Sauté (from the French sauter: to leap) holds a special place for me in cooking. I can think of no more aggressively connected act of cooking than sauté: making the food leap from the pan. Only exquisite knifework better exemplifies culinary skill, but of course, knifework is prep.
'Twould be nice. I realize that expecting anyone to recreate so rich and complex an experience as Fuji Television's long-running Iron Chef series is asking quite a lot, but the Food Network folks are now on their third attempt. We have to either give them an A for effort or a D for slow learner. This latest version actually has some promise, but some of the production is just wrong. No, make that Just Wrong. Perhaps even Just Wrong-o-rama. I don't know how many other concerned viewers have written to tell them they're doing it wrong, but if you're one of the concerned and you would like to see the Iron Chef tradition live on in some palatable form other than reruns, please email the Iron Chef America producers at http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/show_ia/text/0,1976,FOOD_16696_19539,00.html
with your concerns. Maybe enough of us acting in concert can work a Star Trek number on these guys.
What follows is the text of my letter to the producers of Iron Chef America.
A letter to Iron Chef America
Like the majority of your audience, I'm a long-standing fan of the original Fuji Television Iron Chef series. As with most adherents, I was saddened by Fuji's decision to end the series. The original Iron Chef fulfilled several needs for me in that it provided education and inspiration in an entertaining package. I see that much work has gone into the task of reproducing that experience in the latest iteration of Iron Chef America, and--while I realize that you do not want to simply ape the original, I would hate to see this grand effort die for missing some of the key elements that made the original series such a powerful, long-lived staple of culinary programming. If I'm lucky, you've already received quite a few letters expressing the same set of concerns that I'm about to outline.
Let me begin by saying that I think the stadium, costumes, logos, chefs, and announcer are all outstanding choices. I have no qualms with these elements of the program. (Okay, I'm gilding the lily a bit. I find one of the Iron Chefs a bit grating and the Vogue food critic seems needlessly contrary, but I think those are matters of personal preference unrelated to the overall reception of the show.) Thus, I believe the foundation of the Iron Chef America to be sound. I should note that several of my friends do not share my optimism. They are more disheartened by the differences than heartened by the similarities and innovations.
I wish I could be as positive about your host. Mark Dacascos may be a fine actor, but his chairman persona is simply annoying. Who cares if he can do backflips or has "a martial arts black belt" (a statement that most of us read as "a wannabe who never got his black belt")? The martial arts and acrobatics footage have nothing to do with cooking, nothing to do with Iron Chef, nothing to do with the show. Likewise, that stupid karate chop gesture and Dacascos's bellicose delivery of the command, "Allez cuisine" is completely out of place. It looks silly. It looks like someone needs to translate the French for Mr. Dacascos. One more persona glitch, why do the chairman and Alton Brown keep referring to Kaga of the Fuji series as the new chairman's uncle? Without frequent reiteration of a backstory, the claim sounds hollow and pretentious. In any case, the nephew backstory is convoluted, contrived, and heavy-handed. It doesn't explain the new chairman's motivation. It doesn't add anything to the story. Do yourselves a big favor and drop this.
As I noted, I think Alton Brown is a fine choice for expert announcer. Through his Good Eats program, Alton has developed a kind of Food Network credibility as well as a degree of familiarity. I do not, however, believe that anyone should be required to do the job of three announcers. The original Fuji Iron Chef used three announcers in emulation of sports programs like Monday Night Football because they knew that the kind of banter helps fuel the audience's interest in the "game." Those programs use one play-by-play announcer (Fuji Iron Chef's Kenji Fukui), one expert commentator (Fuji Iron Chef's Yukio Hattori) and one color announcer (one or two guest judges). Alton can speculate on the dishes, but he can't argue with himself (well, not convincingly).
Nor should Alton be bringing floor commentator Kevin Brauch into his discussions. Brauch is having enough trouble just keeping up with the goings on down in the stadium. He seems to be doing a little better this season at keeping track of all the ingredients, but that's not saying much. Brauch should continue to improve with time. If not, you might want to consider replacing him with someone who can pronounce the names of the ingredients and of their chefs.
Getting away from personalities for a moment, I find several parts of the competition aspect of Iron Chef America unsatisfying. For example, why is the chairman choosing the Iron Chef to battle the challenger? This looks wrong. I'm sure you have several logistic reasons for pre-selecting the Iron Chef, but if you don't let the challengers make their own selections, the game looks rigged. Besides, you've made quite a big deal in your advertising of the challenge presented by the secret ingredient. Maintaining the surprise-defender tactic from the Fuji series makes the whole spectacle even more suspenseful--who will compete tonight?
Also, unlike the original show, you opted to spell out the point breakdown. I think this a fine idea, but the point categories and your presentation of the results just don't work. One quarter of the points for plating and appearance--that's fine. One half for taste--okay, but what do you mean? Good taste? That's entirely subjective. Establish and describe a reasonable rubric. How about something a bit more specific and slightly less subjective? For instance, the judges in the Fuji Iron Chef series frequently commented that they expected to see dishes presented in Battle Random Ingredient to focus on and exemplify Random Ingredient, not just make it taste good. Anything can be made to taste good with enough tasty stuff piled onto it. I would be more impressed by someone making flavorful use of the bitterness, say, of a Random Ingredient than by someone making a flavorful dish that masks that same bitterness or simply smothers it in truffles. The best dishes in Fuji Iron Chef shows were often said to lend depth to the selected ingredient, and the sets of dishes on a theme were often praised for demonstrating different attributes of that same ingredient.
My problem with the presentation of points is that, while you do break down the points according to category, you do not break down the points by judge. This looks like a poor attempt at hiding the subjectivity of the judging. I, for one, want to know how much of the difference in judging is due to one rogue judge. When Morimoto presents a set of seafood dishes and one of the judges says, "I don't like raw fish," I figure I have pretty good reason to believe the anti-sushi judge is unduly influencing the outcome. If the judges know that their scores will be presented with their names attached, they might be a bit more careful to push some of their biases aside.
Oh, one other complaint about the judging: that Tubular-Bells-Lite noise you play during the tasting sequences has to go. What is that, the sound track from one of Tinkerbell's wet dreams? Ick. Please eliminate it before you send someone up a tower with a high-powered rifle.
One last item that I find discomfiting in the competition is the competitors plating only one of each item. I understand that this gives them a little more time to perfect each dish, but think about this: the old Fuji Iron Chefs always plated one item for each judge and an extra for the chairman (except for the occasional group or family style presentation of a soup, stew, roast, or casserole item). The switch to one of each dish may have been meant to look clever and innovative, but it fails. It looks wimpy. It looks like an admission that, "Well, we can't do what the old Iron Chefs did, but we can almost do it."
Ultimately, I think that's the one stance you want to avoid in all aspects of Iron Chef America. In no way should your presentation read like a second-rate Iron Chef. Overall, I don't think it does, but these few persnickety details are clouding the overall appearance. Correct these items, and I think Iron Chef America can easily be a popular, successful, and entertaining redux of Fuji Television's Iron Chef.
I know I'd never survive as a vegetarian. It's not that I simply can't live without meat (although, with my history of weight loss, I'd make one emaciated vegetarian), nor am I of the Tony Bourdain philosophy that they can have my steaks when they pry them from my cold dead arthrosclerotic fingers. My problem with going vegetarian is that I'm pretty sure the gas would kill me. It would at least force me into a celibate lifestyle.
Frankly, if dietary choice were simply a question of ethics, I'd have a rough time. I love animals. Sincerely. This is not a setup for a W.C. Fields joke.
Don't get me wrong. I won't be throwing away my leather boots and running out to join PETA. Although I admire the sentiment and the conviction of animal rights activists, PETA members always strike me as a bit off kilter. Maybe it was that incident a few years ago when PETA members demonstrated that life, at times, is just one big recycled WKRP Cincinnati rerun. Just before Thanksgiving, on a major freeway overpass, a group of PETAzoids freed a bunch of domestic turkeys. Turkeys are none too bright, though, and the birds just stood there in the open cages. No doubt the gobblers just thought it was feeding time. The PETA members, wanting their gesture to look more dramatic for the captive audience of rush hour traffic streaming past below them, grabbed the birds and threw them into the air. Wouldn't you expect at least one of that crowd of animal lovers to know that domestic turkeys are flightless? Well, the lucky birds just landed on the bridge with a thud. Sadly, several of the birds fell into the oblivious stream of traffic below.
So, I do apologize if this comment ruffles any PETA members' feathers, but on the whole you guys are about as sharp as a sack of wet mice. Perhaps you should eat more fish; some nutritionists consider it brain food.
As I suggested, however, I do understand the whole concept of guilt over eating animals. Like many modern omnivores, I am conflicted in my quests for a fine cut of meat or the correct fish for dinner. I see this effect at work all the time. Some people just can't bear the thought of ordering the death of a lobster. They're perfectly willing to eat a lobster tail, they just don't want to be directly involved in its death. An even more common effect is the Vein That Ruins Dinner. One person at the table cuts into his steak and diagonally opens a vein, allowing a few drops of fluid to bleed onto the plate. I've actually seen people lose a meal over such an incident.
Also, of course, many of us learn to think of some animals in ways that make it difficult to see them as food. My foster daughter, the champion horsewoman, becomes incensed at the mention of horsemeat. Similarly, most Americans are disgusted at the thought of cooked dog. One of my most recently developed quirks is a refusal to eat grouper. I've been diving for a few years, now, and I can't help thinking of grouper as friendly, inquisitive critters.
And then there's veal. What can I safely say about veal? I Googled the term and immediately found the usual complaints about veal calves being raised in slatted paddocks designed to restrict their movement (thereby limiting muscle development) and about the iron-poor, antibiotic-rich milk substitutes fed the calves to get that wan "milk-fed" look you see in the supermarkets. Back in the eighties, many markets simply stopped carrying veal, citing either the unhealthiness of the meat or animal cruelty. I know a quite a few non-vegetarians who won't eat it, and I'm still not comfortable cooking or eating it either. I don't mind killing my food. I'm not even squeamish about cooking with fresh, wriggling lobsters or eels. Torturing my food is another matter. As far as I can see, the intent to kill an animal does not justify torturing it.
