Soups gonna kill me

With two data points I am ready to conclude that soup will be the death of me. The first instance was chronicled in a previous blog entry. Essentially as I was boiling water for pasta, one of the burners on my stove got stuck in the on position, filling the room with gas. Disaster was averted by turning off the gas behind the stove. With a large pot of hot water, I decided the only viable option was to make soup. I had already chopped garlic and opened a few cans of chickpeas... so I mixed it all together with some extras and made a soup. Perhaps the soup didn't cause the catastrophe but it was certainly in the picture.
Last night I gathered a second data point. I was attempting to make my mothers Tuscan Bean soup, which I posted about a few days ago. Everything was going well (I used Kale which was super yummy) until I heard my fire alarm. This was rather unfortunate because it was already 1am, and one of my roommates was in bed and asleep. I felt horrible that my cooking had triggered the alarm. But I also was confused -- I couldn't smell and smoke and the soup seemed to just be simmering. Upon further inspection of the smoke detector I realized the alarm was no for smoke -- it was for CO (carbon monoxide). What???? Why would the CO alarm be going off?
Not sure what to do, I opened as many windows as I could around the apartment and turned on the ceiling fan. Still, the alarm continued. Luckily my pressing the silence button I could get the alarm to turn off for a few minutes at a time. After about 15 minutes the alarm was going strong, so I decided to turn off the stove and even turn off the gas line behind the stove (this was a tough decision considering that my soup was not quiet done). I feared the stove was expelling CO, or that the flame was not burning efficiently. But again, no effect.
By this time I was starting to feel a little woozy. Perhaps it was the CO or perhaps it was a combination of staring up at the fire alarm while the fan make periodic motions... but I was worried.
I knocked on my roommates door (the one who was not sleeping) to let her know about the alarm. Then I decided action was needed. I placed a call to 911 and they directed me to the local fire station. In under 5 minutes 4 firemen were at my door! They came inside and checked out the CO alarm. Their own CO meters registered no CO --- a false alarm and a malfunctioning CO detector! I thanked them and after they left managed, with some difficulty, to remove the battery from the alarm so I could go to sleep.
I finished the night by completing the soup. Again, perhaps the soup did not play a role in the catastrophe, but it was certainly there watching.

Mom's Tuscan Bean Soup

Today I had a really good soup my mom made and I figured that I would share the recipe. Even through my stuffed nose this soup was really yummy and full of flavor. My mom want me to make sure to give credit to Lidia Bastianich from whom's cookbook she got this recipe. Of course she added a bunch of stuff (carrots, tomato paste, and some extra herbs...)
Soup Base (White Bean)
1 lb (2 1/2 cups) small white beans (navy beans, northern beans, or just small white beans) soaked overnight or quick soaked.
4 qt water
3 bay leaves
1/4 cup olive oil
Boil (cover a jar) adjust to gentile boil. Cook 1 hour or until beans are tender. Stir in 1 1/2 tsp salt. Uncover and continue cooking for another hour until there is about 3 qts. My mom added some sage, rosemary, time and some kale after the first hour of cooking.

Much like the spices oil mix which is often added to Indian Dal before serving (my former Indian roomate --- nb. he's still Indian --- called this a Vagar), this soup has a Soffritto.
Soffritto
3 Tbs Olive Oil
6 garlic cloves sliced
1/2 tsp hot red pepper flakes
[3 ounces tomato paste]
Saute until garlic begins to color. The tomato paste (my mom's addition) goes in after the coloring of the garlic begins. Add this to the soup base at the end of cooking and mix it up.

[Note: So as not to be too laudatory to mom, I have inserted a few "witty" spelling mistakes, most of which occurred organically]
[Note: After having written this I realize that most of my mistakes are not in fact funny, nor are they witty, but rather just a sad reflection on my state of education. Unfortunately I am not as quick as individuals like "iron_h8r" or "microraver", or even the elusive "anonymous" from my previous posting. Each of those multiple personalities showed humor in singularly unique fashion.]

