I still make salsa the same basic way I have for almost ten years - I combine fresh and cooked ingredients, because what I want in salsa is a texture that'll stick to chips.

Diced onions and chiles cooked in just a little oil, with tomato puree and salt added - cooked until it's thick. In this case I added a little cucumber juice, because I happened to have extra, which is the subject of another post. If you want a more elegant salsa, you can strain the tomato puree; I usually don't.

Meanwhile, fresh corn kernels just off the cob, chopped fresh tomato, fresh culantro, and fresh Texas tarragon, are tossed together in a jar.

The tomato puree is added to the fresh ingredients, and the head softens the fresh ingredients just enough, while thickening the whole mix.




Served here with Fritos, and homemade macaroni and cheese.

stupid winter

Man, it is chilly today.  If only we could do something about it.  I don't like the thought of putting the heat on, because it's still warm enough when it's sunny that I've been opening the doors to get some fresh air.  Opening the doors in one part of the day and turning the heat on in another part just seems counterproductive, you know?

I mean, I could make champurrado, I guess, that's this Mexican hot chocolate thickened with corn meal, and I've got some nice cinnamon and some whiskey --

-- what's that?  I should make the champurrado?

Well c'mon, gang, let's go!

Champurrado is an atole, a class of masa-thickened beverages which can be served thick enough to need a spoon or thin enough to barely coat the glass -- sort of the way milkshakes vary.  Chocolate and cornmeal are the constants with champurrado; milk (half and half in my case), spices, etc. all vary.

I ground up some Callebaut dark chocolate in the Cuisinart -- when your kitchen is cold, this is easy to do without the heat of the blade melting the chocolate -- and added yellow cornmeal, two kinds of cinnamon (Saigon and Ceylon), and a touch of chile powder, as well as a little sea salt you can't really see in the photo.

Ideally, you would combine this with hot water and/or milk using a special wooden whisk, but whatever.

I tried to use the espresso sea salt from Marx to rim the glass, but it just didn't want to stick -- so most of what's rimming it is actually just sugar.

bears battlestar galactica

I would suggest you get in the comfortable chair for this one, this meal's got a lot of ground to cover.

Let's talk about a few specific elements.

Corn.

Corn is pretty great.  I don't know what I'd do without the foods of the New World.  Even apart from the fact that corn kernels are the best canned vegetable and the best frozen vegetable -- though they experience some loss of flavor and texture, it's not nearly as pronounced as in most vegetables -- the sheer variety of forms corn can take is fucking staggering.  Let's break it down:

Cob and kernels.  Self-explanatory.  As demonstrated, usable to make caramel.  Note in passing that corn is the most underrated of all chowders, capable of excellence with only three ingredients (corn, cream, salt), though five is better (+bacon, +hot sauce).

Cornmeal.  Ahhh, cornbread.  When the weather is colder, I'll show you some couche couche, a fantastic and criminally little-known cereal made with cornmeal.  Cornmeal is also the basis for corn chips, tortillas, etc., and while I don't share the enthusiasm for corn dogs that some possess, I am an ardent supporter of fried cornmush.  Cornflour, similar to cornmeal but finer, is found primarily in fry mixes for chicken or fish, especially in the South.

Grits.  Superficially similar to coarse cornmeal, grits are made from coarsely ground corn (ideally stone-ground).  If you're a Yankee or foreigner, you probably haven't had grits.  You're missing out.  Soft and silky when first cooked, grits solidify when cooled, and can be reheated for a texture that's hard to describe, though similar to fried cornmush -- sometimes crispy on the outside, softer on the inside, somewhat like a French fry.  Grits are often compared to polenta but aren't quite the same, if only because the varieties of corn themselves differ -- just as slightly different varieties of corn are used for all these other corn forms.

Hominy.  Especially big kernels of corn that have been nixtamalized (treated with an alkaline solution) and hulled, which makes the corn more digestively useful, and therefore features in the cuisines native to the New World which were dependent on corn, as opposed to those cuisines which have developed subsequently which typically rely on flour (or rice, in Louisiana and the Carolinas) for their principal starch.  It's no coincidence that hominy survives in Mexican and southern cuisine, where corn has historically been most important.  But nevermind that: hominy has a very light corn flavor and a sort of spongy texture that's hard to compare to anything else.  It's amazing at soaking up flavors, which is why it is the key component of posole, one of the world's great soups.  Dried and reconstituted hominy is far superior to the easier to find canned stuff.

Popcorn.  Come on.  Awesome.  I still vividly remember the introduction of Smartfood.  My brother and I regularly argue over who will inherit my mother's popcorn popper, a standalone electric unit which uses oil in a curved bowl to pop the popcorn.  Air-popped popcorn, which displaced such units in the marketplace, and microwave popcorn, absolutely suck in comparison to oil-cooked popcorn, whether popped in a standalone unit or on the stovetop. 