Even if not produced by torture and antibiotics, veal is an odd meat. Oh, sure, it's beef--young, but still beef. The flavor (as I recall from a few decades back) is far milder than adult beef, and the color attests to that mildness. Because it lacks much in the way of fat, many preparation methods require either the addition of fat from other sources (wrapping in a fat net for roasting, for instance) or inclusion of a healthy quantity of marrow rich bones (thus the necessary shoulder in osso bucco). Frankly, veal is so mild that many of the traditional recipes seem to be designed to give the meat some sort of flavor. I recall that I enjoyed the my first several veal piccata, but even as a teenager I recognized that the flavor in the dish was the result of the butter, lemon, artichokes, and capers. The veal and stock provided nothing more than a canvas. The veal components provided the protein base and none of the flavor. This proved true for every veal cutlet dish I ever tried.
[On a side note, I am toying with the idea of making veal stock. Hey, I said I was conflicted. I believe veal bones make more sense than beef bones as a source for stock because of the lower ossified bone content. More on this later, if I'm lucky.]
I guess it's no surprise, then, that so many Italian restaurants in the US offer chicken scallopini and piccata in lieu of (or as an alternative to) the veal versions. It really makes very little difference to most diners. Chicken breasts, unless browned and boosted with the proper flavor enhancers (for chicken, the best amplifiers I know are mushrooms and olives), offer vary little in the way of distinct flavor. The same is true for breaded veal cutlets. Oh, sure, veal and chicken breast scallopini or cutlets or Milanese will provide some teeeeny bit of flavor to a dish. Don't write to tell me that I'm wrong because you can taste the chicken even if my allergy-addled taste buds no longer can. I can taste it, too. Likewise, probably, the veal. But let's be honest: it's not a principal component in the flavor.
So, piccata is really not an ideal treatment for an Iron Chef-style enhancement of veal or chicken. If you want to enhance the chicken or veal flavor, make something else. That said, I like piccata. If the chicken provides nothing more than a base upon which to enjoy the other ingredients, I can accept that. I like the other ingredients.
Still, I began to wonder, could anything else work as a base in which the piccata treatment would actually enhance the base ingredient? Lemon, capers, butter, and artichokes.
Well, duh. Shrimp.
I thought about fish, but most fish would be overwhelmed by the capers. I might consider a really strong fishy fish like mackerel or bonito, but I wanted to give the treatment a bit more thought. I'd probably have to grill to subdue the fishiness, and I'd rather keep my piccata in the sauté pan, if possible.
I tried the shrimp piccata dish with two different homemade pastas: once with Italian parsley spaghetti, once with tarragon spaghetti. I expected the parsley to be the better of the two (I was concerned that the tarragon would be just one flavor element too many). I was wrong. Both were good, but the tarragon was better.
Initially, I tried this shrimp dish with my chicken piccata recipe, substituting only shrimp for chicken. After making this once, I realized that the mushrooms (which I initially began using to enhance the chicken) were an unnecessary complication, and I eliminated them.
Shrimp Piccata
dramatis personae
1 package frozen artichoke hearts 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 pound enormous shrimp tails 1 cup white wine 1 half cup chicken stock 1 tablespoon unsalted butter 1 quarter teaspoon lemon oil or the zest of one medium lemon 2 tablespoons capers, non-pareils
preparation notes
Yes, I said frozen. Feel free to use fresh artichoke hearts, if you like, but that will add a good forty minutes to your prep. I start with Bird's Eye brand artichoke hearts: thaw them in warm water, drain them in a colander, slice each artichoke half into fourths, discarding any tough leaves. Heat the olive oil over a medium flame, and sauté the hearts until they're just beginning to brown. Remove the hearts from the pan, but leave the oil and fond behind--chopsticks work well for this task.
Get the biggest shrimp you can find. The ones I used were six tails to a pound. Shell, devein, and halve the shrimp longitudinally. To get a more cutlet-like effect, I ran a bamboo skewer down the length of each tail half to keep it from curling during sautéing. You can forego this step if you don't want the shrimp tails flat.
In the oil and fond from the artichokes, cook the shrimp tails until all the translucent bits are opaque (a couple three minutes--who times this stuff?). If you do this, you'll want to remove the skewers immediately upon removing the tails from the pan to keep the skewers from becoming an integral component of the shrimp. The best technique I've found is to hold each tail firmly with a paper towel, and twist the skewer while pulling it out.
Turn up the flame a bit and deglaze the white wine. When the majority of the liquid is gone, add the stock and the lemon oil or zest (both work about equally well, but some folks don't like the grainy texture of lemon zest in their sauces). Simmer until the majority of the liquid is gone. Toss in the artichoke hearts and immediately mount the sauce with the butter. Toss in the capers and remove the piccata sauce from the flame.
For each serving, arrange two or three shrimp tail halves on or aside a cup of cooked spaghetti (see below) and pour on a portion of the piccata sauce.
Chicken Picatta
dramatis personae
Same as the shrimp, but substitute four boneless chicken breast halves for the shrimp
You'll also need
- four cremini mushrooms (roughly golfball size) - two tablespoons all-purpose flour
preparation notes
I prefer to remove all the fat and and the ropy wing muscle from the breasts and then pound them flat--roughly 3/8 inch thick cutlets. Pat the flattened cutlets dry; slice them in half or thirds, whatever size you prefer (it's mostly a matter of aesthetics); and dredge them in the flour. Shake off the excess.
Slice the mushrooms about 1/8th inch thick and, before cooking anything else, sauté them in a non-stick pan without oil until they are beginning to turn golden brown on the edges. Remove the mushrooms (don't clean or wipe the pan, though), and pour in the oil. Prepare the artichokes as for shrimp piccata.
Once you've removed the artichokes, sauté the chicken breasts in the fond and oil from the veggies. How long? I don't know. They should be golden brown and done through. Remove the breasts from the pan.
Turn up the flame a bit and deglaze the pan with white wine. When the majority of the liquid is gone, add the stock and the lemon oil or zest (both work about equally well, but some folks don't like the grainy texture of lemon zest in their sauces). Simmer until the majority of the liquid is gone. Toss in the artichoke hearts and immediately mount the sauce with the butter. Toss in the capers and remove the piccata sauce from the flame. For each serving, arrange two or three shrimp tail halves on or aside a cup of cooked spaghetti and pour on a portion of the piccata sauce.
Tarragon pasta
dramatis personnae
a dozen spinach leaves 2 tablespoons water 1 cup all-purpose flour 1/2 cup semolina flour 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil 2 extra large eggs 1/4 cup tarragon leaves (chiffonade)
preparation notes
You do not have to use a fancy mixer to mix and knead the dough. It is my considered opinion, however, that you do need a pasta roller. I have attempted hand rolling pasta, and it hurts like hell. If you hand roll pasta, you actually like hand rolling pasta, you think the sun rises and sets on hand rolled pasta, you think those of us who rely on pasta machines are wimps--hey, knock yourself out. Personally, I make the dough, turn it over to my wife, and she rolls out fresh spaghetti on the Atlas (this one: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000CFNCP/qid=1098303893/sr=8-9/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i9_xgl79/002-3201007-8799252?v=glance&s=kitchen&n=507846 ) while I'm preparing dinner. She usually has the pasta drying on the rack well before the water boils.
Note: make the dough at least a half hour before you plan to begin rolling the pasta. The dough has to rest to relax a bit. Otherwise, it will be like trying to roll tire rubber.
Puree the spinach leaves in a food processor in the two tablespoons of water. Strain out all the solid bits in a mesh strainer. All you want is the green liquid.
Before you begin mixing everything, set aside the eggs to warm to room temperature. If you don't want to wait, run hot tap water over them for a few minutes to take off the refrigerator chill.
Oh, and about that chiffonade: these herbs are going into a pasta dough. That means they have to be minced into excruciatingly tiny bits. If the bits are too big, they won't stay in the dough.
If you're not using a mixer, wash and dry your hands, and remove any rings, watches, and bracelets. Clear some counter space and dust it with flour.
Mix the flours in a large bowl. Make a crater in the center and pour all the other ingredients in there. If you are not using a mixer, blend everything from the inside out with a fork. Once the dough becomes too thick to mix with the fork, use your hand. When the whole mass becomes one bolus of green dough, transfer it to the floured counter top to knead. Knead until the dough is uniform, pliable, moist, but not sticky--about five minutes of steady kneading should suffice.
Flour a small plate. Plop the dough ball in the middle of the plate. Wet one hand and wipe the wet hand over the surface of the dough. Cover this with a piece of plastic wrap and let it set for a half hour. If you have made the dough more than a half-hour in advance, put it in the refrigerator, but take it out and let it warm up a half-hour before rolling the pasta.
The key word here is construction. You can build some pretty impressive desserts from simple materials. No, I don't mean you should make your desserts from baling wire and toothpicks, but the ingredients don't have to be outlandish or even take much work. I'm not sure when I hit upon the realization, but I know it was during a Texas summer. Normally, I tend to think of desserts as something having a baked or poached-fruit component, but 100-degree days put the kibosh on that sort of preparation. I know, in moments of utmost laziness, you can always opt for store cookies (I prefer Pepperidge Farms Milanos or Brussels) and sorbet, but where's the fun in that? I want to put stuff together and have my family ooh and ah before falling on their dessert like ravenous hyenas (having learned quickly what gets repeat performances from the kitchen, my wife and kids are great oohers and ahers, by the way).
Generally, for constructed desserts, I find that the key elements are pretty much the same as the keys to any successful meal: balance and sensory appeal. Desserts are most pleasing when they are sweet but not too sweet, colorful but not gaudy. Tart flavors should balance against buttery and creamy flavors. Smooth textures should be highlighted with crisp fruit or a crunchy component. Vanilla, cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, herbs, and citrus can add aroma as well as texture, but too much of a good thing is just bad.
Inspiration counts for a lot, too, and the calendar always plays a role in inspiration. If a fruit catches your eye in the grocery store--something looks particularly fresh, sweet, ripe, juicy, colorful--well, that just might be nature's way of telling you to start planning tonight's dessert. This was my experience early this summer with Texas blueberries. The local markets were packed with fresh bulging blueberries. I bout a pint and immediately began scouring my taste memory for things that would go well with blueberries.
Balance is also important in the workload. I think every cook agonizes over the question of what to buy ready-made and what to make from scratch. I don't want to oversimplify the answer to this question, but sometimes it's just a matter of advantages. Will I gain anything by making my own Caesar dressing over buying Cardini's? Well, that depends what else I'm serving. If the Caesar salad is the principal player in a meal, I might want to make my own with whole anchovy strips and shaved Parmesan and fresh lemon juice. If the salad is just a minor player, I'll opt for the bottled stuff. Other considerations include
Can I make something markedly better than the store-bought stuff?
Do I have time to make whatever it is from scratch?
Does this effort require tools that I do not possess?
If the effort is expensive in either funds or time, will it make much difference?