Latkas and Blintzs

By the end of the night I had two swollen fingers, a sink full of potato peels, a kugel made from left over cheese, latkas and vegis, and many new stains on my pants and shirt. But on the upside the Giants won... and my Hanukkah party had been successful.
I boasted the evening before to a friend who was staying for the weekend that I would be able to make 300 latkas for $10. This, however, was predicated on my shopping in Chinatown. This, however, did not happen -- I woke up too late, the weather sucked, and it turns out (as my roommate informed me later in the day) that the 21st was actually a Chinese holiday for the winter solstice. In any case, I resigned myself to shopping nearby --- probably a good thing in retrospect. Rather than buying 20 lbs or potato, 5 lbs sweet potato, 10 lbs onion, 5 lbs zucchini, 6 lbs carrots as I had planned, I about halved everything.
If I have any strengths in cooking, they certainly do not include calculating how much food raw ingredients will yield. I expected company at 6pm, so at about 4pm I began, with the help of my weekend guest, to peel and grate potatoes. I don't have a food processor, so everything was done by hand on a box grater. To keep the potatoes from discoloring, I kept them pre and post grating, soaked in water. When it was time to grate the onion I donned a pair of ski goggles and went to town on the bulbs. (I'm going to try to post a photo of this).



By 5:15 or so the first batch of latka mixture was ready for frying. To keep the potato and onion together I added flour and oats, plus a few beaten eggs (and pepper for flavor). No salt touched the latkas until they were fried, dried and ready to eat. I've heard this keeps them crunchier. When it came to frying the latkas I am of the three castiron school of thought. So, despite the three skillets not exactly fitting on my stove, I managed to have three pans going at the same time, allowing about 15 laktas to cook in any given moment.



For the next two hours or so I fried. At some point people began to come and between flipping of the latkas I tried to be friendly. I had determined that I should keep count of the number of latkas I made, but somewhere after 5 I lost count. My best guess is that I made about 150 of them --- some with a mix of potato and sweet potato, others just straight up potato.
Since I was afraid that there wouldn't be enough food (I'm a little crazy --- I didn't use half of the stuff I bought, so how could there not be enough food??) I had defrosted about 20 blintzs which I made a few weeks back (see the post). These fried up very nicely and went out with the latkas.
The latkas went over really well. Many of my friends had never had them before and enjoyed their oily goodness. What surprised me the most was how well the blintzs went over. This has prompted two conclusions -- first is that I will have shavous party in May, and second is that I really should try to apply for that NYU top chef competition and use blintzs as my breakfast dish.
Other lessons to learn
1. Four containers of sour cream is too much for any number of people. In fact, one container is probably too much.
2. Three jars of apple sauce (50 ounces each) is also too much.
3. Two castiron pans is probably enough to fry latkas.
4. One day a year for making latkas is probably enough.

Well... that last one might be wrong. In fact, I did it again today (though much scaled down) at my brother's house near Albany. We had latkas, this time cooked on an enameled castiron. The flavor and consistency was just as good. However, the feeling of having contributed positively to the seasoning of a castiron pan was just not there when cooking on enamel.

Returning to the end of my night (last night), as my last guests we leaving, I realized that I still had 6 peeled potatoes soaking in water, plus many cheese ends, and a bunch of vegis which would certainly go bad while I was away this week. The only conclusion which seemed reasonable was, at 1 in the morning, to make a kugel. Oh, I forgot, there were also about 15 latkas left over, which formed a wonderful base for the kugel. Now I am starting to realize why latkas and blintzs are relegated to special holidays while kugels are an everyday food --- its much easier to make. And while it was cooking, somehow, with a last bit of strength, I cleaned the kitchen!

[Gross-out warning]
As a last remark to this remarkably long post, my two swollen fingers should be accounted for. One was a simple mistake in opening a wine bottle. The second was a lesson to all who make latkas via box grating potatoes --- keep your finger nails short. I thankful, and unwittingly had heeded my present advice, or else things would have turned out much worse. In grating, my finger slipped and my nail got caught in the potato, driving a wedge of the potato under my nail. Pain ensued, but thankful, due to my diligent hygiene of cutting my finger nails, my nail was short enough that it did not break on account of this. Whew.

Frying and statistical mechanics

Certainly the two items in my title have nothing to do with each other. They are just the two things on my mind recently. This past week I have been rather negligent in posting and cooking. This is because I've been eating the majority of my meals at a conference in Rutgers University. Every morning I take the blasted nj transit there to listen to lecturers about statistical mechanics and now about probability and discrete systems. Any connection to food? There is of course a ton of instances where statistical mechanics plays a large role in food science (I'm not an expert in either fields, so I'll just mention some examples briefly).
1. Ice cream making (preventing large crystals from forming during freezing).
2. Bread making (creating a matrix of starch and protein so cause wholes and rising).
3. Emulsions (like mayonnaise).
4. Chocolate (my brother mentioned this to me. It turns out that chocolate has like 5 different phases which must be properly navigated in order to have all of the characteristics desired).
I'm sure there are books about this... maybe if you know of one you can post it in the comments.
Another observation about statistical mechanics is that almost all of the old generation of practitioners have breads... I thought that was kind of funny.

