Make your own pickles

Bread and butter pickles.  Photo by Rob Robitaille

I'm not sure if it because I am German, but I love sour stuff.  I will eat just about anything pickled or fermented.  The inspiration for this post comes from getting really pissed off at the grocery store the other day.  I don't typically buy pickles because my mom usually keeps me well stocked, but my stock is mostly gone so I wanted to scout out some options.  Have you read the ingredients of pickles lately?  Try to find a brand that does not have sodium benzoate.  Even the refrigerator dills have preservatives. Moreover, some even have artificial color!  WTF!?  Let's think a minute here.  Isn't pickling, by definition, a form of food preservation?  So what's up with the preservatives?  Let's not forget the artificial color.  What, they aren't pretty enough?  I am totally blown away by that and I wouldn't accept any explanation of it, no matter who delivered it.  It just doesn't make sense.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this and we don't have to put up with that BS.  Make them yourself.  I realize that it is winter an fresh cucumbers are impossible to come by, but pretty much every grocery store carry the hybrid cucumbers.  Granted, we don't know how they are grown, but at least the enemy has been reduced to the cucumber itself and not some chemist at a pickle factory.  If you can find organic, all the better.  As an added bonus, home make refrigerator pickles are easy to make and don't take a ton of time.  Not to mention, they are better than store bought (no big surprise there).  My friend Steve, who is a self proclaimed pickle connoisseur, gave these a shining review.  These are ready to eat in a couple days and are really delicious after a week.   Give it a try and let the big manufacturers know that you aren't gong to take any more of their shit.  Enjoy.

Bread and Butter Pickles

• 2 large hybrid cucumbers cut into 1/16th" slices* (they are the long smooth cucumbers that are individually wrapped and have no seeds to speak of.  Great for B&Bs)
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
• 1 clove of garlic, thinly sliced
• ½ red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and thinly sliced
• ½ green bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and thinly sliced
• 1 TB kosher salt

Brine:

• 1 ⅔ cups sugar
• 1 cup cider vinegar
• 1 ½ tsp. brown mustard seeds
• ½ tsp. celery seed
• ½ tsp. ground turmeric
• 1 TB kosher salt

1. Combine cucumbers, onion, garlic, and peppers in a large bowl and sprinkle with salt. Let sit for 1 hour. Transfer to a 1-qt. glass jar, leaving the liquid behind, and set aside.
2. Bring sugar, vinegar, mustard and celery seeds, turmeric, and salt to a boil in a 1-qt. saucepan.  Pour mixture over the vegetables and seal the jar. Let cool to room temperature and then store in refrigerator.  They are ready in a couple days and will keep for a couple weeks, although I have never been able to test that theory because they get eaten quickly.

*Cooks note: A mandolin works great for this and even better if you have a blade with ridges so they look like official B&Bs.

Mise en place

Mise en place for shrimp chowder.  Photo by Rob Robitaille

I always tell people that if you are at all interested in being a better cook, you need to learn from the masters.  There are many cooks and chefs out there that are masters, but many are only within reach of culinary school students and apprentices.  I have two favorites that are withing easy reach of the home cook.  Julia Child and Jacques Pépin.  I grew up with SNL, and most everyone else for that matter, picking on Julia because of her large stature, booming voice, and Patrician English.  It wasn't until much later that I truly came to appreciate her for who she was; an intelligent woman of the world that could teach the French a thing or two about their own food.  Although she is gone, she left behind many of her works.  If you do not own a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, get one!  It is the de facto standard text if you want to learn how to cook French food, and whether or not you think you do, you do because it is the base skill set that will allow you to cook virtually anything else.

Even later in my life, Jacques also captured my interest.  I have never seen anyone wield a knife in a kitchen with such skill as Jacques.  I think the moment that took me was when he showed his viewers how to make melba toast.  He quickly removed the crust of the toast with his knife, then he held the toast gently with the palm of his hand and swung the knife through the toast under his hand to make two very thin slices of toast.  I just about fell off my chair.  I have pretty good knife skills, but I would have been in the emergency room if I had tried that one.  Wow.  Jacques also offers many texts.  One that I enjoy is Jacques Pépin New Complete Techniques, which augments Julia's work very well.