For instance, no matter the situation I'd sooner brush my teeth with a nail file than use store-bought Hollandaise or Bearnaise sauces. On the other hand, I'd never think of making my own hoisin sauce or Dijon mustard.
But we were talking about desserts. What all this listing and justification and juggling of nuances is leading up to is my excuse for buying a cake. The nearly-100-degree weather convinced me that I should buy an angel food cake to use as the base for my dessert. I was not baking a cake that night. Besides, frankly, I've never cared much for baking cakes, I don't have a bundt pan, the cake was destined for a supporting role, it was hot, and it was a Thursday night (I never can seem to get my shit together on Thursday nights). Anyway, I call this dessert a topple, because
--uh--
because it looks like one.
dramatis personae
one angelfood cake (well, probably not a whole cake)
zest of one small orange (or tangerine or Meyer's lemon)
one cup heavy whipping cream
two tablespoons confectioner's sugar
one quarter teaspoon cream of tartar
a dash of cardamom powder
one quarter cup marscapone cheese
one quarter cup pear butter
one half pint of berries (blue, black, rasp)
two tablespoons hulled pistachios
quality of ingredients
The cake should be uniform in shape and texture, moist but not sticky, sweet but not too sweet. I realize it's difficult to determine all of this if you've never tasted this particular bakery's cake, but you won't need the entire cake, so taste a bit. If the cake is too sweet, halve or forego the sugar in the whipped cream.
The berries have to be fresh and should not be mushy. Freshness can be tricky with some berries. Blueberries can be especially tricky; I think green blueberries deliberately masquerade as fresh berries to confound me. As with the cake, you'll need to taste the berries before you use them. If they're a bit on the tart side, cut each berry in half and use half as many on each topple.
When selecting the orange remember that you are going to use only the zest. Well, okay, you can use the rest of the orange in something else or eat the damned thing while you're whipping the cream, for all I care. But the zest is where your attention should be when you purchase the orange because that's the part you're using in this dessert. For this application, the color of the zest is unimportant. The aroma and overall health of the zest are the only important aspects. You want an orange (or tangerine) with no blemishes in the zest. Test the aroma by nicking it with a fingernail. It should have a strong, sweet, pleasant citrus aroma. If it smells too acrid or if it has little aroma, pick a different variety. If you can't find a decent orange or tangerine, a lemon (preferably a Meyer's lemon) will work.
preparation
Remember I said this is a construction. Since you've purchased the only cooked components of this dessert (the cake and the pear butter). Begin by preparing the filling and the whipped cream.
The filling's pretty quick. Combine the pear butter with the marscapone in a small bowl and whip them together with a fork. I like a uniform consistency, but you might prefer the filling to have a slightly striated appearance. Either way works. You might also be wondering, why the hell is he using pear butter? Apple butter is far easier to find, and it tastes good with berries, too. I suppose you could substitute apple butter for pear, but apple butter has a more assertive flavor than pear, so you'll probably want to use less.
I've never understood why anyone would use ready-made whipped cream. It's simple to make, takes less than 10 minutes, keeps for a couple of days, and tastes many times better than the ready-made. The topple uses orange-cardamom whipped cream, which sounds fancy but is damned simple. Combine the zest (if you don't own a microplane zester, get one) sugar, cream of tartar, cardamom, and cream in a large mixing bowl and whip it good. This is not rocket science. Whip it until it peaks. Use a silicon spatula to scrape the sides every minutes or so to ensure even distribution of the ingredients.
Break up the pistachios a bit. They needn't be chopped or ground. You want pieces that are in the neighborhood of a third pistachio size.
Slice the cake radially, like you slice a pie. You need two half-inch thick slices per serving. Use a large, extremely sharp knife and slice down slowly to avoid crushing the cake. On each plate, place one slice of angelfood cake, spread on a tablespoon of filling, place a second slice atop the filling offset slightly, so that it looks like it's sliding off the first. Top this with a large spoonful (a quarter cup? hell, I never measured) of orange-cardamom whipped cream. Sprinkle eight or ten berries and a teaspoon of pistachio chunks on each topple.
I want to talk a little about the virtues of marscapone. Naturally, this relates to sex. Everything relates to sex.
There is an old (old as in, having Medieval origins--even Chaucer takes a stab at a variation on this via the Wife of Bath) sexist joke that goes something like this:
A young knight rapes a beautiful young lady. The king, for the reason du jour (low ratings with the female population--big-hearted sense of justice--desire to see the matter swept under the rug without any authentic adjudication--brain tumor), decides to let the queen and her ladies try this matter in the Court of Love. The ladies, using some arcane or arbitrary system of judgement decide that, rather doing anything so rational as tying this Y-chromosomatic over-achiever to the nearest pole and allowing a rabid polecat to search in his codpiece for mice, send him on an educational quest. If he can return with the correct answer to the council's Question in a year-and-a-day, they'll set him free. If not, it's the pole and ferret treatment for Our Hero. From this point onward, the young man's life (or at least that of his genitals) hinges on his discovering the answer to a fairly straightforward-sounding Question: "What does every woman really want?"
So, our Medieval Mike Tyson goes a-questing. Wherever he wends, he requests an interview with whatever woman the locals have deemed the wisest in the area. Because each maternal sage gives him an answer decidedly different from the previous answers, it quickly begins to look like this scumbag will get his just desserts. By various sources, he is told that all women really want:
Financial security
Frequent rogerings by accomplished young studs
To be young and pretty
Jewelry
To be told that they are young and pretty
A nice house
True love
A room of her own
Exquisite desserts
To be left alone
The requisite year-and-a-day passes, and Our Hero finds himself once more before the council of ladies. They put the Question to him and, having heard the same contradictory evidence as he, we are fairly certain this young fellow will soon be singing soprano.
"What every woman really wants," he says, "is"--
pause for dramatic effect--
"her way."
And they set the slimy bastard free.
I'd like to use this old joke to make two points. First, before you start getting steeped in the irony of progressive elitism, remember: the Clarence Thomas hearings weren't that long ago. Yeah, I know, that was a non-sequitur.
Second, that old sexist joke really demonstrates the dual nature of stereotypes. We tend to believe them even as we deny them. The stereotype of women from the men's perspective is that we never truly know what women want. The subtext of the joke, however, is that men actually know exactly what women want, but we also consider it an unreasonable desire.
In light of that stereotype, I'm sure you can see that we shouldn't be too quick to assume we know exactly what someone wants based on stereotypes. My wife, for example, is half-Italian. It's amazing how many people in this country think they know exactly what an Italian wants to eat based on nothing more substantial than a vague sense of ethnic origin. Italians are all supposed to love pasta, garlic, tomato sauce, Italian sausage, roasted peppers, langostino, and white truffles. Bollocks. Princess Valiant doesn't care, for example, for Parmesan cheese (she's also none too fond of roasted peppers or sausage of any description, but I'll address those matters another time). She's none too keen on Romano or any other stinky cheese, for that matter. Peccorino, Reggiano, Asiago, it makes no difference. She just doesn't like it. Her multa italiana Aunt Mary shares this sentiment; she says parmesan smells like a sweaty sock and won't allow it in her kitchen, much less near her pasta.
This puts me in a rather delicate position when I attempt to make risotto for the family. Authentic risotto is made with arborio rice, stock, white wine, cream, and parmeggiano, and I adore a good traditional risotto. Oh, I admit, I skimp on the parmesan for seafood risottos: shrimp, squid, lobster, and scallops just don't need the competition. Note I said "skimp." Seafood-based risotto still needs a little cheese for body. For most risottos, though, without sufficient parmesan, the results are rather bodiless and bland.
In most American households, this doesn't seem to be a problem. These days, folks in the US seem to be sold on the value of Reggiano Parmigiano as a flavoring agent. The Food Network and the boys at Queer Eye praise it to the heavens. Italian restaurants dole the stuff out like most places pass out cracked black pepper. This is unfortunate. It's rather like bathing your sushi in wasabi and soy sauce. Sure, it tastes good that way, but all you're going to taste is wasabi and soy sauce. At sushi prices, that's a waste of money. Likewise, if all you want is the taste of garlic and parmesan cheese, sprinkle 'em on a burger. What's the point of spending good money on a lasagna, risotto, or manicotti if all you're going to taste are the parmesan and garlic?
Recently, I discovered the answer to both of my risotto needs. First, I needed a the body of cheese for the seafood risottos, but I needed to eliminate the aged-cheese-stench. Second, for other risottos, I needed both the body and a certain extra flavor agent that would not provide too much grease (tried butter, threw away the results) nor too strongly cheesy. The answer I happened upon is marscapone.
Most folks are familiar with marscapone from a rather different source: marscapone provides the body and a degree of piquancy to tiramisu and cannolis (if you are not Italian and weren't an adult in the 1980s, you may have to look up this term--trust me, it's a dessert). Marcaspone is young mozarella. It has nearly the consistency of whipped cream cheese but with a slightly tarter flavor. What I found truly amazing is that marscapone not only makes an outstanding substitute for parmesan in risotto, not only works with (vice against) the flavor of seafood, but also makes the cream superfluous and allows the risotto to mount much faster than with cream. It's so easy to use, it almost feels like cheating.
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
Flaaaaaaaavor
A friend of mine and fellow diver—we'll call him Ivan—positively drowns his food in butter. Ivan's also a bit of a gourmand and quite the fan of French cuisine, and I don't mean that Americanized nouvelle légere crap either. No no. Ivan delights in high concentrations of cream, butter, lobster, cheese, foie gras: all the jolly crew. Said friend explained his preference to me quite concisely over croissants at dinner one evening: he pointed to a croissant (a scrap of bread that, by definition, is already at least on third butter by weight) upon which he had lavished a soft butterknife-load of butter and, leaning closer to me, intoned the mantra, "Flaaaaaaavor."
Said friend also has—despite much cycling and swimming to combat it—the average American male physique: ovate. I don't know that I want to accept any age- or socio-economic-status-related correspondence there, however. I myself am 45 years old and rarely above 8% body fat. I spent several years religiously following the Zone® diet, but I have become increasingly lax in that respect over the past three years. I still follow the general Zone principle of keeping my protein intake to approximately thirty percent of my diet, but I eat a lot more high glycemic carbohydrate and a good deal more "unhealthy" fat than during my evangelistic phase. My reason? Well, I think Ivan nailed it:
Flaaaaaaavor.