Changing gears, I'm preparing myself mentally for my latka cooking this coming sunday. I expect to make upwards of 300 latkas, plus maybe cook some of the blintzs I made a few weeks back. If I have time I may make some fancy schmancy latkas with sweet potato or the likes. Anyway, I'll post on monday likely to update as to the success of the latka party. Hopefully by that point my hands and clothing will have ceased being translucent from the excessive amount of oil on them.

Still pretty bad at roasting chicken

One of my favorite food memories while growing up is the Friday night chicken my mother would prepare. It was, for a number of years, almost always the same and it was consistently great. In an attempt at being healthy, my mom would remove the skin from all of the chicken --- that is except the wings for which skin remove was nearly impossible. The skinless chicken would get a little mustard and ketchup and maybe a few other spices. I never eat the skinless pieces though. For me, there were wings --- juicy and skin covered. So every Friday evening I would tempt nose burns while trying to get as many whiffs of the roasting chicken. These memories are a large part of why I don't think I could ever become a vegetarian (though I seldom eat chicken and almost never eat red meat).
I'm not sure why, but I'm pretty bad at cooking any type of meat. I think its the pressure. If I mess up some zucchini - no big deal. But if I mess up my chicken and make it too dry, or under-cook it, to me, this is a disaster. So with all of this pressure I over think things, doubt myself and usually end up doing the same, non-spectacular preparation of chicken.
The above mentioned preparation is essentially cooking the chicken with some garlic chunks, onion and potato in a deep cast iron pan, on the stove. What usually happens is that some pieces I cook are too large (like breasts) and others too small (like wings) and I end up needing to cup the breast open to cook the inside. This, of course, lets all of the juiciness of the meat out, and I end up with slightly dry dinner.
Last night I tried to oven roast the chicken, but impatiences, an oven which has no other settings than super hot, and an overly reactive smoke-detector cut this idea short. I needed to finish cooking my food on the stove top.
Perhaps I should look at a recipe book? Still, I'm afraid that a lack of control over my ovens temperature would make it nearly impossible to cook a thick piece of meat without charring the outside. Maybe I should try using my crock pot...
Anyway, I tend to learn from failures, but its been at least a year that I keep stove cooking my chicken and I haven't really learned better.

Blintz

[First announcement is that I will begin to post some pictures stuff I make. My brother gave me his old camera (my old camera had broken)!]

I'm considering applying for an NYU version of top chef. The first task is to design and then cook a breakfast spread. So yesterday I tried out some of my ideas --- all of which involve blintz. For those who do not know, a blintz is an east European (Jewish) food which involves a filling wrapped in a crepe like shell, and then pan fried until golden crispy. They are often eaten on Shavuot, as their filling is usually dairy, and Shavuot is associated with dairy. In any case, I decided to experiment with different types of fillings, and to pick a few to form a breakfast platter of blintz. Unfortunately for me, most of my ideas involve ingredients (types of cheese mostly) which are not available for the contest. I made them anyway for fun.



The shell is really fun to make. The recipe I used called for
4 eggs
1 cup milk (or water)
1 cup flour
1 tsp salt
I used jumbo eggs, and so I increased all of the 1s, to 1.3 or so to adjust for the larger sized eggs. Mix this until the flour is fulling mixed and there are no pockets of dry flour. The consistency should be runny but able to coat a spoon. Refrigerate and make the fillings. After about an hour, take the batter and mix it again. Then take a small (5" diameter) cast iron pan and put it on a medium to low flame. Before pouring on the batter, take a paper towel, or a piece of bread and rub some butter on it, and then rub that on the pan. Repeat this before pouring the batter for each blintz shell (though you don't need much butter --- i used maybe a half an inch of a stick of butter for the whole process). Take a measuring spoon and pour enough batter to coat the bottom (turn the pan in the air to coat) and then pour out excess into your batter bowl. It will take maybe a minute per blintz to cook, and you'll know its done when the top is dry and the sides start to curl a little. Remove the shell (only one side is cooked) with the cooked side up, onto a plate on which all shells will be piled. Repeat until done.



The fillings: I made three different fillings.

The simplest filling is just farmers cheese. Some people mix in an egg yolk, or some honey, or some butter. I just used the farmers cheese.



