp butter

Juice of half a lemon

5-8 capers (Optional but always appreciated)

This recipe comes together as any pan-fry-then-sauce would, with the only change being the adjustments made for the fish. Fish are very high in protein, which will stick to your pan if you do not properly lubricate it. Additionally, you will want a proper spatula to work the fish off the bottom of the pan, so as not to tear your fish steak to shreds trying to flip it. It’s nothing too perilous, as long as you know it’s coming.

Start by heating the pan, with the oil inside, over medium-medium high heat, until the oil shimmers. Salt both sides of your fish steaks evenly, and then carefully set them in the pans. Once the fish hits the pan, do not touch it for three to four minutes. If you do, you’ll disrupt the browning process, which also forms a structural support for cooked fish. Futz with it too much, and your fish may come apart in the pan. Once the fish is cooked on one side, flip it, and give it another three to four minutes. Once it is golden brown and delicious on both sides, and the inside is cooked (use a knife if you’re unsure), set the fish on a plate, and turn your attention back to the pan.

For those of you who read lesson 5, this is going to sound really familiar. Pour out the extra oil in the pan, and set it back over medium heat. Get it nice and warm, before pouring your wine into the pan. If it’s hot enough, it’ll start to steam right away. Stir nice and fast, dragging your spoon or stirring implement of choice over the bottom of the pan to free up all of the fond stuck to the bottom. Once the steaming dies down and the pan is clean, add the lemon juice, the capers, and the butter to the pan, stirring to combine everything. The resulting sauce should be just nape, or able to stick to the back of your spoon. If it isn’t that thick, then let it cook down a little, or add a bit more butter to thicken the sauce.

Once the sauce has come together, pour it over your fish. Serve it with some of the white wine you used to make the sauce. Enjoy.

As a final thought, a bit of follow up. You have your bottles of wine. You’ve opened them up, made what food you will and drank what wine you want. If you’re like me, you still have a bit left in the bottle. It’s still good, you don’t want to pour it out, but what do you do? Just cork the bottle with the cork you pulled (it won’t be a perfect fit, but it will block the opening), and put it in the fridge. Even if it’s a red. This will slow the oxidization process, giving you a few more days with the wine. It may not be quite as drinkable the second or third day in the fridge, but it will stay good to cook with for up to a week.

Footnotes

[1] While doing research for this post, I came across that old and often quoted statement that the acids in wine ‘soften meat’. The amount of acid in wine, or even in vinegar, is simply insufficient to do much more than surface level cell damage to meats. What is true is that the acids in wine and vinegar do stimulate your tongue to produce far more saliva, which can lead to the appearance of more tender meat. Now, if you want to see real cell damage, you’re going to have to look to the alkalies.

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 24: Fried Rice

So, Thanksgiving was two weeks ago now, and with any luck all of the leftovers have been eaten. If not, it’s probably time to start tossing them, two weeks is an awful long time to hold cooked turkey. But, if you cook anything like me, you’ve still got leftovers in the fridge. Just not, hopefully, Thanksgiving leftovers. For example, in my fridge right now, I have a container of ravioli, a bag of baked bacon[1], some tofu-broccoli concoction, a flat of eggs, and a great big container of cooked rice.

Well then. I guess I’m making fried rice.

I was going to hold this recipe back, but honestly, I can’t think of a better time than now to discuss fried rice. It’s a dish made for leftovers, from the very start. After all, fried rice is best made with day old rice. Why? It all has to do with starches. Freshly cooked rice still has enough of a gooey starchy coat that further cooking will just make it all mush together. Rice that’s been allowed to fully cool and dry out a little has that gooey starch coat transformed into a firm coating around the rice, allowing it to be cooked while keeping individual grains separate from each other.

Fried rice, much like hash, is a dish you want to do with mostly pre-cooked ingredients. Unlike a hash, you aren’t doing this to simplify cooking times;you’re doing it to preserve the ‘fried’ in fried rice. In the best fried rice, the rice is browned not by the addition of soy sauce, but by sauteing it in a little bit of hot oil. And while this is a task easily enough accomplished in an empty pan that you’re feeding the rice into, it becomes a much more difficult task to accomplish if you need to, say, cook some sausage in the pan first. It is certainly possible, but it becomes much more difficult, and you’re more likely to not achieve that delicious golden brown rice.