There are many techniques to learn in the kitchen.  One that I think is important for the average home cook is mise en place, or to put in place.  Professional chefs depend on it, and home cooks can benefit from it, because when you really think about it, it is ingenious and beneficial.  It forces you to think things through; what ingredients I need and when.  It allows you to prepare those things, your "mise" as some chefs casually refer to them, ahead of time.  Without even thinking about it, it helps you organize your work area so when it comes time to cook your dish, you can concentrate on the task at hand instead of having to scrounge up ingredients at the last minute.  It allows you to...well, cook.  One of the things that most often plagues inexperienced home cooks is becoming overwhelmed when cooking for a group.  This technique allows you to examine things and break them down into smaller, more manageable parts.  Then, the stress melts away and you can focus on your work.  After all, cooking is supposed to be fun.  Think how cool you will look when your guests arrive and your "mise" is "en place".  Then you can grab a libation, visit with your guests and prepare the meal, cool as a cucumber.  Remember, you don't want to be that person that is freaking out flying around your kitchen like some big jacked up moth.

In the example above, I organized my mise en place for shrimp chowder.  The first thing I did was remove the corn from the cob and put them in a bowl.  Next, I boiled the cobs with the shrimp shells, from my shrimp which was also cut up an put into a bowl, to make a nice stock.  As that was cooking together, I chopped my carrots and celery and placed them in a bowl.  Yes, technically those could have gone into individual bowls, but I had them portioned out and were all going into the pool together anyway.  Then I diced onion and pepper into another bowl.  Then, the potatoes.  Finally, the shrimp/cob stock was done and went into the measuring cup along with what I scraped off the cobs.  Not pictured are the shrimp, corn, turkey stock, and cream, which were already "en place".  Finally, all I had to do was cook the chowder, which was splendid, I might add.  And why?  I thought things through and concentrated on the task of cooking so that I could taste and adjust and coax it into what I wanted.  And it was easy, relaxing, and fun.

Calamari Stew - Because Squid are Cool

Calamari Stew.  Photo by Rob Robitaille

Squid, or calamari as it is commonly called, is not one of the most common ocean dwellers used in todays kitchens.  I think there are many reasons behind this, but I would venture to guess that the number one reason is, well, look at the picture.  When you order calamari in restaurants, you rarely get the tentacles, which is a shame because they are tasty.  I get it, though.  Most Americans don't like food that looks too much like what it looked like when it was alive, especially things with tentacles.  Therefore, most calamari is cut into strip lengthwise, breaded, then deep fried and served with some kind of spicy sauce, at which point, it resembles squid about as much as a leather shoe resembles a cow.  Maybe if we understood the squid more, we would change our minds.

A squid is a cephalopod, and is related to the octopus and cuttlefish.  They live in the cold ocean, swimming in nice clean water and eating seafood.  They are bioluminescent, which means they can light up based on their moods, so I guess you could say that they are into the performing arts.  They also get around using water jet propulsion, so they are high tech.  Let see a pig or cow do that.  (Most commercially raised pork and beef don't spend their lives in clean water, in fact, it is quite the opposite.)  Then, after a living in the ocean, they are caught and sold fresh at fish markets, unless you live where it do, in which case they are cleaned, and frozen into big blocks and sold at the grocery store.  The latter is the kind I will refer to in this post as it is probably what most people have access to.  Relatively inexpensive for seafood, somewhere around five bucks a pound, they are fairly easy to obtain.