Huitlacoche.  Technically not corn, this is a fungus -- a mushroom, if you're a marketer -- that grows on ears of corn, to the consternation of some and the delight of others.  It has only really been adopted by Mexican cuisine, perhaps because they call it huitlacoche, while gringos call it "corn smut."  The flavor is actually very subtle -- a little earthy, like cocoa powder without the acidity.

BOLD BOLD BOLD HELLO THERE.  Lima beans.  BOLD BOLD BOLD SHAZAM.  God, so many people hate lima beans, but here's the thing: the dried ones are not very good; the frozen ones are only okay; the canned ones are terrible (get canned butter beans instead).  You want to get them fresh, and they have a brief season.  Ideally, lima beans are slightly sweet, with a creamy texture.  They get mealier if they get bigger, and since my limas come from my mother's garden, where generally things are let to grow as big as possible, the ones I'm using do lean in that direction.  But I'm an experienced and satisfied lima-eater, I'm okay with that.  They're just not what I'd consider conversion limas.

"Lima beans" isn't bolded because every time I bold it, my browser crashes, even when all I do is restart the browser, open up Blogger, open up this draft, and do nothing but highlight "lima beans" and then press the bold button.  True story.  What the fuck, Blogger?  Motherfuck.  Fourth fucking time in a row now!  Pisswhistler.  I have employed an alternate means of emphasis.

Beets.  It was a long time before I loved beets, because I had grown up with Harvard beets -- pickled beets -- and was never fond of them.  I discovered plain old regular beets in New Orleans, and for whatever reason they became my standard side dish with fried fish.  Beets have a sweet (remember Mrs Howell?) and earthy flavor, and are sort of potato-like in texture, though they neither fry nor mash as well as potatoes do.  They're very forgiving when you roast or boil them in their skins, which then rub or peel off easily.

The stems -- which have a similar flavor to the beets, but lighter -- and greens (sweetish, tender) are both edible.

Lunch, then, consists of:

Succotash, which I have talked about before, a traditional dish of lima beans and corn.  I added tomatoes and sweet pepper in this case.

Beet "confit."  I covered slices of peeled beet in duck fat and cooked them at a low temperature until tender.

Smoked grits cake.  The grits were cooked in the stovetop smoker with salt and butter, and then combined with diced ham and my aforementioned "lactic corn," before being refrigerated.  A slice of the refrigerated grits was reheated in a pan with just enough butter to keep them from sticking.

and I don't care

To fry chicken:

Marinate for a day or two (in buttermilk with or without hot sauce, sriracha, or Old Bay, or in undiluted Louisiana hot sauce).

Put a mixture of flour, self-rising flour, cornmeal, and seasoning in a sack -- I never measure, but I can tell you it's not more than a few spoonfuls of cornmeal and that there's more flour than self-rising flour.

Heat oil in cast iron.

For each piece of chicken, go through this procedure: shake in the sack until well-covered.  Let rest on a plate for twenty minutes to hydrate the flour.  Shake again right before putting in the oil.  Cook for about 8-10 minutes depending on size, flip over and cook for that amount again.  (I tend to cook one or two pieces at a time, and don't use a huge deep fryer with gallons of oil -- because if I did, I wouldn't get around to frying chicken very often.)  Let rest ON WIRE RACK with plate underneath to catch the dripping oil.  Fried chicken will retain heat pretty well, but even apart from that, this particular fried chicken is good cold or room-temp.

Remember when deep-frying -- even "shallow" deep frying like I do -- that the first thing you fry will not be as good as the third or fourth.  Oil has a lifespan, and it doesn't do its best work in infancy.

Thighs here, drumsticks in the country captain.  You might could guess leg quarters were on sale.

To make "fresh grits":

Scrape corn kernels from cob.  Pulse in Cuisinart until pulpy.  Fry up a little bourbon bacon in a pan, with some chopped tomatoes.  Add corn and cook for 2-3 minutes.  Salt and pepper.

With sweet corn, this is a very sweet side dish -- in fact, I made it to use up some Mirai corn that'd been sitting in my fridge over a week, and it's still very sweet.

City chefs call this "fresh polenta," but fuck them.

sexy girl air freshener, snacks and a pinwheel

To make corn caramel:

1: Fill a lobster pot with corn cobs, corn silk, corn husks, etc., figuring there is no point wasting any part of the buffalo.  Let simmer for a day or so to make a nice strong corn stock for chowder and so on.  Reduce the resulting stock, and in so doing, notice how sweet it is -- far too sweet to use in chowder or any other soup except in conditions of serious dilution.  So sweet that the reduction freezes like an icy sorbet.

2: Think hmmm.