My ex-wife (wife, at the time) and I were dining at a steak house with a couple of acquaintances in Idaho some years ago, a young couple who had been teenagers during the eighties. When the server brought the obligatory bread and butter, they asked for a substitute for the butter. Neither of them, they claimed, could stomach the stuff--the real stuff--butter. They preferred margarine. They said butter tastes too milky. In fact, they launched into lengthy discussion of the merits of various margarine brands and oil types: corn, safflower, sunflower. I can't reproduce what they said here. I was too busy being disgusted at the thought of anyone wanting margarine for any purpose at any time on any food item to recall the details. In any case, I know that I, for one, will never develop a taste for margarine.
Oddly, I also grew up in a household stocked with margarine in stead of butter. Butter was considered unhealthy (saturated fat instead of polyunsaturates). I can still recall my family's joy at the introduction of whipped margarines, which meant they would never again have to shred a slice of toast while attempting to make it palatable by spreading fat on it. Mom and Dad both considered restaurant bread with real honest-to-God butter a serious treat. Both would sigh and lean back in their seats and wax nostalgic on recently-churned butter and ice boxes. Still, my parents never for a moment considered keeping butter in the house. Butter could spoil, was more expensive than margarine, and was supposed to be the unhealthy alternative to the wonders of polyunsaturated fats.
At the time, I really didn't care much one way or the other. Fat and I have long enjoyed a weird love/hate relationship. When I was a child, butter and margarine were all just gelatinous slime to me. I hated fat, grease, and fatty foods. I absolutely detest lard and tallow and shortening. I've always gone out of my way to strip the excess fat from meat and poultry. I like sausage, but a little too much nauseates me and gives me a headache. Pasteurized processed cheese-food (whatever the hell that is) has the same effect on me as sausage, but I consider this no loss as I would rather have holes drilled in my teeth than eat imitation cheese.
Still, even as a child I understood that there was something strangely enticing about butter. Though not a big fan of buttered bread (or bread in general—I tend to think of bread and pasta as bases upon which to serve actual food), I have long preferred the taste of butter to that of margarine. Likewise, on vegetables I can always tell butter (which adds a distinct richness) to margarine (which just makes everything oily).
The problem of flavor, you see, is multifaceted. Butter alone is about as flavorful as recycled plastic grocery bags. Slightly milky-tasting coagulated oil--de gustibus and all, but my doesn't that sound flavorful? Well, no, of course not. Can you imagine a restaurant offering butter, in any form, as a main dish? Or even as a side dish? Grilled salmon with a side slab of butter on field greens--Cobb salad with chunks of Danish whole-milk butter, ribeye with a side of whipped butter and garlic. Bleah.
On the other hand, can you imagine a restaurant charging for the butter they bring out with the bread? I tend to avoid the places that offer me oleo with my bread, and I'm not a big bread eater. All the nutritional experts agree, however, that fat accounts for a good deal of what we experience as flavor. The richer, saturated fats seem to hold a certain preeminence in that department. Olive oil, sesame oil, peanut oil, and almond oil all have stronger, more readily identifiable flavors than butter, but it's the butter-based dishes (Hollandaise and Bearnaise sauces, Sole Meuniere, beurre blanc) that get labelled luxuriant.
So, butter improves (for most tastes) the flavor of food, but butter by itself is not something most of us want to eat. Thus, it should come as no surprise that a dish can be too buttery. I've made this mistake in preparation. Any fish prepared meuniere (fried in clarified butter) must be cooked quickly or the fish (and the thin coating of flour) soaks up too much butter. Not to make this too simple, too high a temperature tends to over cook the thinner parts of the fish while undercooking the rest. C'est la vie.
Okay, I don't think it's possible for me to go a week without cooking. Not really. Unless I'm on vacation, at a resort, in a room with no kitchen. This week came close, though, and I think it's added to my overall jitteriness.
I'm going into culinary withdrawal. I need a fix. [Fade to tattered, unshaven Prince Valiant, crawling across the Mojave, reaching toward the shadow of circling vultures, and croaking out, "Oil. Oil. Extra virgin olive oil."]
This has been a preparation week. We're going on a dive excursion this weekend—Cozumel for four days—and we're taking Girlchild on her first dive trip. What a fiasco. Never enough time to do everything.
I consider this noteworthy for three reasons: (1) she's ten years old, (2) like Princess V and I, she's gaijin, and (3) I believe this gustatory love was only made possible by Girlchild's enduring courage. Girlchild is tiny, not a big exercise buff, and to the best of my knowledge has no martial skills (if you discount surreptitious studies in world conquest and domination), and Girlchild is decidedly a Little Girl. She likes frilly and colorful clothes, plays with dolls, buries herself in stuffed animals every night, and has been known on occasion to pout (under extreme duress, she can produce tears the size of concord grapes).
To provide a little contrast, consider Firstchild. Firstchild (who is twenty-three years old and attending college in Washington state) considers herself a Japanophile of the first order. She reads Japanese, absorbs manga and anime, and at times appears to be on the verge of anime-dom. She recently won a costume competition at a gaming convention, dressed as a Pokemon villain. Her dream career, I believe, would be designing and modifying a series of virtually reality games based on Pokemon or YuGiOh or Sailor Moon—that or discovering a magical orb from another planet and using the super powers conferred by said amulet to rid the universe of an Unknown Evil with the reach of the Yakuza and table manners of Yog-Sothoth. Firstchild also loves Iron Chef (well, we have that much in common, at least). Firstchild will not eat sushi. At the very mention of sushi, she makes The Face.
For an experimental cook, a courageous audience is a must. It's particularly convenient to have them living with you. You can see, then, why (aside from the obvious proud step-papa thang) I might find Girlchild's culinary daring laudable.
Of course, life with a courageous ten-year-old has its drawbacks. Oh, I don't mean the run of the mill foolhardy daredevilism. We get enough tree-scaling, traffic dodging, equilibrist-cum-human-fly thrills of that particular "Hey, Dad! Watch this!" variety from Boychild. Girlchild's bravery is both tempered and sharpened, you see, by her intellect.
Girlchild, you see, reads like a Harvard law student. Oh, sure, lots of Harry Potter and Madeleine l'Engle and Brian Jacques and Roald Dahl and all the jolly-pree-teen pap, but also all of Dahl's adult works and Douglas Adams and J. R. R. Tolkein and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe. During any quiet moment, if she's not on the computer, Girlchild is burrowing through another book. Sometimes, she's retilling familiar ground. She read the Lord of the Rings saga a half dozen times last year, and her Harry Potter tomes have begun shedding their binding glue. Girlchild's reading has unearthed a wealth of vocabulary, and she spends that wealth unabashedly, gilding her conversations with sesquipedalian terms the way most ten-year-olds layer on the cools and dudes and all the latest slang. Girlchild's speech bears, as Princess V points out, the autodidact's stamp. The very words she incorporates into her discourse with such syntactic, semantic, and phonetic aplomb are, often as not, misprounounced. I know that quirk intimately. Just this past week, I made my first attempt (since learning it over a quarter-century ago) to use the word syzygy aloud and botched the whole affair (no animals were harmed in the botching of this conversation, my ego suffering only minor contusions in the fall).
Girlchild takes her intelligence in stride. She's proud of her verbal facility without being overbearing (most of the time), but she exudes a T. S. Eliot attitude about her erudition: anyone worth her time will understand the words and allusions she chooses to use. I think she has every reason to be proud: she works hard for her vocabulary, and I hope no one ever manages to shame her out of that pride.
Where then, you might wonder, are the drawbacks? The tempering effect of intelligence, as I've already suggested, eliminates most foolhardiness. Sure, bright kids can do stupid things—they're still kids. I expect that. I may not be prepared for it every time, may not anticipate it as often as I'd like, but I do expect it.
The problem is the whole Disney Evil Genius scenario. Ever notice that, in Disney cartoons and anime, the villain is always the intelligent brother? I've always considered this the most counterproductive possible prejudice. Why study hard if you don't intend to become an Evil Overlord? I've also long believed this idea to be fomented by former whiz kids and the parents of whiz kids. We've all known obnoxious brilliant children; the ones who assume we're all morons and expend much breath explaining their own genius to us. Honestly, though, even the non-obnoxious genius child is always up to something: dreaming, planning, searching.
When Princess V and I were kids, we found clever ways to provide light under the blankets for after-hours' readings. Our parents eventually found and confiscated our flashlights or spotted the light leaking around the coverlets and confiscated our flashlights or simply refused to buy more D-cell batteries, so we moved on to cleverer means: indicator lights on battery-powered toys, phosphorescence, bioluminescence. You don't need much if you're willing to read a word or two at a time. We knew, despite warnings about lost sleep and eyestrain, despite appeals to authority, that the benefits or our clandestine readings outweighed the possible detriments. What did our parents know, anyway? If they were so smart, why weren't they catching us?
Just think of the havoc we would have wrought if we'd had access to the Internet.
Girlchild has access to the Internet.
A month ago, she lost a week's access to the Web when we caught her maintaining secret email accounts. (Her excuse: "I just wanted to see what BrandX's email was like." Yes, even brilliant children spew forth a protective ink-cloud of lame excuses at unexpected confrontations).
A few days ago, she lost access again for registering in an online rôle playing game. Her previously–spelled-out access rules had included no signing up for anything online without permission. We're not unreasonable. She plays on the Neopets site; she's registered with Disney; she has AOL IM buddies; she publishes fan fiction. Registering to play the part of an itinerant vampire in an online RPG, one that automatically includes an email address, was not on her approved list. Neither was coercing or exhorting her little friends to join.
Frankly, the Goth influence does not concern me. Vampirism, with all its anti-Christian, sub-societal, moribund, and carnal subtexts will likely have no longterm negative effects on Girlchild. I've raised teenagers before. I realize that, when the hormones hit, whether we specifically allowed or forbade her pre-teen self access to Internet Goth culture will neither accelerate nor prevent her adolescent tumble into darkness. Angst comes or it does not. It comes to some in a shy awkwardness and to others in a dark wave of Goth. One day, she'll wake up and decide to don black leather and fishnets, to shave part of her hair and dye the rest with black shoe polish, to limn her eyelids with kohl, and to insist that her soulname is Death Petal; or she won't.
In this case, the more serious problem was Girlchild's aforementioned recruitment of a friend into the vampire RPG. Friend's dad called us, shocked to have discovered that his daughter was receiving email from a young gentleman she'd met in the online city. Dad was not pleased to see letters to his innocent ten-year-old darling coming from an adult who styles himself Blood Sucker.
So, once again, we had the Terrible-Web-Perverts-Who-Prey-Upon-Children Talk™ with Girlchild and suspended her Internet privileges for another couple weeks. She was devastated. She immediately started reading another series of books.