They require a bit of cleaning, even though the packaging may state that they are cleaned, which they sort of are in that most of the guts are gone and the skin has been removed from the bodies.  I will start with the tentacles.  They need to be cleaned in such a way that everything is removed except the tentacles and the part that holds them all together, essentially everything past the eyes and beak.  Sometimes there is extra "stuff" attached that used to be on the inside of the squid that needs to be removed.  If that freaks you out, don't use the tentacles as the bulk of what you buy is body anyway.  It is also a good idea to feel around inside the bodies with a finger because you will probably find a cuttlebone or two in a batch of squid.  In fact, I have never had a batch of squid that didn't have at least a couple of them.  It looks like a long, clear leaf and isn't good for anything.  

Once the bodies are cleaned, you are ready to cook with them.  They can be left whole, or sliced into rings, like I did in the picture above.  The important thing about squid, as with many types of seafood, is that they need to be cooked very quickly, or for a long time.  Anything in between and they are like eating rubber bands.  So, basically that means that you can dredge them in flour or batter and fry them until golden brown, in which case it is only a matter of a few minutes, or stew them for about an hour and a half.  The recipe above was adapted from my cioppino or the octopus stew, if you are interested.  I hope you will give it a shot, or at least try cioppino, if you want to ease into it slowly.  Enjoy.

Aioli

Saffron Aioli.  Photo by Rob Robitaille

Well, I am back after a short summer that I felt needed to be enjoyed as much as possible.  To be honest, I realized that I don't have a huge following of people in a world with numerous food blogs and I kind of pulled back from the whole blogging thing.  But then I started reading the blog of Johnny B. Truant, and basically learned that you need to quit worrying about stuff and just do it.  Maybe this blog will never have a huge following, but if I worry about that, I won't do it, as I haven't for the past couple months.  So, sometimes you have to just say fuck it and try to be as awesome as you can be.  Like Johnny says, no one is going to give you the gift of awesome, you have to make it yourself by doing awesome things.  This is my attempt at being as awesome as I can.  I digress.  On with food talk.

Aioli is one of those things that people often times have never heard of, yet have probably eaten several times, usually going by the moniker of something something spiced mayo, and usually one of those somethings in garlic.  In its most basic form, aioli is mayonnaise seasoned with garlic.  Ta-da!  Usually a lot of garlic.  I have found that a little garlic goes a long way, but as with most things, tastes vary.  The fun thing about aioli is that it is one of the basic French sauces, and not unlike many French sauces, is based on another sauce.  Feel free to make your own mayo for this, but I am perfectly happy with a good quality store bought mayo.  Once you have aioli, you can be imaginative and add what you like to tailor it to a specific application.  In the above example, I added a nice pinch of saffron to some aioli and stirred it every few minutes over the course of an hour so that the saffron infused into it and turned it a beautiful golden yellow color.

Another great thing about aioli is that, unless you make your own mayo, you don't even need to remember any real proportions, just don't burn it with garlic.  Now, aioli isn't for every type of food.  Obviously, it adds a silky mayo texture and mouth feel, but it also adds garlic, so it is a bit of a double whammy, so you need to be careful.  That being said, it goes well with fish, some times chicken, eggs, and many vegetables like potatoes and asparagus.

Here are a few of my favorites and how I use them:

• Plain old aioli - fish, potatoes, asparagus
• Creole spiced aioli - corned beef, believe it or not
• Saffron aioli - fish, potatoes, deviled eggs, Tortilla Espanola, salmon cakes
• Ponzu* aioli - pan seared salmon, deviled eggs, salmon cakes
• Wasabi aioli - pan seared salmon or tuna, deep fried chicken wings
• Dill aioli - salmon, and salmon quiche
• Green peppercorn and caper aioli - salmon cakes

As for the list above, the recipe is in the name. Just add the accompaniment to taste and let stand for about an hour.  Don't worry, if you use good mayo that has been properly stored within the proper time frame, you won't grow a colony of  people killing bacteria in an hour, although the fear-mongering news media would probably have you believe that now that they are tired about talking about whether eggs are good or bad for you, or if you should wash your chicken.  But that is another post.

