a comanche hot dog, the old russian volkswagen, canadian whiskey

Most of the New World crops are actually native to South or Central America -- corn, chocolate, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes ... the potato, which is now a key part of northern New England cooking and a major cash crop, didn't even arrive in Maine until the 19th century. (The potato chip was introduced almost as soon as potatoes became a common American crop.) One of the ones we CAN claim for our own, we named ...

... the Jerusalem artichoke.

what.

It has nothing to do with Jerusalem, or artichokes. The French call it the topinambour, apparently after a Brazilian tribe that doesn't have anything to do with it either. You'll often see it as a sunchoke now, but it also isn't a sunflower. You may as well call it a monkey egg, or a Dutch banana.

Sunchokes - let's call them sunchokes - haven't caught on all that much, but they make their way into cuisine here and there - sunchoke relish ("artichoke relish") in the South, sunchoke soups here and there, a salad or two. They're probably the best-tasting tuber outside of King Potato himself, and unlike almost every non-potato tuber, they're not excessively starchy - they damn near fall apart into this velvetty puree after a short roasting.

But they store inulin instead of starch, see, and humans can't digest inulin, but the bacteria in our guts can, which leads to "a filthy loathsome stinking wind within the body," like with beans. I don't know if it's something you adapt to in time - beans don't give me any trouble, for instance, because I eat them often enough.

Anyway, also unlike potatoes and most tubers, sunchokes are perfectly good to eat raw. They're very crisp raw, but best peeled, and peeling these knobby little guys can be a pain in the ass. So you might want to roast or boil them, either of which will bring out a rich, nutty flavor. Honestly, they pretty much taste buttered straight out of the oven - the ones here were just roasted plain. It's no wonder people have been pureeing them for soups.

I have typed all that after eating the sunchokes, and prior to being sure if I'll suffer any effects or not. Best leave this here unposted for a while, just to find out. ... dot dot dot ... No man, it's all good. Maybe eating a lot of beans does immunize you.

I said to myself, "I need to do something with that leftover smoked trout."

"What about something like a tuna melt?"

"Yeah, I don't like tuna melts."

"I know I know. Something like a tuna melt. But with trout."

"But I don't really ... I don't like tuna melts."

"It's like a tuna melt except for everything else."

"Everything else what?"

"Everything but the tuna."

"The tuna is trout!"

"Soooo... we're good."

Instead of canned tuna and mayo and cheese and bread under a broiler: smoked trout, a little creamy curry sauce, mozzarella, and a medium-boiled egg (as for curry, cf earlier post), in pizza dough, deep-fried, with chutneys. Sounds busy, but there's not much curry sauce in there - just enough to moisten the smoked trout and complement the chutneys.

Man, I am hooked on these noodles. Dan Dan noodles were always my favorite thing at P.F. Chang's, but I didn't realize how non-traditional that version is until reading a Jonathan Gold article on the noodles that mentioned Szechuan peppercorns - which were definitely not in the version I'd had. So I cobbled together my own.

This is potentially quite quite spicy, but can be made milder and still be as good.

The sauce will be enough for a number of servings (at least six), and will keep in the fridge. You would normally use sesame paste (not tahini) instead of peanut butter, but I haven't found any yet.

Seriously, whatever you're having today, it's lesser than this. My lunch has kicked your lunch's ass. My lunch has won.

3 tablespoons peanut butter
3 tablespoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 teaspoons chile oil
pinch of sugar
1 tablespoon cider vinegar (Chinese black vinegar is preferable - I don't have any)
a few spoonfuls of water
Szechuan peppercorns: freshly toasted, freshly ground ... to taste. A pinch might be enough, a teaspoon, a tablespoon. It's partly about how spicy you want it and partly about the balance you want between the spice of the chile and the numbth of the Szechuan peppercorn. Numbth is a word. You just saw me use it.

Whisk sauce ingredients together and adjust to taste. Cook egg noodles, sauce them, top with green onion, sesame seeds or chopped peanuts, and a little chile oil. I added smoked shrimp - not traditional, not necessary, not the source of the awesomeness. I just had leftover shrimp, that's all.

Good luck with your inferior lunch, sucker.

More falafel for lunch today, with salsa verde - not the Mexican kind with tomatillos, but a smooth emulsified version of the Italian parsley sauce:

Toss parsley stems (I'm using the leaves for courtbouillon), a little olive oil, a couple anchovies, a couple cloves of garlic, a little lemon juice, and a little pepper vinegar (Caitlin's mother sent it to me) in a food processor - the Magic Bullet in my case, better than the Cuisinart at small jobs - and whiz until smooth and pale green.