This week, Girlchild is learning to scuba dive so that she can join Princess V and I on occasional undersea excursions. Lucky kid and lucky us getting to take her along, but of course this is one more thing to terrify my parental side. In just a couple weeks, we'll be flying along in the current with our little neoprened Power Puff Girl floating alongside us. The thrill with which I anticipate this experience is, frankly, flavored with just a dash of trepidation. She'll be okay: she's smart and she's brave. She'll also bear constant watching because she's smart and she's brave. Smart and brave and capable of scuba diving: sounds like an anime villain just waiting to take over the world.
Anyway, it was Girlchild's suggestion, this past weekend, that caused my second foray into the realm of sushi. I don't think it's what she had in mind, however. When I asked what she wanted for dinner and she replied, "Sushi," I think she expected to go out to Koreana Grill or get takeout nori-maki from Central Market. Then again, who knows into what fiendishly clever plan of hers I may have stumbled when I went to the cupboard and opened that seemingly innocuous box of sushi rice.
My first efforts with sushi didn't exactly whet my appetite for that particular activity. It did, however, annoy hell out of me, which, perversely, did whet my appetite. It's not that I'm masochistic (much). I hate giving in to any kind of cooking (okay, I avoid baking breads and cakes, but I find that activity boring). Moderate success (you know: the dish is adequate and relatively easy to prepare but nothing to write home about) is more likely to keep me away from a dish or technique than outright failure. In all fairness to myself, my first nigiri-zushi efforts were not failures; they did lack elegance, though.
You can find lots of information on sushi online, so I won't go into detail about different types of sushi, history, or table manners. I have noticed a certain lack of detail, however, concerning what can go wrong in sushi preparation. Much of the available advice on sushi preparation sounds like passed on lore with little or no meat. What follows, then, are some tyro observations on sushi preparations.
Sushi rice
Sushi rice is frequently, colloquially referred to as "sticky rice." This is a misnomer and can cause you shopping problems. Sticky rice is a Thai dessert dish. You want sushi rice: matured California or Japanese short-grain rice. If it doesn't say "sushi rice" on the package, it's probably the wrong rice.
The drill goes something like this:
Rinse the bejesus out of the rice.
Cook the rice (1 cup of rice to 1¼ cup water) in a rice cooker or on the stovetop.
Cool the rice (a far more complex procedure than you might imagine) and add seasoned rice wine vinegar.
The rinsing is to clean off the dry preservative. Once upon a time, sushi rice was packed in talc to dissuade thrips. Nowadays, it's packed in starch dust. Either way, you want the rinse water to run clear. This usually takes a dozen or more rinsings. Rinse with cold water only. The starch will stick to the rice if you use warm water. I don't know what difference this makes in the cooking, but I'm sure it would be very bad.
Sushi rice is, as anyone who has ever eaten sushi knows, quite tacky. It's also slightly sweet and slightly tart. If you've never eaten any of the milder nigiri-zushi (such as tamago [omelet]) or if you always drown your sushi in soy sauce and wasabi, you might not have noticed the vinegar. That stickiness is important. Too sticky and it adheres to everything: the plate, your fingers, your chopsticks, your clothing, your facial hair, your car keys. Not sticky enough and the sushi rice pad falls apart.
The real trick here is the cooling process. Oh, sure, the rice has to be cooked to the right consistency, and you have to add the correct amount of seasoned vinegar, and you don't want to scrape any overcooked (browned) rice from the pot or cooker into the cooling bowl, but none of these factors is quite as limiting as the cooling process. If you do not cool the rice enough, it will be too tacky and almost impossible to work. If you allow the rice too cool on its own, it will cool unevenly and be crusty on one side and damp on the other. If you stir the rice too hard or add the vinegar too early, it will break up and turn into a gunky mass with the consistency of partly dried white school glue.
Most sushi-preparation guides follow the lore: use a cedar, ceramic, or glass cooling bowl. Cool the rice by fanning it while carefully separating and polishing it with a bamboo paddle (shamoji). Do not add the vinegar until the rice is cooled. Do not handle the rice until it is cooled. Do not use a metal bowl or metal spoon to cool the rice.
All of this sushi cooling lore turns out to be rational to some degree.
The cooling bowl and shamoji must not be metal because you add vinegar at the end of the process. If you mix separate and cool the rice in a metal bowl and with a metal spoon, you may (after you add the vinegar) impart a metallic taste to the rice. I have not attempted this, but I have tasted the seasoned rice wine vinegar after letting it stand in a metal spoon for a minute or two, and it does impart a metal oxide to the mixture. (Side note: you can make your own sushi-zu, but it's just rice wine vinegar, salt, and sugar. The prepared seasoned rice vinegars are inexpensive, easy to find, and taste just fine. Even though you wait until the rice is cooled to add the vinegar, because you still have to continue separating and polishing the rice after you add the vinegar, it's going to be in the cooling bowl for several minutes. I agree with the lore on this one: non-metal bowl and shamoji to avoid the metallic taste. This stuff is just too much trouble to blow it all over something so simple to control.
Getting just the right touch with the shamoji, separating the rice for cooling and stirring it around to polish it without mashing it to pabulum: this take practice. I found that I had to stop ever few minute and rinse the shamoji in cold water. Keeping the shamoji cool, clean, and slightly damp helps keep the rice from clumping on it. Throw away any rice that mashes onto the shamoji (a good reason for making more rice than you think you'll need). Keep separating and fanning the rice (yeah, you really need four hands to do this properly) until it is at or nearly at room temperature.
Nigiri-zushi
My first effort at sushi was ebi nigiri-zushi (not ama ebi—raw crustaceans are dangerous treats, and I would suggest only using farm-raised shrimp, which is expensive and difficult to find). It certainly looked simple enough at first glance: a boiled shrimp tail on a pad of rice. I will kill any possible suspense by admitting that my result was too big, too uneven in size, and sitting atop rice that is just too damned sticky.
First-glance simple is usually a wrong impression. Think Zen gardens: how hard can it be to rake lines into a patch of sand? Heh. Notice the simple appearance of most ebi in sushi bars: uniform, lying flat on the rice, rounded at the edges. The flat appearance is achieved by peeling the shrimp, cleaning them backwards (opening up the abdomen instead of along the notochord), and skewering them for cooking. I got lucky, but I opening the shrimp from the abdomen is an ideal way to slide open your hand. What worked best for me was peeling the shrimp (except fot the tails) and skewering the shrimp next. Use the thinnest bamboo skewers you can find, and insert the skewer right down the notochord channel. Run the skewer point all the way into the fleshy tail piece directly above the center of the tail fins. Then, split the shrimp on its abdominal side, taking care not to cut all the way through to the bamboo. Set a large pot of water to boil. When it reaches a full boil, drop in the shrimp for forty-five seconds. A full minute will be too much and may make the skewers impossible to remove without tearing the shrimp. Remove the shrimp from the boiling water directly into an ice water bath to stop the cooking process. Remove the skewers immediately and trim the ends of the ebi to echo the shape of the sushi rice.
I find the trimming difficult, philosophically, because it means throwing away perfectly good bits of cooked shrimp. One possible solution is keeping the leavings to add to temaki (hand rolls). I had intended to try this last time, but I ran out of rice and had too much sushi for the three of us, anyway.
The sushi rice rolls are fairly easy to make if the consistency of the rice is already correct and if you rinse your hands in cold water just before you handle the rice. You will probably need to wash your hands after forming each rice pad. By now, you are probably beginning to see why sushi chefs in Japan spend their first five years just handling rice. For each rice pad, scoop up a quantity about the size of a ping pong ball and form it into a flat-sided oval.
If, every time you try to form a sushi rice pad, the rice sticks to your fingers or refuses to form, you did not cool it properly. I recommend that you curse, stamp your foot, and try further drying and polishing the rice with the shamoji. If that doesn't work, give up on the nigiri and prepare sashimi. If the rice tastes okay, you can mix in a handful of halved grape tomatoes and blanched snowpeas for a colorful, tasty side dish. Or you can chuck the rice and go out for sushi.
On my second foray into the world of sushi, in addition to the ebi I also used halibut (hirame) and salmon (sake), two of my favorites. Once you've tried to cut clean, rectangular, uniform slices of prime fish for either nigiri-zushi or sashimi, you will see the real reason for the high cost of sushi in most restaurants. This is a wasteful process. You cannot use most of the flesh close to the skin or close to the bones; you cannot use bruised, separated, or otherwise discolored flesh; you cannot use flesh containing too much stringy fat. Your knife has to be extremely sharp and clean. I have managed the best results by following the same ground rules I use in preparing carpaccios:
Use a high-quality, razor-sharp knife.
Use only fresh fish.
I know this sounds like it contradicts that last point, but: put the fish in the freezer about an hour before you attempt to slice it.
Keep your cutting board clean.
Rinse the knife in cold water frequently while slicing the fish.
Handle the fish gingerly: bruises make it bitter as well as ugly.
Save edible scraps and crooked cuttings for nori-maki or temaki.
Remember, this is a visual art: style counts.
Place a tiny dollop of wasabi (about the size of a quarter of a pea) atop each rice pad and the place the fish or rice atop the pad.
I was far more pleased with my nigiri-zushi—better appearance, consistency, and quality of rice—the second time than the first.
Nori-maki
Nori-maki is the Lego™ of Japanese haute-cuisine: hardcore playing with food. I got lucky. My first try actually produced tasty, attractive nori-maki. I used sockey salmon (the strips leftover from the nigiri-zushi. I'm probably overdue for burning an offering at a shrine somewhere.
Once upon a time, finding the ingredients and tools for sushi-roll construction meant a foray into the nearest available Japanese or pan-Asian specialty market. Lately, nori-maki has become so popular that most major grocery chains in the US now carry nori sheets and makisu (the little bamboo mat you use to form the rolls).
In addition to the instructions I found in many popular cookbooks and on a vast array of Web sites, here are a few key lessons I learned while making nori-maki:
These rolls use a lot of rice—much more than I expected. A quarter-inch layer of sushi rice per roll (covering all but the last one-inch strip of the nori sheet) means that one cup of (dry, precooked measure) sushi rice will make two full-sheet rolls or four half sheet rolls. A half-sheet roll will be like the typical California roll: one full wrap of nori around rice and whatever else you've included. A full sheet produces a slightly fatter roll (about an inch and a half in diameter) with a spiral over lap of nori half-way through the rice. The cut nori-maki discs each look something like a colorful @ symbol.