* Ponzu is a wonderful Japanese sauce that looks like thin soy sauce.  The flavor is hard to describe without going into each ingredient that makes up ponzu, which many times does not help the situation as those ingredients are just as strictly Japanese as ponzu itself.  Just think of it as a light, yet full bodied sauce, faintly reminiscent of a thin soy sauce, but less harsh and salty with a slightly acidic citrus note.  You typically see it served with tataki (see my duck tataki post).

Malabar Spinach

Malabar Spinach.  Photo by Rob Robitaille

As I had mentioned to in a previous post,  I love the farmer's market because you can find some really interesting produce, especially if you have a strong Asian contingent, which our market fortunately does.  One of the things I really enjoy is this strange spinach like plant called "Chinese spinach".  Now, I am not doubting anyone, but it seems like it is all too easy to throw the name Chinese on the front of something that the plant looks like and most people won't notice.  However, Chinese spinach seems to be the name given to many different things, on of them being Malabar spinach, which also goes by many names.  Since I don't know any botanists, we will just call it Malabar spinach and  leave it at that.

So, now that I have bored you with what it is called, let's talk about it in a practical sense.  What to do with it.  Well, not surprising, it can be used in much the same way as regular spinach, with a couple minor exceptions. The first thing that you will notice is that the texture is not of a normal spinach.  It is like a succulent in that the leaves are fairly thick and rubbery, but not in a bad way.  You will also notice that it has clusters of leaves on a larger stalk, and that is because it is a vine, unlike regular spinach.  The flavor is much more delicate than spinach and does not tend to make your teeth feel like they are coated in Emery cloth after eating it.  I really hate that about typical spinach.  One thing that you will also notice, and perhaps to your chagrin, is that it is also a bit mucilaginous.  Okay, slimy.  But not like a northern pike or lunch meat you forgot about in your meat drawer (or what the cafeteria used to serve us in college on a regular basis), but kind of like okra.  Therefore, you most likely want to cook it quick in a stir fry, or in a soup so that it helps in the thickening process.  One of my favorite ways to cook it is to quickly stir fry it and then hit it with some oyster sauce.  It's really good.  Right now I have a kettle of meatball and white bean stew in the oven.  Typically I use chard or kale, but I had Malabar spinach on hand so I am using that.  So, far I have never felt that it was at all slimy when cooked, but you will notice it a bit when cutting it.

So, next time you are at your local farmers market, be adventurous.  If it is called Chinese something, then it is probably something you won't find at the local grocery store, and something you should take home with you.  You wouldn't believe how much time I spend on the web trying to identify what the heck I just bought.  And if an Asian farmer tells you something is good, buy it.  I think it is a safe bet that this is exactly what they are eating at home.

Hen of the Woods

Hen of the Woods mushroom.  Photo by Rob Robitaille

The other day a friend texted that he had a Hen of the Woods for me.  I had never had one before, so I jumped at the chance.  It is not every day that someone offers you fungus.  So, it arrived basically filling up a plastic grocery bag.  After a few minutes of rearranging the fridge, we made room and started looking forward to the next days meal.  Although I have quite a bit of experience cleaning and cooking mushrooms, I wasn't exactly sure how to approach this one.  It weighed in at exactly 2 1/2 pounds and was bigger around than a dinner plate, and about as tall.  The mushroom is built a lot like a cauliflower, in that it has a large central core and branches off into smaller clusters, but that is where the similarity ends.  Each small mushroom cluster reminds me a little bit of a chanterelle in both looks and texture.  So, how to clean it?

I first removed the bottom root area with a knife and started breaking it down, almost exactly like a cauliflower, working with a knife in a circle around the base until all the main clusters were removed.  I then split the larger ones down into something a bit more manageable.  In retrospect, I wish I would have sliced it up more because this mushroom stays fairly firm unlike most mushrooms that shrink down and soften up.  I just didn't realize that until after.  Next, I carefully washed the pieces and placed them in a strainer.  The only issue I had was dealing with a centipede that had stowed away.  I hate those things.  They have all those legs and dart around like they are going to jump in your ear, just like on "The Wrath of Khan".  Gross.