3: The following year, do that again.  Let it simmer for two and a half days instead.  Reduce it down slowly -- there's no choice but slowly, the stove doesn't like keeping an uncovered lobster pot hot -- while you write some articles for a science encyclopedia, until it's reduced enough to fit in a container for the fridge.

4: Once you get a day off, restrain that reduction into a pot.  Taste it.  It's dark-brown, the color of porter, but it still tastes like fresh corn -- not that terrible creamed corn taste, thank God -- a very vegetal taste, thanks to the silk and cobs.  And it's very noticeably sweet.  You could make soda with this.

5: Bill, stop, don't make soda with this!

6: Add a hunk of butter to the pot and twist the knob to high.  Come back and check once in a while.  Note, observer, that there is no added sugar.  All the sugar came from the corn.  This is just reduced corn stock and butter.

7: Pour it into a pan and cool it.  Sprinkle some salt.

It's a chewy, soft caramel -- it could've been a little harder, but this is pleasantly chewy while cold, a little too soft when warm, could probably be heated up for an ice cream topping or swirled into something (goat's milk ice cream would be swell).  The flavor is like a cross between familiar caramels and burnt popcorn, in a good way -- not bitterly burnt, but those slightly more-cooked kernels you get in a batch of decent stovetop popcorn.  It's very very dark, and definitely stands out -- you wouldn't mistake this for some other caramel.  You'd know something's going on here.

you better start from the start

August 2nd. Still no tomatoes. Crew fears all is lost, but we sail on.

There is fresh local corn, so that's something. My favorite corn dish is succotash, which you see various interpretations of but for me must have corn and lima beans.  It can have plenty of other things, sure, but corn and limas, those are the key.  Unfortunately we don't have lima beans here yet.  So I took the few shell beans my garden has produced - a mix of Burkina Faso beans and limelight beans (which are supposed to be like limas but more amenable to the north) - and tossed in some of that purslane.

Add a little salt and a little Louisiana hot sauce, and there you go, breakfast.  ... well, lunch, now.  I don't know where the day's going.

Last night I made a little working-all-weekend-dammit snack: Peppadews stuffed with beer cheese.

Peppadews are a brand name for a particular type of South African pepper and a particular way of processing it. The result is a pickled pepper that's crisp, well-suited to stuffing, and slightly sweet.  The hot ones are pretty reasonably hot, the mild have a little bite to them, the golden ("sweet and sour") ones go nicely with sharp cheeses.  I'm a big fan of Peppadews.  I grew up with pickled peppers as part of the local cuisine -- you get them on steak bombs, you may put them on your Italian subs, or stuff them with cheese and salami -- and Peppadews are the first that I like more than straight-up pickled cherry peppers.

Beer cheese, on the other hand, I didn't grow up with at all.  In fact, until discovering pimento cheese as an adult, I associated cheese spreads with jars of generic paste studded with who-cares-what.  

But pimento cheese ... aw man.  I'll post about that when/if my pimiento peppers come ripe.

There's a lot of overlap between my pimento cheese and my beer cheese -- most of the ingredients are the same, and I sometimes splash a little beer in the pimento cheese.  The main difference is that pimento cheese always has pimiento peppers and mayonnaise; beer cheese always doesn't.  So there you go.

Kentucky beer cheese is usually made with cream cheese as well as cheddar, but I skip that, which makes mine beerier.  You start with some sharp cheddar cheese -- and you can use amazing cheese here, but you don't need to, and I typically go with Cabot or Heluva, which are both about $5/lb.  Put chunks of cheese into the Cuisinart -- you don't really need to grate it -- with a little hot sauce, a little Worcestershire, and a fair bit of pickled ramp bulbs.  If you haven't got ramp bulbs, you can use pickled garlic.  Maybe a little pickled or raw onion, especially spring onion.  

Turn the Cuisinart on.  You'll probably have to scrape it down a couple times.  While it's whirring, add beer a little bit at a time.  You're thinning the cheese with beer until it's spreadable.  Check the cheese BEFORE you think it's had enough, because it'll go weird if you add too much beer.

Now, for this particular beer cheese, I used Sierra Nevada Southern Hemisphere Harvest Fresh Hops.  It's just what happened to be in my hand when I thought "hey, I should make beer cheese."  I've used Dogfish Head's IPAs, I've used various Stone beers.  I don't think I'd use a stout or a spiced beer, and definitely nothing sour, but there are few enough ingredients here that it's not too complicated to find a beer that'll work nicely.

Best as a spreading cheese -- on sandwiches, on burgers, etc.  If you go to melt in on or in anything, keep in mind that you've added a significant amount of liquid to it.  If you're going to use it in macaroni and cheese, for instance, or even in a grilled cheese sandwich, it's best to use it in combination with some normal cheese.

Once in a great while, if you misjudge the amount of beer to use and don't use up the cheese in a few days, you'll find some beer leaking out of the cheese.  This isn't a big deal.