Fried rice actually has a lot in common with hash. They’re both made to turn what would otherwise be wasted food into another meal. And like a hash, fried rice is really more of a set of rules than a set dish. My personal fried rice rules are as follows[2]:

-Fried rice is mostly rice. It is not ‘a whole takeout container of General Tso’s and a little rice to bind it all together’. The goal is to stretch a modest amount of very flavorful food with rice, not to build a hash with rice instead of potatoes.

-While a sauce is not out of the question once it’s on the plate, in the pan fried rices are fried, and thus not moist. You want steam and caramelization, not to have the rice and other ingredients sitting in a puddle

-Mind your salt. Many of the ingredients I put in the fried rice are already quite salty, and the rice is given a pinch of salt to bring its flavor out at the start of cooking. Add to that soy sauce’s ability to intensify salt already in a dish, and you run the risk of over salting your meal if you’re not careful.

-Speaking of soy sauce, I used to use it all the time in these dishes, but these days I’ve switched to a pinch of kosher salt. Why? Well, soy sauce will provide that brown color you’re looking for in the rice, but it masks any browning that the rice would be undergoing normally, making it hard to tell if you’re actually sauteing it. Also, adding a liquid to the frying rice tends to arrest the sauteing. Finally, if the soy sauce cooked down in the pan, there is a chance it will burn. A pinch of salt will give the rice just enough sodium to really frame its own nutty goodness, without any of the above problems. All that said, soy sauce does add some very distinct flavors all it’s own to the dish, and is worth including. Just do it at the end, in very sparing amounts.

-No dairy. I have all kinds of pet theories about why this is the case, but the long and short of it is that dairy just tastes wrong when added to a fried rice.

-If your stir fry needs more bulk, crack and egg or two into it when it is nearly done, and let the egg cook fully before plating.

Vessel: 1 medium pan. Usually I would advise against non-stick, but as you’re not building a pan sauce, non-stick is fine.

1-2 tsp fat (olive oil, butter, bacon grease, whatever you have)

2 cups pre-cooked, day old rice

1 pinch kosher salt

Filling, which today includes:

2 strips of bacon, crumbled or 1 thin sliced, pre-cooked sausage

1 cup of modified buddhist delight (added steamed broccoli)

1 egg

1 dash Soy Sauce

1 dash hot sauce

1 dash Sesame Oil

Start by warming the fat in your pan over medium heat. While the oil is coming to heat, break up the rice with your hands. If it is long grain rice, it will probably have formed a bit of a brick overnight in the fridge. That brick won’t cook well, so break it into small chunks. You may need to add a few drops of water to make it break up easier, but be sparing. Once the rice is broken up, add the pinch of salt, and toss.

Feed the rice into the pan slowly. You don’t want to swamp your pan and cool it off too quickly, so go about a cup at a time, letting it hiss a bit before adding the next cup. Once all the rice is added, cook over medium to medium-high heat, stirring frequently. You don’t want to leave the rice alone. Stir it, keeping your eye out for browning kernels. Once most of the rice has taken on a nice tan color[3], then you can add the filling.

Hopefully, most of the filling has been cooked, and you’re just warming it up. If it needs a little more cooking, then clear a piece of bare metal in the center of the pan and add it there, letting it cook a bit before stirring the rice back in. In any case, add your fillings and stir well to let it all combine evenly.

Once the filling is well integrated into the rice, you can add the final liquid additions, the soy sauce, the hot sauce, and the sesame oil. Be careful and sparing with these three, as any of them have the chance to overwhelm the dish. Be especially careful with the sesame oil. This oil smells pungent, but it is very temperature sensitive. The flavor starts very strong, but exposture to cooking heat will make the aromatic qualities vanish in the steam. Thus, you want to add it to the dish right before it comes off the heat, and only keep it on the fire to mellow the flavor a little bit before you pull it.

Footnotes:

[1] I tend to bake a half-sheet pan’s worth of bacon at once, and just stow the pieces I don’t use in the fridge.

[2] Your milage, as they say, may vary.

[3] Or if you’re brave, an even darker color.

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 23: Refrigerator Pie (A.K.A. Quiche)

The Thanksgiving leftovers still lurk in my fridge. Quiet. Waiting. They want me to drop my guard, to forget about them, so they can happily go bad in peace.