Garlicky, green, a little sharp, a little pungent.

falafel

This weekend we made an impromptu onion dip - I ground an onion with cream cheese, pickled ramps, garlic, buttermilk power, and salt - in order to have with these awesome puffed rice-and-corn Indian snacks called Kurkure, which are like green chutney flavored Cheetos.

(We miss out, you know. Our only Cheetos are cheese-flavored and the occasional variant like chili-cheese, flaming hot, nacho. Doritos' killer app was Cool Ranch - I'm old enough to remember when it was introduced, but for the life of me have no idea why anyone ever ate Doritos when the red bag was all we had, cause everyone since has seemed to prefer the blue bag. But most importantly, it wasn't just a cheese variant. Cheetos seem locked in cause of their name - except in Japan, where they have caramel Cheetos, mayonnaise Cheetos, roasted chicken Cheetos, you name it, none of which have cheese - but the rest of the world has plenty of puffed corn snacks in other flavors.)

Anyway, I had leftover onion dip. What to do, what to do. Falafel!

Falafel is a crunchy on the outside, delicious on the inside, fritter of ground-up chickpeas and/or fava beans, seasoned with parsley, onion, garlic, cumin, and probably other things in other places. (They were probably originally made with fava beans, and the chickpea-only variant originated because of the prevalence of favism - a fava bean allergy - among Jews. Probably. Who knows.) This is soul food, and more non-vegetarians should get on board with it. It's also a good example of parsley contributing flavor, not just token green garnish.

I'd never made it before, so I'll just link you to the recipe I used after reading several others and a number of message board threads. A lot of contemporary recipes will use canned beans, but I saw a lot of complaints about the texture of such recipes - which makes sense because, as surprising as it may seem, falafel traditionally uses chickpeas/favas that have been soaked but not cooked. The soaking - a full 24 hour soak, not merely overnight - is sufficient, if your chickpeas aren't years-old, to soften them enough that once they're ground up with the other ingredients and deep-fried, you're good to go.

Changes I made were purely because of what I did and didn't have in the house: I used one bunch of parsley, since I had no cilantro; I had no coriander seed, so left it out; I used ground ancho chile for the hot pepper, just cause I particularly like ancho with cumin and garlic. My falafel stayed in the refrigerator overnight, simply because I wanted to grind everything last night so that I could get the Cuisinart in the dishwasher.

Real easy. Real good.

eggs

There are as many ways to combine eggs and curry as there are ways to cook eggs. One of the best breakfasts, especially after a night of drinking or a morning of sleeping in, is eggs scrambled with Thai curry paste - maybe some onions, maybe some leftover fish. Indian curries can be made with hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, omelettes, you name it.

But this is the way I've been doing it.

You start with eggs as near to room temperature as possible - if I forget or don't have time to take them out of the refrigerator in advance, I sit them in a bowl of very warm water for 15-20 minutes to bring their temp up. This helps keep the eggs from cracking.

Bring a pot of water to boil. Have a tray of ice cubes handy.

Put the eggs in the boiling water and boil them for five minutes. Remove from the water and immediately put them in ice water. Leave them there! For a while. Twenty minutes. An hour. Longer if you like. Eggs retain heat for a surprisingly long time. The other day I was making these eggs, took one out of the ice water after a few minutes, and felt it warm back up in my hand in a few seconds.

If you boil them for six or seven minutes instead of five, you get the unctuous egg - with a yellow yolk that looks nearly boiled but is creamy instead of grainy, terrific for eating whole, not very good for egg salad, all wrong for deviled eggs. At five minutes, you get something like a soft-boiled egg with a hard-boiled white.

Leave them in the shell as long as you like. Once they're out of the shell, the shape warps easily - sit them on a plate and you end up with flat eggs after a bit.

When the curry is ready - the sauce is cooked, the rice is cooked, any other ingredients are ready - take the eggs out of the shell if you haven't already, and add them to some hot butter, ghee, oil, or coconut fat, rolling around a few times until the outside of the egg is golden and blistered like the outer edges of a fried egg's diaspora. This also warms the egg through if you've had them in the fridge after their boiling.

In this case, the egg is served over rice and leftover malai kofta sauce, with mushrooms and curry leaves.