Spread the rice with your fingers (don't forget to wash and dampen your hands with cold water before handling the rice). Tools will just make a mess of the job.
Nori is fairly stout material, but it does not handle sheer forces well. When you cut it, use a large chef's knife and cut by pressing down and rocking the blade. Slicing will tear the nori.
As in sexual matters, wetness is a crucial concern in nori-maki production.
Avoid getting the nori wet: it weakens and separates. Dry your hands before you handle the sheets and dry the knife you will use for cutting the nori sheets.
The knife you use to cut the roll has to be sharp, clean, cold, and damp for every cut. Repeat: every cut. Be sure the hand you use to hold the nori-maki is dry, however, or the nori is liable to stick to your fingers and separate from the roll. Keep a dishcloth or a wad of paper towels on hand as well as a bowl of ice water. After you slice the roll, your knife will be gummed up by the sushi rice. If you don't clean and chill the knife, your next cut will pinch or flatten the roll on one side.
Here comes the weekend and, O look, there come the thunderclouds. Good-bye weekend dive opportunity. It probably sounds silly to a lot of people that we don't want to dive in a rainstorm. Hell, we're going to get wet anyway, right?
Of course, it's not the rain. It's the lightning. Would you be willing to stand on a shoreline in a thunderstorm wearing a bundle of dynamite on your back, a bundle with a built-in lightning rod? You might. You'd probably change your mind if you ever felt the concussion from a lightning stroke hitting the lake less than a hundred feet away, just as you were trudging out of the water. That's what happened to Princess V last time we dived Lake Travis in an electrical storm.
You can understand, then, why—with stormclouds hanging over us—Princess V and I decided to forego our dive last weekend. Just our luck, the lake saw nary a drop of rain. So, here I sit, reviewing weather.com and intellicast.com, hoping to find a hiatus in the next few days' predictions of Isol. T-storms and Scat. T-storms. No such luck.
Fate should establish an 800 number for complaints—at least a website with contact information. They shouldn't be able to deprive me like this on Father's Day. I'd write a letter to my Congressman, but he's a Democrat, so he wouldn't be able to do anything.
Of course, with my former wives, I frequently said the same thing about sexual deprivation on Fathers Day, on Christmas, on my birthday, Veterans Day, Flag Day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and so forth.
Guess I should count my blessings.
Sometimes, I guess I expect too much. I saw an Iron Chef episode last night—one I'd seen before. Morimoto battles a young chef of the Ohta faction (a group of Japanese traditionalists who consider Morimoto's neo-Japanese cuisine something of an abomination). This particular challenger was an expert in the use of salt, something you are unlikely to find in restaurants outside of Japan and a throwback, of sorts, to ancient times when the Japanese had no seasonings but salt and responded with creative applications.
The moment that made the greatest impression on me was when one of the judges complained that one of the challenger's dishes was too salty. Of all the possible complaints I might hear from a judge about a chef's preparations, I thought, this was the one he should have been above. Salinity is the one quality that he, more than anyone present, should have fully under control. That moment, striking as it did at the very heart of his expertise, had to be a far greater embarrassment than losing the competition. She may as well have said, "You call yourself a chef? You call yourself a salt expert?"
By comparison, I feel hardly any chagrin over the fact that my shrimp risotto, last night, turned out just a bit too salty. Hardly any.
Really.
Otherwise, I was quite pleased with the risotto. I don't know whether I've just been lucky or risotto is very forgiving. Still, this was shrimp risotto, and shrimp is not as forgiving as risotto. I'm pretty sure that the timing on the shrimp was mostly just a matter of luck.
Anyway, here's the dish I prepared for Princess V, the girlchild, and my own self (i.e., serves 3½—I'm a big eater):
Shrimp risotto
Dramatis personae
two tablespoons olive oil
one medium shallot, thinly sliced
one small clove garlic, small dice
½ cup arborio rice
½ cup white wine
three cups chicken stock or bouillon, or a fumet
½ teaspoon minced cayenne pepper
½ pound medium shrimp
lemon zest
¼ cup whipping cream
2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese
Quality of ingredients
See my comments of June 10th, regarding olive oil.
I prefer the richness that a shallot imparts to risotto, but most risotto recipes call for a medium onion. Try it both ways if you like. I usually don't add garlic to this recipe, but I like the way it helps peak the piquancy of the cayenne. When I say a small clove, I mean enough to produce about a half teaspoon when diced. Slice the shallot to about twice the thickness of a rice kernel—roughly that thickness. I don't mean to be anal about this, but the kernels will approximately double in thickness as they cook, and you want the thickness of the cooked shallot strands (the slices will separate into ribbons) about the same size as the cooked rice. Similarly, you want the garlic bits about the size of the cooked rice kernels.
Cooks following recipe instructions tend to be overscrupulous in trying to apply adverbial directions. I once asked a friend, who wanted to prep for me, to prepare the shallot by slicing it in half along the axis and then thin slicing the halves across the axis. She got the orientations right, but she sliced the shallot thin enough to read through. Slicing a shallot that thin actually creates two possible problems (usually both):
Cooked directly against the pan, it dries to a crispy, onion skin texture and consistency.
Cooked in oil, it dissolves leaving thin filaments that get caught in your teeth.
Yes, it has to be arborio rice. Forgetting for a moment that my wife's Italian ancestors will haunt your dreams with off-color Tarantellas if you try to use long-grain rice, only arborio provides sufficient surface area to dissolve the requisite quantity of wine and stock. I have devised a technique for faux risotto, but it doesn't have the blended quality of flavor that you achieve with risotto. Faux risotto is essentially just rice in a creamy sauce. To avoid the lengthy digression it would entail, I'll append a recipe for shrimp faux risotto at the end of this one. For arborio rice, check the grocery stores near you that deal in bulk foods. For reasons that escape me, prepackaging arborio rice makes it worth nearly three times as much money.
This may sound inconsistent with my assault on red cooking (so-called–)wine, but white cooking wine works just fine. If you use real white wine, use a dry white, and use half as much.
I know, every cook book tells you to use stock. I hate to echo every other cookbook, but stock is decidedly superior to bouillon. Stock will impart more flavor and result in a meatier texture. The texture is good, but in this case—shrimp—the flavor from stock might be a bit overpowering. If you are making this risotto as part of larger spread of seafoods, a fumet will make the best possible stock for this (or any seafood-based) risotto. I recommend avoiding fish stocks or bouillons sold in stores; they tend to impart a nasty odor to everything in the kitchen. If you use stock or fumet, you may need to add a little salt to your recipe.
If (like me, the other night) you happen to be out of stock (I haven't roasted a chicken in about two months, and I always make my stock from the birds I've roasted), bouillon works just fine (call it four and a half stars instead of five). For a recipe this size, use only one bouillon cube (I used two, which adds too much salt for this size recipe) in three cups of water.
I love cayenne pepper, but like all peppers, the damned things are highly variable. This dish is well served by a little red hot pepper both for tiny bit of bite and for the color it adds. The question of how much to use is a tough one, though. Sure, you can generalize about which pepper belongs in which range of the Scoville scale. Big deal. So, you know that cayenne peppers are roughly ten times as hot as jalapeños and only one sixth as hot as habañero. What does this mean in terms of the meal? I used a cayenne pepper from my garden, and that was one hot little bastard. I ended up using only a quarter of a three-inch pepper. This one little item is probably the most subjective, make-or-break item in this menu. My risotto was just hot enough to leave a hint of burn on our lips but mild enough that girlchild didn't wince. No matter what your personal preference in peppers, you have to taste them before you use them. This will help you decide how much to use and how late to add them to the dish. The earlier they go onto the fire, the softer they'll be and the milder they'll be—within reason. Don't expect a scotch bonnet to mellow down to the level of an ancho.
With seafood, all the experts say to use only fresh—to eschew frozen. Makes you wonder how the grocery stores sell all that frozen crap. I live in Austin, damned close to the Gulf, and fresh shrimp isn't always available, even here. Sometimes, you just have to decide between doing without and making do with the frozen stuff. In the case of fish, I do without. With shrimp, however, I've found that frozen doesn't necessarily mean bad. If the shrimp is supposed to be pink but looks brown, don't buy it. If it says "tiger shrimp" but looks black in spots, don't buy it. Otherwise, frozen will likely be indistinguishable from fresh.
I like Reggiano parmesan cheese, but I will not tell you that you have to use it in your recipes. Asiago cheese or romano both work fine. That stuff Kraft™ sells in a cylinder is not cheese—it's cheese food. That's the stuff they feed to real cheese. It also tastes a good deal like shredding cardboard with just the subtlest innuendo of motor oil. (Disclaimer: Kraft sells some decent cheeses. This stuff isn't one of 'em.)
Preparation notes
This is a pretty attention-intensive process, so have everything prepped before you begin sautéing. Have your mise squared-away—everything appropriately diced, slided, zested, grated, and readily at hand—or you'll be scrambling to avoid burning the rice. The stock, fumet, or bouillon should be simmering in a pot next to where you plan to make the risotto.
Preheat the olive oil in a large, non-stick skillet over a medium flame. Add the shallot and the garlic and sauté until the shallot just begins to clarify. Pour in the rice and continue to sauté until the rice is uniformly tan.
Pour in the wine and continue to sauté the risotto until the liquid is all either absorbed or evaporated. Ladle in about a quarter cup of broth and sauté as needed to keep the risotto from sticking. Once the broth is fully absorbed, ladle in a bit more. You're going to continue this process until the risotto is al dente, but just before the risotto reaches that ideal doneness (yes, I realize how horribly subjective that sounds) stir in the cayenne. After a minute or so, stir in the shrimp and lemon zest.
It is just barely possible that you will run out of broth before your risotto is quite done (this can happen if the flame is too high, causing the fluid to evaporate faster than the rice can absorb it). If this happens, turn down the flame and continue the ladling process with tap water. Don't worry. You're more likely to have stock left over. If, however, you end up cooking the risotto longer than you expect, do not overcook the shrimp. If the shrimp are done but the rice is not, remove the shrimp (chopsticks work well for this) to a separate bowl until the rice is done.
Once the rice is just al dente, stir in the cream and cheese. Gently stir the risotto until the mixture is creamy, consistent, and steamy. If you had to remove the shrimp, stir them back in now.
Because of the cheese, the risotto will cool slowly, giving a little time to prepare other portions of your meal. I wouldn't wait more than a half hour, though.