Not this year, however. This year, my leftovers are all getting used. But there are only so many times you can reheat the same plate of food in the microwave, and only so many hashes one can enjoy. Besides, I don’t have quite as many leftovers as I did last week, so I need to stretch them. And for that, I turn my attention to my old friend, the quiche.

The quiche has, or at least had when I was growing up, something of an image problem. It wasn’t that it was a food for rich people, not exactly. It was a fancy food, and in that way that fancy things sometimes are, it was tagged as unmanly. I think there was even a book about it. So for most of my childhood, quiche was a punchline to a joke I never quite understood.

When I finally learned how to make quiche, the recipe itself was practically a throwaway, noted in passing. Two eggs beaten into one cup of whole milk. Pinch of nutmeg and two of salt. Poured over something in a pie crust. Baked, cut, eaten.  That was it. I admit, I was a bit confused. It was not a fancy food. Sure, you could use fancy fillings, but it’s just an egg pie.

The real power of the quiche, I’ve come to realize, is in the filling. It can be anything, as long as it’s mostly dry[1], and mostly cooked. And that means that quiche[2] is a leftover vacuum. Which is exactly what I need right now.

Mashed potatoes are a bit too moist for this dish, but I’ve still got some green bean casserole in the fridge, with a bit of french fried onion on the side. I have more turkey, of course, thought a bit of city ham if you have it would also do very nicely. And I’ve got a bit of parmesan, because my house runs on the stuff. And with that, I’m pretty sure we can make a quiche

Vessel: 1 mixing bowl, 1 half-sheet pan, 1 frozen pie crust[3][4]

Egg Base[5]

2 whole eggs

1 cup whole milk or cream

2 pinches salt

1 pinch nutmeg

Filling

Shredded turkey

Green bean casserole

Parmesan cheese

1/2 tsp dill

Or

Cubed city ham

Cooked collard greens

Cheddar cheese

1 dash of the hot sauce of your choice

Start by placing the frozen pie crust on your half sheet pan. The pan will serve as a catch basin, making sure that if any of the egg base sloshes over, it doesn’t slosh down onto the floor of your oven. Speaking of ovens, preheat yours to 350 F

Place your filling in the pie crust, tossing to combine. You don’t want to fill the pie crust up to the brim. Since the egg mixture will expand in the oven, you’re going to want to give it a lot of room to expand. Thusly, you probably only want to fill the pie crust halfway to three quarters of the way up, loosely. You want to make sure there’s room in the pie for the egg base to flow into the nooks and crannies. Use whatever filling you like, but I’d probably keep it simple. Two or three ingredients that play well together, and maybe a bit of spice if it’s called for.

To prepare the egg mixture, crack your eggs into the mixing bowl, add the dairy, and beat until the two are thoroughly combined. Then add your salt, and your nutmeg. Once the egg mixture is ready, pour it into the pie crust slowly, making sure to get it evenly distributed throughout the pie. Don’t want one side to be dry while the other is just an egg puck.

Once the pie is ready, slide it into the oven, and cook for 35-45 minutes. The quiche is done when it feels like set jello. If you aren’t sure, you can slide a paring knife into the custard, pull the knife out, and press on the breach. If liquid squirts out, it needs a little longer to cook. If it doesn’t, it’s ready.

Footnotes:

[1] Or at least not soaking wet. Juicy meat is fine, a dollop of gravy is not.

[2] Or refrigerator pie, if you need to dress it up for someone who thinks quiche is a four letter word.

[3] Yes, frozen. Making pie crust at home is all fine and good, but it is a lesson all it’s own, and when leftovers come knocking, I use whatever tools I have. Don’t worry, anyone who gives you guff for store bought pie crusts isn’t someone you want at your table anyway.

[4] If you don’t have a frozen pie crust but still want to make this recipe, you can make a crustless quiche, by replacing the pie crust with an oven safe casserole, or large ramekin, or even a cast iron skillet. Just be sure to lube up the vessel with a thin layer of butter, shortening, or oil, because eggs very much love to glue themselves to anything they can.

[5] The french call this a royale, and there isn’t really an english equivalent, except maybe ‘pre-custard’. It is the glue that binds the quiche, and many other dishes, together.

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 22: Thanksgiving Hash

So, when this hits it will be Black Friday. If you are lucky, you’ll be recovering after a long night of celebration. If you’re unlucky, you’re getting home after a long overnight shift. If you are among the cursed, you probably won’t read this until Saturday, because you’re on deck for Black Friday at one of our country’s many fine retailers. If you are working today, I can only wish you godspeed, and stay safe. People can get dangerous today.