You have probably already guessed that I decided to work on Indian cooking this Lent. But I also wanted to finally do something with salt cod. Salt cod features prominently in Portuguese, Spanish, and Basque cooking, and through the former was introduced to New England, which is probably one reason it's displayed at my local supermarket. Because of its shelf life, it's also not much of a gamble to carry it as long as it sells eventually, something the same supermarket can't say of crabs or monkfish.

As far as I can remember, I've only had salt cod in croquettes, where it reminded me of fishcakes. I decided to start with brandade, partly to finish off the leftover mashed potatoes.

Salt cod is just cod that's been preserved with salt. It's dry and not very flexible. You soak it in the fridge for at least overnight and as long as a few days, changing the water at least twice a day. I soaked it from Thursday night to Sunday morning - it ended up being mild enough (and not overwhelmingly salty) that I'm sure a day less would have been fine, and cooking it Friday night might have even been a possibility had I changed the water more frequently.

Soaking the salt cod plumps it back up, but it's still going to be firmer than fresh cod. Brandade recipes vary, as with most salt cod recipes, you cook the soaked salt cod before incorporating it into the dish. This further desalinates it.

My salt cod fillet didn't have bones or skin, so I didn't need to remove those. I've heard that salt cod skin can be very pungent and unpleasant; no personal experience to report there.

The brandade is simply a combination of mashed potatoes and flaked salt cod. You mash the potatoes and then fold the salt cod in small flakes into it. Like I said, recipes vary - most use both olive oil and cream in the mashed potatoes, but the only olive oil I have on hand at the moment is coffee olive oil, which we'll talk about another time. Although it's good for fish, I didn't want to use it my first time making brandade. So I used cream and the last of the sage/garlic brown butter that I had been using with gnudi - the brown flecks you see in the brandade are brown butter solids. There are also onions which had cooked in the butter.

The brandade isn't overwhelmingly fishy at all, no more than fish cakes or the like. We had it spread on onion naan. It's fairly heavy, and I wish I'd had salad greens - baby spinach and romaine with a garlicky lemony anchovy dressing would have been perfect.

yes, more potatoes

There's a pizza joint here that makes a mashed potato pizza, using what I'm pretty sure are instant mashed potatoes as the sauce, topped with mozzarella, bacon, and scallions. It's good starchy food and I've had it in the back of my mind, minus the bacon, for Lent. I didn't use instant potatoes.

Colcannon pizza, because tomorrow is St Patrick's Day and because greens are good for you. I think colcannon is properly made with cabbage, but I used spinach because I had some on hand: I sauteed garlic and spinach in a little butter, added smoked mashed potatoes, and put that on a parbaked pizza crust with cheddar cheese and scallions.

First dinner of Lent! Ma la tofu and potatoes.

Ma la simply means the dish has both the heat of chiles and the numbing of Sichuan peppercorns. It's one of my favorite flavor combinations, and for whatever reason, I usually include greens in a ma la dish.

There are several components here:

Rice, steamed;

Potatoes, cubed and fried twice, once at 350 and once at 375, to keep them crisp;

Tofu - "extra firm, cubed," bought that way from the supermarket, marinated in soy sauce, garlic, ginger, chiles, and Sichuan peppercorns, and then dusted with Zatarain's fish fry (why not) before being deep-fried with the potatoes in their second frying;

A sauce of soy sauce, vinegar, honey, water, Sichuan peppercorns, chiles, ginger, garlic, and cornstarch to thicken;

Turnip greens - blanched, squeezed dry (well, moist), chopped, and added to the sauce to heat through.

The greens would be greener if I hadn't had to hold the sauce while waiting for the rice to finish.

Tofu has a flavor, but like potato, it's a flavor that is quickly overpowered by whatever other flavors you're surrounding it with - here, it's mainly a textural contrast to the fried potatoes, the rice, and the crunch of the raw scallion.

o sole miso

Sole fillet rubbed with red miso and marinated overnight; plantain rounds; edamame stir-fried with ginger, garlic, and turmeric.

There's not much to say about it, I ... just wanted to use the title.

up against the wall, motherfucker

I had hot-smoked snapper for dinner last night (in a taco with salsa and fried potatoes), so lunch today was a snapper melt with the leftover fish: seeded rye bread toasted on both sides and buttered on the outside, flaked snapper, red miso + mayonnaise, grilled onions, mozzarella + aged Mahon.

Pepper Relish Lay's on the side.  (Imagine salt and vinegar chips, a little sweeter, with the flavor of fresh pepper and onion.  They're pretty good.)