Hen of the Woods Pasta.  Photo by Rob Robitaille

To prepare it, I simply sautéed it in some butter with a little bit of white wine, minced onion, and garlic, then served it over tagliatelle with some fresh grated Parmesan.  I thought about making a sauce, but thought that it may cover up some of the flavor, and since it was my first hen, wanted to keep things simple.  It was fabulous. and I don't often use the word fabulous!  So, if you know any mushroom hunters, it may be a good time to help them clean their gutters, or change transmission fluid on their car, or just do what I do and feed them.  You may end up with a prize now and again.

In Praise of the Farmers Market

Farmers market booty.  Photo by Rob Robitaille

If you have never gone to a farmers market, shame on you!  Find one and go!  You don't know what you are missing!  In my community, the farmers market is held in the central park every Saturday morning from late spring until fall.  Actually, there is a winter farmers market held indoors as well, but as you are about to see, I prefer the summer market.  It is part of my weekend ritual and I look forward to it all week long.  If I have to miss it for some reason, I feel somehow deprived.  There are many reasons to go.  It helps support the local community, you get excellent products, you can save some money, and it is just fun to talk to people and build relationships with vendors.

The market caters to many interests; anything from beads, honey, birdhouses, hand woven rugs, cookies, pies, pickles, paintings, cheese, clothing, and kitchen scrubby pads.  However, my favorite reason to visit the farmers market is produce.  There are several vendors, each with different reasons for being there, and each bringing something different to the scene.  Many are avid gardeners selling their surplus, but some are farmers in the truest sense.  You can spot them a mile away.  You can see it in their faces, the hours of hard work in the sun, but also of the satisfaction of eking out a living doing what they know and love.  Several of our vendors fall into the later category.  These people are serious farmers and take pride in their work.  You can see it in the quality of their products, and how they are presented.  Shiny clean, neatly bundled, and proudly displayed lined up beautifully on long multi-tiered tables.  Vegetables so picture perfect that you can't help but buy them and then figure out what you are going to do with them later.

I usually start my morning with an older couple selling produce from a large delivery truck.  They are both very kind, with easy smiles, and are my prime source of carrots, onions, peppers, and, later in the season, ripe red jalapeños by the bags full.  This past weekend I was pleasantly surprised to find a gentleman selling tomatoes that I had never seen there before.  And not just any tomatoes.  He must have had at least 15 different varieties of tomatoes in all shapes, colors, and sizes.  The line was long, which is always a good sign, and was definitely worth the wait.  He was asking $1 per pound of any type so, of course, I walked away with 5 pounds.  Well, I didn't walk away with them, I payed him.  The most interesting ones were the beautiful yellow tomatoes with the fuzzy skin.  They feel just like a peach and they are almost as sweet.  Along with these, I also bought a couple huge beef steak tomatoes from another one of my favorite vendors, a tall, lanky, musky fishing handyman with an obvious love and aptitude for gardening.  All the while visions of tomato salad and French tomato tart filled my mind.  But as good as all these things are, the best by far is a simple plate of sliced tomatoes, or in this case, one huge tomato.

Fresh tomatoes need very little to bring them to their full potential.  You don't need to beat them into submission, but rather gently coax them.  In fact, good ingredients typically only need gentle coaxing.  First, I started with the tomato.  A rather large brute of a tomato, weighing in at a bit over a pound.  I sliced it about 3/8" thick and arranged it on a plate.  Actually, I had to do a bit of creative arranging to get it to fit on a large plate.  So, here is where the coaxing comes in.  All it needs is a sprinkle of kosher salt, a sprinkle of sugar (it helps tone down the acid of red tomatoes), a light drizzle of good sherry vinegar, and finish with a light sprinkle of extra virgin olive oil.  That is it.  I ate the whole damn think myself and don't feel any shame whatsoever.  I couple of times I thought "I bet my wife would enjoy this."  And, she probably would have, but she chose to sleep in.  Her loss.

So, get out there to your local farmers market.  Enjoy the open air, support your local vendors, and get some of the best ingredients around.  And, save money in the process.