However you end up spending the day, chances are you’re going to have leftovers in your life. Either from a feast all your own, or given to you by friends and family, or prepackaged for you by food vendors[1]. And while you can certainly just throw everything on a plate and throw it in the microwave for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next few weeks, there’s no reason not to play around with it a little.

My first reaction, early in the morning when faced by a plethora of leftovers is a hash. A hash is yet another one of those dishes like barbecue, that suffers from a broader definition than some would like to give it[2]. It traditionally is finely chopped meat and potatoes, spiced and fried up in a pan. Except that, from where I sit, there’s no reason one can’t make a hash with whatever leftovers one has lying around. Stuffing instead of potatoes? Sure. Toss a bit of cranberry sauce on top? Not traditional, but sounds tasty. Got pickled beets that no one at the table would touch? Sure, it’ll make sure no one will eat your hash before you. As long as you can get the end result to bind together like a loose pancake[3], then it’s a hash.

Whatever ingredients you have on hand -- either sent home with you by your family, or simply sitting in the refrigerator, you can make a hash. But there are a few rules to consider:

-The foods going into a hash must be cooked, or mostly cooked. There isn’t going to be a lot of time for any particular ingredient to sit in the pan, so rather than try and balance out cooking times of various ingredients and try not to overcook anything, it is much easier to just have everything prepared before hand. The only real exception to this that I can think of are eggs, often beaten and used as a binder. Eggs can be and often only work if added raw, but they cook quickly enough that you can get away with it. But no raw chicken.

-The allure of the hash comes from the browning of all of the food that goes into it, by contact with a lightly oiled pan at medium high heat. Because foods do not brown well when they are swimming in liquid, a hash needs to be dry enough that it can brown. That doesn’t mean stale bread is required, but drowning a forming hash in gravy will kill it.

-The end result has to bind together, however loosely it does that. Even if the only thing holding it together is the layer of browned food on the bottom of it, and it falls apart like butter under a fork, a hash needs to hold together a bit. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of fried things in a pan.

-While the end result does need to bind up, we’re not making pancakes or quiche here. Batters limit the contact of the food to the bottom of the pan, and turn a hash into a very strange cake.

While I have no idea what kind of food I’ll have at Thanksgiving this year, I can make a few educated guesses. There will probably be a turkey. It may instead be a ham, but a turkey seems more likely. There will probably be stuffing. There will probably be mashed potatoes, and with mashed potatoes comes their ever present chauffeur, gravy. There will be green beans, or if I’m very lucky, collard greens. And there will be cranberry sauce. I’m pretty sure I can fix a good hash out of that.

A traditional hash is meat, usually corned beef, fried with potatoes in a skillet. In this hash, the role of meat will perhaps obviously be played by the turkey. The role of potatoes will actually be split, between mashed potatoes and the stuffing. The stuffing will provide texture and structure, while the mashed potatoes will serve as a binder. The green beans aren’t exactly traditional, but if you chop them fine, they’ll add a little more structure and fry up nice as well. The gravy and the cranberry sauces both go onto the dish after it’s cooked, as a sauce.

Thanksgiving Hash

Vessel: 1 skillet, cast iron prefered, stainless steel and aluminum just fine. Nonstick is suboptimal.

1 tbsp butter

1/2 onion, diced fine (optional)

Turkey, shredded or diced fine

1 handful green beans, diced fine

Stuffing

Mashed potatoes

Gravy

The measurements are intentionally left vague for this recipe because, as a fried dish, it relies on sufficient pan space for everything to brown up. So rather than worry about measurements, just get enough of the turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes that you can make an even layer with each on the pan. Not that you’re going to start with a layer of them in the pan, but that’s about how much you’re going to need.

Start by melting the butter over medium heat. If you’re going to add the onions, add them now, and cook them until they turn golden.

Once the butter is melted, and the onions are either golden or absent, add the turkey. Spread it into an even layer, and let it fry for two to three minutes. Don’t stir it for the first minute or so, because if you agitate it you will interrupt the formation of a brown crust. Stir it very occasionally, until the turkey is as brown as you want it. Then add the green beans, and let them warm up and get a bit of color as well.