Fish definitely makes meatlessness easier.  So does being a week away from St Patricks Day, a Reuben, and corned beef hash.  What I miss most from the meat counter: hamburgers, Buffalo wings, duck breast, roast chicken, unctuous pork bits (tails, feet, etc).  Even Buffalo wings depend on the collagen-richness of chicken wings.  That lip-smackingness, you dig, that's always missing from "boneless Buffalo wings," because the collagen in this case is all in the skin.  Unctuousness -- the almost-gooeyness of collagen-rich parts like oxtails, spareribs, pig tails, etc -- is something neither fish nor flora can provide.  

Similarly, I find that without meat as a palette for it, I have not much interest in tanginess -- the sweet-sour-sharp of barbecue sauce, for instance, or mustard glaze, or Filipino adobo.  Peppadews or pickled cherry peppers on a steak sandwich.  The contrast between a hot dog and sauerkraut.  I'm not sure I miss it yet, but it's one of my favorite counterpoints for meat, which means it's a well I'm used to going to often.  I would certainly miss it in the long run.

(Interestingly, one of my favorite fish dishes, Platonic fish, is a tangy dish -- I just haven't got round to making it yet.)

when the moon hits your eye

After writing that pizza post, you won't be surprised to hear that I was craving pizza.

I really should try making one of those spinach pizzas, I thought.  So I picked up some pizza dough, rather than attempt another draft of fool-proof dough myself, and some spinach, some garlic, some ricotta.

The results ... made me realize just how high-fat Nashua House's spinach pie must be.  Because while I added a ton of fat to mine, it came out "delicious but kind of lean-seeming."  Maybe just drizzling some olive oil on would make a difference, I don't know.

What I did was, I combined garlicky creamed spinach with whole-milk ricotta and spread that on the dough, and topped it with cheese.  It was certainly very good!  It just wasn't as delectable as Nashua House's, and didn't seem NEARLY as high-fat as I knew it was.

This pizza, today's pizza, is not that.  But I found that the creamed spinach makes a great addition to a red sauce pie: spinach, ricotta, and lampascioni pie:

First, the creamed spinach:

I minced about half a bulb (that's half a bulb, like six cloves) of garlic and cooked them in half a cup of heavy cream in a saute pan until the cream reduced to the point that the garlic was frying in butterfat.

Meanwhile, I took one bunch of cleaned spinach, blanched it (boiled for about 45 seconds, shocked in ice water), squeezed every drop of moisture out of it that I could, and chopped it fine.  When the butterfat broke from the reducing cream, I added the spinach to the pan, cooked it quickly, and added a touch of cream at the end to bring everything together -- and then seasoned with a pretty healthy pinch of salt.

You use about a third of that spinach for a pizza.

Next, the lampascioni.  Nevermind the label: these are not wild onions.  They're labeled that way sometimes because they sort of look like onions and a lot of English-language guides to Italian food refer to lampascioni that way.  They're wild hyacinth bulbs.  You can't eat most varieties of hyacinth, but you can eat this one, which grows wild in Italy.  It's bitter -- punishingly bitter if you don't precook and/or soak them in olive oil before your final preparation.  The brand I have, sold by Zingerman's, has been roasted and packed in olive oil.  Noticeably bitter, but edible.  (My bitterness threshold: I can drink Campari straight, but bitter melon is almost completely inedible for me.)

There is maybe a gene for the enjoyment of bitter foods.  I'm half-Italian, and the Italians certainly love their bitter things, from bitter greens to Campari and other amaros to chinotto oranges.  Salt reduces bitterness-perception, so all those bitter things pair well with salty cheeses like Pecorino and parmigiano, or meats like prosciutto.  One of the finest flavor combinations in the world is broccoli raab (rabe, rape, rapini) with pork and Pecorino or parmigiano.  

On a pizza like this, the cheese, the garlic, the tomato, they all provide great contrasts for that bitterness, which in turn distracts you from how much cream and cheese is involved here.

it's a trap

There are two ways to cook squid: very fast or very slow.  Two minutes or three hours -- anything in between, you may as well shit in your hat.

Slow, above: braised squid.  

I cooked garlic and chopped hot peppers in oil for a minute or two, added about equal amounts of red wine and Trader Joe's marinara sauce (mostly tomato and basil), and chopped squid (including tentacles), and barely simmered it for three hours.  The squid goes from cooked and edible to rubbery like a finger puppet to tender but a little toothsome.  Serve over pasta.  Goat butter garlic bread would've been awesome alongside.