Faux risotto
I know I'm just discouraging real cooking with this, but I guess not everyone loves to cook.
dramatis personae
two tablespoons olive oil
one medium shallot, thinly sliced
one small clove garlic, small dice
½ teaspoon minced cayenne pepper
½ pound medium shrimp
lemon zest
¼ cup whipping cream
2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese
one cup cooked rice
Quality of ingredients
Everything I said before applies except the rice. For this version, the rice should be long-grain, short-grain, or basmati rice. Princess V and I prefer the rich, nutty taste of basmati (most American long-grain rice tastes like spitwads). Prepare the rice as you usually do (stovetop, microwave, or rice cooker all come out about the same) but substitute chicken broth or stock for the water. Do not use sticky rice preparations like sushi rice.
Preparation
In a non-stick pan, preheat the olive oil and sauté in the cayenne, shallot, and garlic. Once the shallot is translucent, toss in the shrimp and the zest. Sauté the mixture until the shrimp are done.
Mix in the rice and then the cream and cheese. Stir the mixture to blend it and warm the ingredients.
Serve.
The "real" risotto will have a more integrated quality and a richness lacking in this dish, but the faux risotto is a little easier to prepare if you're pressed for time. As for the complexity of the dish, I don't think the difference really makes the faux version worth the lost quality.
Isn't spontaneity a Wonderful Thing™? Touchstone of creativity, litmus of excitement, spark-plug of desire, and the only possible deterrent to Dullness, according to a former spouse of mine. For the sake of anonymity and in order to prevent litigation and to avoid such clumsy phrases as "my ex-wife" and "that ball-busting bitch," I'll just call the woman in question Ms Take.
So frequently did Ms Take praise spontaneity in creative efforts and denounce predictability in any effort, that I eventually came to realize that she believes spontaneity is creativity. Even logic, in her universe, suffers equation with dullness beside the preferable spontaneity of epiphany, intuition, and revelation. Genius itself, to hear her expound, is unbidden thought. If history books were written according to Ms Take's dicta, Einstein's Theory of Relativity would not be deemed genius—too much calculation—nor would Mozart's Requiem—too many explicit instructions in the commission.
Any time Ms Take wanted to put me down with a quick verbal stroke (i.e., whenever she was losing an argument) she would accuse me of predictability, usually with a shake of her head and a little dismissive chuckle: "Oh, you're so predictable." Boring repetition of meals was deemed predictable (somehow, her favorite ice cream appears to be immune to such categorization). Movies she did not wish to watch for a second time or activities she did not wish to repeat were likewise denounced for their lack of spontaneity. Life with Ms Take meant she could, at any time, decide that any planned activity was not worth her while, simply by virtue of having been planned. This meant any claim such as "We've been preparing for this for months" could be trumped with some Kahlil-Gibran-level dogmatic folderol like "Life is too precious to be thrown away on prepackaged experiences." Wouldn't it be nice if we could call American Airlines at the last minute and argue, "I'm sorry, you have to refund the cost of those tickets in full. The flight plan lacks spontaneity."
The worst aspect of Ms Take's worship at the altar of spontaneity was not, however, her use of predictable, nor was it her use of spontaneity as an appeal to illogic. The worst was its effect on my sex life.
I discovered early in our relationship that maintaining any sex life at all with Ms Take took a bit of concentrated seduction. She was always slow to arouse. For a while, I thought I could handle that. I tried getting the kids out of the house and preparing special meals for her. I tried seducing her in semi-public places. I tried dinner and dancing. I tried sexy clothes. I tried a night out followed by a stay in a nice hotel. I tried blue movies and sex toys.
Lucky me. Nearly every variation I tried worked.
Unlucky me. They only worked once.
If I tried the dinner for two more often than once a month, it bored her. If I tried the hotel stay more than once a year—hadn't we just done that? If I tried the movies or toys too often, I was relying on artificial accoutrements to do the work for me, thereby doubly damning myself as predictable and lazy.
If you think this spontaneity gambit is easy, try coming up with a different seduction every night for—oh, say a month. It saps your strength, dampens your resolve, and probably causes stress-induced halitosis. After a couple of weeks, I would get fed up with trying, beaten down by rejection, my head pounding at the prospect of coming up with yet another brilliant and original ploy for getting Ms Take's juices flowing.
When you're married to Ms Take, you masturbate.
A lot.
[Note to self: some day, when I'm feeling truly pissy toward Ms Take, I must remember to tell her that being married to her made me feel like a teenager.]
Princess V and I never seem to have problems with this matter of repetition. Oh, sure, repetition of even the sweatiest wild-animal sex acts could get old after a while—if it were the only act we entertained. The point is moot, however, since that's never been the case in any of my relationships. I like variety. During sex, I usually want to do everything, all at once. We shift, change places, swap rôles, romp around (assuming no one's tied down), and generally have a great time. Sometimes, we do run through the same set of variants over and over again for several nights running. Does this constitute a lack of spontaneity? I would argue that it actually does not (if for no other reason than the simple finite range of human sexual experience). Okay, on a grand scale it might: no spontaneity in relying on the same set of maneuvers. On a granular scale, though, we're not relying on a script. Nothing says which act goes when or how many times each is repeated.
When you're married to Ms Take, you also learn to let her fix most of her own meals. I put up with the sexual dysfunction a lot longer than the gustatory demands. All it took was hearing, "Didn't we just have this?" about one of my meals to quell any pride I'd previously held in preparing her dinners.
Princess V and the kids have favorite meals. The girlchild is always happy to get oyster beef with broccoli. The boychild loves carne guisada. Every Thursday, when boychild goes off to spend the night with his mom, we have shrimp (or scallops or lobster—boychild won't eat these), which always makes Princess V smile. Nobody wants the same meal every night, nor do they want the same dessert every time.
Still, I must admit, I've never heard anyone whine, "Chocolate soufflé again?" Somehow, I don't expect to.
Chocolate soufflé
dramatis personae
special equipment: double boiler, mixer, dessert ramekins
some granulated sugar
some unsalted butter
6 ounces semi-sweet chocolate
3 tablespoons amaretto
¼ cup heavy whipping cream
five extra-large egg whites
four extra-large egg yolks
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
quality of ingredients
Which chocolate? Hell, you got me. Real chocolate, certainly. Molding chocolate tastes like candle wax. I buy the baking chocolate squares, but I've also used Nestle's™ chips. It's easier to measure the squares (one square equals one ounce), but the measurement isn't really critical. I know that six ounces works. I also know that a couple hands full of chips works. Semi-sweet seems about the best level of sugar for most of us. I've used bittersweet chocolate for mousses, but I want a little more sweetness in my soufflés.
I don't know much about amaretto, but I have used DiSaronno and the cheaper stuff. The cheaper stuff disappears, leaving nary a hint of almond. The DiSaronno adds a rich, warm flavor.
Most cookbooks assume that an egg is a large egg. I use extra-large eggs. If you want to use large eggs, you'll probably want five yolks and six whites.
When separating yolks and white, I recommend you do so with your (clean) bare hands: just let the white slips through your fingers. You're less likely to break the yolks in your hands than while juggling back and forth between jagged eggshells.
notes on preparation
Prep six individual ramekins (I think mine hold about a half cup of liquid, but I honestly haven't measured—personal dessert size) as follows:
Coat the inside of each ramekin with butter.
Pour some sugar (roughly two tablespoons—you know: some) into one ramekin and swirl it around to coat the bottom.
Slowly pour the sugar out of the first ramekin into a second ramekin while turning the first ramekin to coat the sides completely with sugar.
Repeat this swirl and pour-while-turning method until all six ramekins are coated with sugar-frosted butter.
Put the ramekins in the top shelf of your fridge.
This ritual is not to make the ramekins easier to clean. Without this coating, the soufflés will stick at the sides and collapse.
Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Add the amaretto while the chocolate is melting. Once the chocolate is more or less liquefied (with the amaretto, it will tend to glaze over) stir in the cream. Keep stirring until you have a thick but uniformly syrupy consistency. Keep it over a low simmer while you prepare the egg whites.
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Add the cream of tartar to the egg whites and beat them until they're stiff.
Pour the chocolate mixture into the egg yokes and, with a fork, beat the mixture to a uniform consistency and color. Fold in the egg whites approximately a third at a time. The trick here, as with any recipe that calls for folding, is to avoid crushing all the air out of the whites while mixing the concoction as thoroughly as possible.
Decision point: one aspect of chocolate soufflés that I find truly astonishing is that the recipe is identical to my recipe for mousse. If you'd prefer chocolate mousse, turn off the oven, put the concoction in the fridge for about an hour to let it thicken slightly, and then take it out and fold it thoroughly, again, to even out the consistency (it will be thinner at the center). Pour the chocolate mousse mixture into separate goblets. Put the goblets in the refrigerator and allow them to chill for another two or three hours.
Meanwhile, back at the soufflé
Once the oven is ready, remove the ramekins from the fridge, arrange them evenly on a cookie sheet, and fill each with a portion of the soufflé mixture. Put the cookie sheet on a rack above the center of the oven and let them bake for about 16 minutes. At this time, the soufflés will have risen a good inch or more above the rim of the ramekins.
Sweet soufflés collapse faster than savory soufflés, so you'll want to serve these immediately. I place each individual ramekin inside another bowl so the kids won't burn their fingers.
(Here's a real leap: Howard Dean to halibut. Keep your eyes open for the subtle segue.)
Last night I did not prepare dinner. Instead, we went to hear Howard Dean speak at the Saltillo Plaza in East Austin. I had been impressed the first time I heard him (on a teeeeeny little mpeg screen playing a portion of a California Democratic rally), and I hoped that my first impression was more than just a fluke. I was not disappointed. What a firebrand. Princess V also seemed to enjoy Governor Dean's speech.
I was impressed first by the fact that Howard Dean manages to make a complex problem (the need to repeal an outlandish tax cut in the face of an equally outlandish federal deficit) fairly simple to understand on a personal level. Even many of the pro-Bush halfwits understand that creating a huge federal deficit is a bad thing, but few voters of any political stamp seem to perceive deficit growth as an immediate (hey, interest rates are the lowest they've ever been) or personal (my salary isn't going down and inflation is nil) problem. They seem to buy the NeoCon argument that any portion of the deficit not overcome by the financial gains made possible by extra expendible income will be eliminated by the eventual, concomitant, and (they are certain) necessary reduction in social support programs. If you want to sell the country on the need to repeal a tax cut (which the Republican's will spin as "raising everyone's taxes"), you have to point out how the individual will gain from the repeal. I think Governor Dean struck the right chord last night in explaining that the Bush tax cut for the wealthy will mean higher property taxes (to say nothing of higher sales taxes and state taxes for everyone). The federal deficit has already reared its ugly head in 9 of 10 of the United States in the form of lost federal aid resulting in growing state budgetary deficits. The states have to make up this money somewhere.