Once the green beans and turkey are ready, add the stuffing, and let it brown as well. Stir in the mashed potatoes, and then form a puck in the pan. Let it fry for two or so minutes, then either pull it from the pan, or if you’re feeling particularly brave, flip it like a pancake. Once the whole device is browned to your requirement, then plate it, and serve with gravy. If you don’t have any gravy, then deglaze the pan with chicken broth, and stir in a bit of butter and a light dusting of flour. Cook until it reaches gravy consistency, and tastes right, and use it instead.

Footnotes

[1] Because I swear that thanksgiving leftovers have become an almost greater reason for Thanksgiving than the actual feast.

[2] There are a lot of them in the cooking world.

[3] Or, perhaps, like a hashbrown

[livingoffyourland]

Aside 7: Wine in the kitchen pt. 1

I know. Wine? This is a blog about making do with modest means, and wine is, well, about as far on the other side of that divide as we can get, in the land of tiny canapes and little crackers with caviar placed delicately atop. Wine is a luxury item, and its inclusion in the kitchen is a step into the lands of decadence and waste.

Or maybe not. According to some of the fine legislators in the state of Texas, steaks are a luxury item too[1], and I still ask you to cook with beef. Wine’s image as a fancy drink for fancy folks is a strange American affectation, one part our Puritan phobia surrounding alcohol, and one part the wine industry’s own marketing program: they don’t just sell wine; they sell prestige, bottled.The price for a Dom Perignon is not just a function of the rarity of the grapes (Tk they’re not that rare), or the way in which it is produced (it’s not special). The price is based on how much you think it’s worth. How much that prestige costs.

But as any French housewife will tell you, wine isn’t a special drink for a special occasion, it is as integral to her home as coffee is to yours. As an ingredient, it can go in anything. As a drink, it can go with anything. It will open up culinary vistas otherwise inaccessible, and in moderation it’s probably better for you than soda[2]. You don’t have to fill your house with wine, but one or two bottles will give you the flexibility to you need to really dive into some fancy cooking.

After all, we can’t live on grits and beans alone.

But if I tell you to just get one or two bottles, you’ll very rapidly come to a bit of a problem. Because the diversity of wine is matched only by certain cheese counters, and much like cheese counters, there are no good road maps. Words like dry, fruity, smoky, and leathery might show up, but if you have no context for what those taste like the words are useless. And if you do have context, then knowing that these twelve wines all have a sweetness bordering on jamminess won’t really help you pick out which one to drink. Hell, I worked at a beverage store, and I tried to spend as much time near the scotch, where matters were less complex. Still, there are a few general piece of advice I can give, and hope that gives those of you like me, among the blissfully new, a bit of a starting point into wine. And to you fancy pants folks who already know their wine And the best caviar to go with them, feel free to correct me in the comments.

I’m going to talk a lot about flavors today, about floral and leather and other ephemeral notes. And I’d be remiss in my lesson today if I didn’t point out that cooking dulls those flavors. That delightful wine that has the slight taste of rain-soaked stone? If you cook with it, that flavor is going to evaporate once it hits the heat, and become muted. When you’re cooking with wine, what you really need to focus on are its tastes; the things you sense with your tongue, not your nose. Things like sweetness, bitterness, savoriness, and tanginess. All of that stuff about flowers, and berries, and smoke and dirt? All of that is your nose telling you tales.

If you’re only going to hold two bottles in your house, I would suggest a red wine, and a white wine. No champagne, no dessert wine or roses or fancier critters. While all of them are delicious, I’ve only seen a few recipes that call for sparkling wine or dessert wines, and never one that asked for a rose. If you’re going to be called to use a wine in a recipe, it’s almost certainly going to either be red or white.

But which red wine? For American domestic wines, you’ll find six main grapes; Zinfandel, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Syrah and Petite Sirah. You’ll also find blends of all of these grapes. While American wine culture gives place of pride to single variety wines, there’s nothing wrong with blends, which are often cheaper while being just as good. Once you get out of America, you’ll find that blends are often more prevalent than single varietals. In France, for example, it’s often illegal to say which grapes were used if you give the location in which they are grown. The location is prize, the grape are assumed to be blended to give their best character. That’s not to say the French are the authorities in this matter[3], but it is important to get some perspective on the matter. Now, which wine?