Getting a little more complicated now.
2 medium red onions
1 large sweet potato
1/2 lb Gorgonzola cheese crumbled
a few splashed of port, or red sweet wine
a few sprigs of rosemary
cinnamon
brown sugar
In a heavy stainless steal pan caramelize two onions, chopped into half rings. When nicely browned, add a splash of port and deglaze. Meanwhile cook a sweet potato. The easiest way to do this is to poke some holes in it, wrap it in a wet paper towel and microwave it for 5 or 6 minutes. When done, skin it and chop into chunks. Add these to the caramelized onion and cook together for a few more minutes. Also add in some chopped rosemary and salt. Before turning off the heat, deglaze the pan again with some more port. Transfer this all to a bowl and add the crumbled cheese. Mix until uniform and add some brown sugar, a pinch of cinnamon and a little more rosemary.



The final filling was a more earthy mix of flavors. In fact, the cheese I used (which I don't know the name of since I got it at a Courant party) had a rind which almost look like it had been buried in the ground for a while. Weird.
2 cups frozen chopped spinach (or fresh if you are some sort of rich person)
1 package of mushrooms (the small white/brown type you usually see in packages -- though small field mushrooms would be good too)
6 cloves garlic
1/2 onion
garlic/onion powder, pepper, salt
a hard earthy flavored cheese (again, not sure of the name...)
Saute the onion and garlic for a little, then add in the spinach and cook until nicely wilted. Add in the mushrooms, chopped into half inch spices. Add some additional garlic/onion powder, and some pepper and salt. Cook until mushrooms are tender. Put into a bowl and add the earthy cheese, shaved and chopped. (You could probably also include pine nuts here. The whole idea is to attain a very earthy flavor.)



To fill the blintz, lay the cooked side up, and about an inch in from one edge put a large spoonful of filling down. Fold the symmetric sides over this filling leaving you with a rectangle of blintz, with the filling on one side. Roll this, starting from the filling side, to make a roll.
These can be frozen and then thawed in the fridge, or immediately cooked.

I froze mine, but here's how one would cook them.
Fill your favorite large cast iron skillet with oil to cover the bottom. Heat, then add a few of the blintz. Cook until browned and flip. Once both sides are browned, remove onto a paper bag to absorb excess oil. Eat with apple sauce or sour cream, or be more creative and thing of something good to pair with the filling. I haven't thought that far yet though.

Pizza Dooh

For almost two and a half years I've been doing way more work to make pizza than I have too. Yesterday evening I went to a dinner at the apartment of a college friend. Her boyfriend, one of my college roommates, enlightened me as to quick and easy way to make pizza in a city: Buy the dough from your local pizzeria! Wow... that is smart (this roommate always had a knack for doing things in the most intelligent yet time efficient manner...)
This is not to say that I begrudge the hours of mixing, kneading, and rising. But to know that I could have gone around the corner to the pizzanini and payed three dollars for enough dough to make 6 pizzas... again... Wow.
And this dough was good. They made two different type of very thin crust pizzas - both featured ample rosemary. One was butternut squash thinly cut, caramelized onions and goat cheese; the other was thinly cut potato, mounds of potato mashed with rosemary and cream, and Fontana cheese.
While I'm really excited about this way of making pizza, I do want to briefly defend the merit of making your own dough. I like making half whole wheat dough... and its pretty darn hard to find a pizza joint which uses that. So, I think I will try this idea, and maybe even freeze some of the dough, and then alternate between types.

The other side of Salmon

In my last post I wrote about the apex of salmon products. Here I will briefly write about two acceptable recipes for the cat food of salmon --- canned salmon (nb: this is not actually cat food, but rather I mean to say this is the lowest grade of fish sold for humans). This stuff is super cheap. Its even cheaper than Chinatown fish. Plus, if you get the good stuff (and by good I mean nastiest) it will come with skin and bone. There is a plus to this however. The bones in the salmon have had ample time to soften, and can be eaten without any difficulty. This, in fact, provides you with a really great source of calcium, which in addition to the protein etc of the salmon is a homerun nutrients-wise.
Still... the canned salmon is one of the more fishy forms of fish out there, and unless you really like that, you need to be pretty selective in the type of recipes you use this stuff in.
Here are two which I consider pretty good, the second of which I just made tonight (for the first time).

Salmon Latkas:
My grandmother makes these in the style of hamburgers, but with salmon in place of the ground meat. This is a good way to do it, but I'm going to propose another type of latka based on the "Tuna Kabobs" which my former roommates girlfriend showed me. Surprisingly the ginger/garlic/pepper flavor really goes a long way towards cutting the fishiness, and actually has a rather nice flavor.
1 can salmon
a few cloves garlic crushed and chopped
an inch cube of ginger finely chopped
ample black pepper
an egg
~Mash the salmon and mix in all ingredients, including some salt. Form into patties and fry in oil.