Governor Dean's position is simple: you might see $500 dollars back in the form of a tax cut, but you'll lose that and more in other places.
I was further impressed to see that Howard Dean does not shy away from convictions that the NeoCon hacks have so frequently turned to slurs in the past: pacifist, liberal, social reformer. Dean unabashedly supports a woman's right to choose, argues for gay rights, and preaches a national health-care program. He projects a forceful, almost belligerent energy that almost dares any potential opponent to call him a liberal or socialist. His arguments are compelling and concise. His pronouncements are lucid and fiery.
Governor Dean stumbled a bit at the outset, trying to find something pleasant to say about the young state representative's admittedly unimpressive introduction. He recovered quickly, however, and had the crowd with him in short order. He also made good use of well-placed references to Truman, whom Governor Dean resembles in size, temperment, and politics.
I was surprised that Governor Dean managed, in Texas, to compare Texas—unfavorably— to Vermont without losing any of his audience. Texans tend to be a universally proud, self-righteous bunch (see also Statewide Inferiority Complex). Of course, considering recent disillusionment with Texas state legislation and administration, especially among Democrats, and considering this was an audience of Democrats hungry for solutions, I guess it shouldn't surprise me that this comparison worked. Instead of "Why should we give a rat's ass what a bunch of New Englanders do?" Dean managed to stir up a "Why don't we have what they have?" fervor.
He had the audience by the wrists. That audience.
Of course, there is that matter of audience.
We all—all the Democrats present at last night's rally—went to hear Howard Dean because we feel disenfranchised, trapped in a quasi-religious, quasi-police state of quasi-American ideals. We've watched in horror as our President declared war on another country based on something he thought we should fear that they might do—if they could. We have heard a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States shrug off civil and human rights violations as expedient. This is fast becoming a scary place to live. The NeoCons are on the verge of demolishing Roe vs. Wade, have begun pounding nails into the coffin of Affirmative Action, and are bankrupting the states in order to make rich scum richer. We went to the rally, last night, because we want a solid, reliable option for this next presidential election, and we hope that Governor Dean is that option.
We also went because, to some degree, we've all heard the pipes already. Most of the attendees already know of Howard Dean, primarily via the Internet. Our attendance was not motivated by a desire to hear yet another candidate speak; we did not go seeking options. We went to confirm our collective choice. We went to demonstrate to ourselves that we had made a good choice. Most of the attendees last night signed the petition to put Howard Dean on the Democratic ballot. Most. I don't know the numbers, but it was obvious that the majority were heading straight for the petition tables when they arrived.
Thus, most of us cheered when we heard Governor Dean championing the causes we expected to hear him champion. We laughed at his jokes at the expense of the Not-So-Loyal Opposition because we agree with the sentiment. We let his fire spark our own. We left in jubilance and walked off with a hopeful swing, smug in the knowledge of the rightness of our decision to support the man from Vermont.
I distrust smugness. Even my own.
Especially my own.
I don't want to become complacent and start praising this candidate simply because I chose to follow him. I don't want to blind myself to the possibility that he is not the right man for the job. Am I deluding myself? Is it simply impossible for anyone so liberal that he would sign the Civil Unions Act into law—is it impossible for so liberal a man to be elected to the highest office in this land? Is it possible, no matter how you word it, to win that election telling the American public up front that you want to repeal a huge tax cut? Am I hearing what I think I'm hearing or what I want to hear?
I see a Howard Dean who is forceful and persuasive, but he has openly—some would say ferociously—attacked the other politicians running against him for the Democratic nomination. Has he made too many enemies to make an effective run for President if he gets the nomination? If he defeats them, will the Kerrys and Grahams and Gephardts support him? Will that support be more than lukewarm? Am I seeing a junkyard dog and calling him a noble guardian?
As with smugness, I tend to distrust praise. Spin colors it, even unintentional, incidental, and habitual spin.
Especially unintentional, incidental, and habitual spin.
I am fortunate in having, for my cooking, a captive audience. Princess V does not care for cooking, and the Little Darlings are too young to fend for themselves. They're pretty much stuck with whatever Dad serves. For this reason, I tend to examine carefully the praise I receive— especially from loved ones.
I don't want anyone (especially my family) to think I don't appreciate the praise. I like my strokes as much as anyone else, and I have a big enough ego to nurture a fantasy that I deserve at least some of it. I also know that my family's praise for my cooking is not simply a matter of them being stuck with it and having to make the best of it. I know that I'm a better than average cook. Frankly, I'm damned proud of some of my culinary skills (tsk, there's that creeping smugness, again). I also know that I'm my own worst critic. Princess V still shakes her head and smiles when I start the nightly postprandial debriefing cum deconstruction.
Still, I think it's important to be able to tell the difference between light praise from the family ("That was good.") and effusive praise ("Wow! Can we have this all the time?"). I welcome the light praise, but I really strive for the other. A fine example is the main dishes from Saturday and Sunday of this weekend. Saturday, as I previously reported, I served twice-seared prime rib in red bean paste. Everyone said it was good. I was thoroughly unimpressed. I also didn't hear any requests to repeat the effort.
Sunday night's offering was seared halibut with blackberry-wasabi wine reduction. The thick halibut filet provided a fresh and beautiful beginning, and the sauce was nearly a home run hit. I served the halibut atop sautéed slices of 1015 onions (translation for non-Texans: 1015s are a seasonal Texas treasure, similar to Vidalia sweet onions), which was a minor mistake (only the girlchild and I ate the onion slices—nice flavor but the wrong texture—haricots verts would have made a better bed). I could also have improved the sauce slightly by straining out the blackberry seeds, but they were a minor inconvenience.
In addition to the flavor and the praise, I enjoy meals like this because they are both sumptuous and simple. Here, then, minus the bed, is my latest effusive-praiseworthy dinnertime creation:
Seared halibut with blackberry wasabi wine reduction
dramatis personae
1 lb halibut fillet
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup cabernet sauvignon
two tablespoons blackberry jelly
pinch of kosher salt
two tablespoons butter
one tablespoon wasabi paste
quality of ingredients
I discussed freshness of fish a few days ago (Friday, June 6). To my comments about salmon I will add two points about halibut: (1) the flesh should be nearly snow white (not quite as white as Chilean sea bass, but whiter than most cod) and (2) for searing or grilling, you want the fillets to be as thick as possible, at least an inch thick. An inch and a half is better.
For general purpose cooking, I use extra virgin olive oil. I prefer Colavita, but you should experiment with different olive oils and pick one that suits your taste. Olive oils vary widely in flavor and some do not hold up well to cooking. I have known cooks who stocked two olive oils: one for cooking, one for salads. Whatever olive oil you choose, be sure it is consistent from bottle to bottle. The trend of late among Food Network cooks has been to tout canola oil for cooking, based on the claim that it does not flavor the food. I have not found this to be correct. Canola oil, to me, imparts a plasticky taste to delicate foods. If I want something lighter in flavor than olive oil (or with a higher smoke point) I use peanut oil. Yes, I am aware that Andrew Weil thinks we should all live in terror of transfatty and cisfatty acids, but I've yet to see any research finding any actual danger from either substance. More to the point, I do not take dietary advice from fat guys.
The red wine is for cooking. It doesn't have to be expensive. On the other hand, if it's too sour or too thin, it will make a shitty sauce. So-called "cooking wine" is far too watered down. You'd have to reduce two bottles of that trash to get a decent sauce. Get a nice table-quality cabernet. Should cost less than seven bucks a bottle.
Blackberry jelly. Well, if you want to be hardcore about this, you could reduce a half pint of fresh berries and then separate the pulp from the seeds by pressing it through a strainer. I do this for blackberry soufflés. The process will add an hour to your cooking time, leave you with sore hands, and not make a noticeable difference in your sauce. Blackberry jelly works fine. Just be sure the jelly has a good, stout berry flavor and is not overly sweet.
I love real wasabi, but it's about as plentiful in the US as hens' teeth. The paste from powder works fine. Yeah, I know, it's actually just horseradish and spirulina, but it works. If you can find the real thing—I hate you.
I probably shouldn't have to say this, but butter means butter. There is no such thing as a butter-substitute or butter lite. This sauce, for flavor and consistency, requires two tablespoons of real, unapologetic, honest-to-arteriosclerotic-plaque butter.
notes on preparation
Nothing to it. Leaving the skin on and intact, carefully slice the filet into four approximately equal portions. Check to be sure the flesh is devoid of bones and scales.
Pour the wine and blackberry jelly into a small or sauce pan. Bring this concoction to a high simmer and reduce it, stirring occasionally, to a syrupy consistency (ten minutes? maybe twenty?).
When the sauce is nearly reduced, in a separate non-stick saucepan, preheat the olive oil. Place the fillet quarters in the hot oil, skin side down. Cook the fish on medium heat until the fish is done about a third of the way through. Turn one piece of the fish over very carefully (you want the pieces intact, and cooked halibut becomes increasingly flaky). Remove the skin by slipping a sharp knife between the skin and the flesh and working it gently from side to side. I suppose you can lift the skin with the knife or a pair of chopsticks or tongs. I use my fingers (yes, you can burn the hell out of yourself doing this, especially if you touch a particularly oily spot). Do this quickly. You want to cook the fleshy side a little but you don't want to brown it. Turn the piece back over to brown the skin side (the side that used to have skin). Repeat this step for the other three pieces. Once the skin side is nice and brown and just a tiny bit crunchy, remove the fish to a bowl and cover it. The fish will continue to cook a bit in the bowl, but you don't want it to cool (cooled fish oils taste and smell unpleasant).
Add the butter in to the reduced blackberry and wine concoction to mount the sauce. Once the butter is all mixed in, turn off the fire and stir in the wasabi.
Plate the fish pieces individually (as I said, next time, I plan to plate these guys on a bed of haricots verts) and pour a tablespoon or so of sauce over each slice. The sauce provides a good balance of sweet, tart, winy, and piquant, and the balance of browned and medium rare halibut is flavorful enough to assert itself through the sauce.
This dish gets rave reviews (yeah, I know, too easy).
Nearly thirty years ago, I worked in a fine restaurant in Denver for not quite a year. Since then, I have never wanted to work in another. I am glad for the experience, but I have no desire to reproduce it. Cooking at home is fun--a combination of amateur chemistry, amateur sculpture, and a chance to play with knives and fire.
A few years back, I married an Italian sex goddess--my darling Princess V. Life is good.