Zinfandels are sweet, thick wines. That’s because Zinfandel grapes are very sugar rich grapes, and so by the time the yeast have come in and consumed as much sugar as they’re going to consume, and produced as much alcohol as they’re going to produce, there’s still plenty of sugar left. Zinfandels tend to be sweet, fruity, and ultimately very drinkable, even if they do feel a bit heavy on the tongue. Not syrupy, but heavy. I like Zinfandels for drinking. One of my favorite, reliable bottles is a Zinfandel. I don’t like it so much for cooking. The sweetness is fine in a glass, but it the pan it can turn from pleasantly heavy to syrupy very easily. While some recipes tango very well with that sweetness, Zinfandel becomes a fussy dance partner; you always have to make sure you’re accommodating for it.

Merlots are a little less sweet than zins, but are generally quite fruity, with notes of dark berries like strawberries and cherries not uncommon. They’re smooth drinkers, generally only a little more bitter than Zinfandels, but not enough to become dominant, like you might see in a Pinot Noir or a Cabernet Sauvignon. If a recipe calls for a sweet red wine, I’ll usually reach for a Merlot first

Cabernet Sauvignon wines tend to be bitter - very tannic. They also tend to evidence flavors like leather, smoke, oak, chocolate; flavors that are darker, for lack of a better term, and less fruity. I don’t mind cooking with them, but they can get pricy.

Pinot Noir wines are usually drier, tannic little bottles. Unlike Cabernet Sauvignon, pinot noir grapes tend to taste the most like the ground they’re planted in -- in wine circles, they are very sensitive to their terroir. I like pinot noir wine for cooking, because it contributes alcohol, very modest (compared to oak, leather, and smoke) flavors, and doesn’t turn into a syrup if I need to reduce it. And it doesn’t hurt that cheap bottles of pinot noir are generally just right in my budget.

Syrah[4] and Petite Sirah wines are, despite the closeness of their names, entirely distinct grapes, and thus entirely distinct wines. But the names are close, so it becomes a bit of a stumbling point.

Petite Sirah wines tend to be Extremely tannic, even moreso than Cabernet Sauvignon wines, and thus aren’t terribly suited for cooking. They are known for having complex, dark[5] flavors, but all that tannic acid tends to make them an acquired taste.

Syrah wines are like Merlots; smooth, with a balance of tannic acids that keep it bitter but not too much so. And they tend to have a wide range of fruit and floral flavors, based on the particular grape and it’s particular earth.

And which white? Well, there are almost as many domestic white grapes as there are red grapes, so rather than continue the information download, lets pause, and consider what we can do with the knowledge we have right now. We’ll get back to white wines, next month. For now, a recipe

Beef Stroganoff (Hungarian Edition?)

Vessel: 1 large, heavy pot, with a lid

1 tsp olive oil

1 pound skirt steak, sliced thin

1 yellow onion, diced

1 bin of white button mushroom, sliced

10 ounces of liquid, either

5 ounces beef broth and 5 ounces dry, full red wine (Cabernet Sauv, Pinot Noir, or Syrah)

or

10 ounces red wine

1 tbsp paprika

Salt to taste

1/2 cup sour cream

2 tsp nutmeg

Cornstarch

Start by frying the skirt steak in the pot in batches, probably about a third to a half of the sliced steak, salting each batch with a pinch of salt. Remove it once it is browned to a bowl. Once all the beef is browned, add the onion, and cook it until it’s browned, or at least translucent, adding another pinch of salt. Once the onions are cooked, add the mushrooms, and the beef back to the pot, and add the liquid. Let it hit a boil, before dropping the heat down to a simmer, adding the paprika. Cook for 30 minutes or so, allowing everything to meld, and reduce down a bit. Once it is done, add the sour cream, and the nutmeg. Stir to combine, and if the sauce doesn’t stick to the back of the spoon, sprinkle on a little cornstarch and stir, and see if that thickens it enough.

Once the sauce is thick enough, serve over thick noodles, or tube pastas. It’s technically a braise, so it will be better the next day.

Footnotes

[1] And thus attempted to forbid the use of food stamps to buy them.

[2] Pop, coke, sugar drink, or your colloquialism of choice.

[3] We did beat them at the judgement of Paris, after all

[4] Or Shiraz, as the Australians would have it.

[5] Chocolate, wood, smoke. Wine tasters use color words when they can’t readily seize on a flavor, to prevent them from getting hung up on a flavor.