Pot of stuff
This recipe (aptly named for its nature) took shape while I was at a Jazz show tonight. I hadn't eaten much since lunch and so my mind flickery back and forth between Jazz, math and food. In fact I often forgot which one I was thinking about. In any case, I followed my imagined recipe through to a tee, and got a pretty good result. I'll split it up into a few small parts.

Salmon mixture:
1 can salmon mashed
3 limes juiced
1 hot pepper chopped
1 clove garlic crushed and chopped
Mix everything together and let the salmon sit in the mixture until most of the fishiness has departed.

Take one large sweet potato, skin and chop into 1/4 inch slices. Then cook these with a little oil in your favorite cast iron skillet until tender. Reserve and once cooled chop into inch by inch squares.

1 large onion
6 cloves of garlic
1 hot pepper
cumin powder
1 can salsa
1 can tomato sauce
1 can black beans
1 can pink kidney beans
1 head cabbage
1.5 cups of brown rice
First cook the rice in the microwave for like 25 minutes. It will be almost done but still a little tough. Meanwhile chop the onion and garlic and pepper and cook in a large pot with some oil until a little translucent. Add a teaspoon or so of cumin. Then add in both cans of beans plus the salsa. While this cooks, chop the cabbage and slowly add it into the pot, so that it comes into contact with the surface. Add some salt. The cabbage will cook down pretty fast. Add in the rice, plus the tomato sauce. Cook all of this together until the cabbage has cooked down. Then add in the sweet potato squares and the salmon mixture. Mix thoroughly.
I ate this today in a soft tortilla which I heated on my cast iron. It was a pretty nice dish and super good for you. The lime really neutralizes the salmon fishiness, and the brown rice gets cooked tender. The flavors are not amazing though, but it makes for a nice warm meal none-the-less.

Salmon Bacon (Brekfish)

A little under a year ago my brother had a son, and in the Jewish tradition had a Bris for his eight days later. Probably the second most important Jewish tradition to circumcision is the eating of smoked salmon afterwards (in fact, much like most of the other Jewish occasions, a large part of the mitzvah of a bris is to have a meal there). My brother purchased a rather massive cut of smoked salmon from his local Price Chopper (Albany area --- price chopping is king), which has a rather nice kosher deli. The fish was spectacular. Where was it from? None other than the Springfield Smoked Fish company (http://www.springfieldsmokedfish.com/). This was a rather nifty coincidence since my family (up to my parents generation) has been almost entirely from Springfield Massachusettes. Yet somehow we had never found out about this smoked fish company.
How you ask? I don't want to get into family politics, but some members of my family have less than cordial relations with the smoked and cured fishes. In any case, this discovery, lest I say this revelation has since changed the nature of our trips to visit Springfield.
Even before having a chance to go to the source, my brothers and I researched this smoked fish company online. Suddenly there it was: Brekfish Salmon Bacon--- what in the world could salmon bacon be like? This quesstion haunted us for the months leading up to our next visit to my grandmothers. The day came, the car drove and the gps led. Finally we had arrived at the Springfield Smoked Fish company. The building was not too impressive and the inside was as can be expected (a half a dozen clean metal tables with various implements for cleaning and preparing fish). The man who greated us was very helpful, and showed us a list of the items which could be purchased. I know we bought a few things, but what has lingered in my mind was that first purchase of Salmon Bacon.
I waited a few days until returning to New York before being able to actually try the fish. Here is what I found when I had defrosted my first package. The salmon was very soft and free from any sort of fibers. It was cut into thin strips (about 1 inch thick) through the fish's natural grain. I heated up my favorite cast iron skillet and with a little butter, threw a few pieces on. After about 4 minutes the bottoms had cooked to a nice browned color, so I flipped and finished them off. When properly cooked the salmon got very crunchy and held its shape really well. The favor was (and its been a while since I've had this) out of this world. Every little piece was enfused with a smoky, sweetness. The fishiness and saltiness of regular lox was almost not present. I'm not even kidding when I say that I savored every little piece.
The rest of my family had varying responses. What seemed to be the consensus was that it was excellent unless you have had real bacon, in which case it was a little weird.
This Thanksgiving I gave thanks for many things, including the opportunity to get more Salmon Bacon. I even came to Springfield with a few requests from friends to purchase it for them. Unfortunately for me, there was to be no salmon bacon this time. The newest batch just finished today, not last friday when I went to purchase it. So I write today a man without his salmon bacon. I've looked into shipping it here to New York, but it will cost like 40$ just for the shipping. I've asked if they have any distributors here in New York, but the answer is sadly no. So, for the next few months I will need to salivate to the thought and not the smell of Brekfish Salmon Bacon.