Fast, not pictured because a Picasa update ate the photo: Buffalo squid.

Slice squid bodies into rings.  Spread out on a kitchen towel to blot the surface moisture away.  Dredge with a combination of flour, self-rising flour, and Old Bay.  Heat oil to pretty hot, so that the temp doesn't drop much when you drop the squid pieces in, and fry until just cooked -- about a minute and a half, two minutes.  Drain, toss with Buffalo wing sauce, serve with ranch and celery sticks.

Major success.

I don't like you and I'm gonna beat you up

One of the interesting things about this meatless Lent has been the way that it's affected my meat cooking on Sundays -- for instance, yesterday I mixed miso into my burger for an umami boost, and gave goat butter Buffalo wings a try (they're good but the spice overwhelms the goatiness).  Now, the goat butter I probably would have picked up one way or the other, but miso is something I hadn't got round to picking up until it occurred to me that it would be a good addition to vegetarian chili.

See, I don't want some bullshit vegetarian chili.  Chili with a bunch of carrots and celery and squash and all that jazz isn't chili, it's spicy soup.  I want a chili that suits chili traditionalism (outside of Texas and its no-bean rule, anyway) but just doesn't happen to have meat in it.  So I'm working on that.  I don't think I have it quite down yet.  That's why I haven't posted a million bean recipes -- I'm still working them through.

But for now, a basic guide to dried beans.

First of all, you don't need to soak beans.

Almost everybody gets this wrong.  Food writers.  Cooks.  Your mom.  Bean vendors.  You don't need to soak beans.  It won't improve their texture, it won't improve their flavor, it won't have a significant impact on their cooking time, it won't make them more easily digestible.

You can soak your beans.  It doesn't do any harm.  With very stale beans that are years old, it might have a greater impact on their cooking time, and that may be where this practice comes from.  But generally it's going to buy you maybe half an hour, and I don't see that thirty minutes is worth an overnight soak and the need for advance prep.  Soaking is one of those myths that survives because if you do soak your beans, hey, your beans turned out fine.  Well, they'll turn out fine if you dance a jig and rotate the pot widdershins three times too, but that doesn't mean shit.  Stone soup comes out just fine with no stones at all.

Without soaking, beans take no longer to cook than a decent pot roast, and need very little supervision.

You can toss them straight into a Crock Pot, flip it up to high, and just wait a while.  That works.  Even soak-advocates often mention that, so I don't know why they're so hung up on the soaking myth.

But here's how Russ Parsons advocates cooking beans, here's how I generally cook beans:

Heat a cast-iron pot with a lid on your stove, on medium high heat.  Saute any aromatics you like -- carrot, celery, onion, pepper, garlic, for instance.  Add a fair bit of water (I eyeball this, can't help you with measurements).  Bring it to a boil.  Add your beans and maybe some seasoning.  Keep on a high boil for five minutes.  Cover and put in a 250 degree oven for a couple hours.  Start checking on the beans after 90 minutes or so.

Keep in mind that canned beans -- which not only weren't soaked before cooking, but weren't even cooked, in that the canning process actually does the cooking -- are softer, more "well done," than people traditionally cooked beans for the thousands of years before commercial canning was introduced.  So you can cook them to that point, but you shouldn't feel you have to.  Often when people avoid canned beans, it's because of this matter of texture and doneness.

Very important points about bean cooking:

Never add acids to uncooked beans.  That means tomatoes, vinegar, molasses, lemon juice, anything like that.  In an acidic cooking environment, beans won't soften.  Ever try to make baked beans and added the molasses at the beginning?  Twelve hours later you've got the same thing you started with, just hotter.

Add salt at the beginning.  You can add more later, but if you only add salt at the end, you're seasoning the pot liquor, not the beans.  Yes, this is another thing conventional wisdom gets wrong.  Look, it's the same reason you add the aromatics to the pot: the beans are soaking up water.  Put flavor in the water and the beans will soak up flavor.  If you wait to salt the beans, it will take more salt to get the job done.  It's a myth that salting the beans before they're cooked will make them tough.

What will make beans tough is having really old beans.  Beans keep for years.  For decades.  This is one reason they've been cultivated: they're a durable storage protein.  But if you're not living in a fallout shelter, they don't have to keep for years.  The beans at your supermarket, depending on where you live and what the sell-through is like, are probably quite old.  They may have been old when they arrived.  They may have been old when they were packaged.

Beans are so cheap, there's no harm in paying a little extra for them.  I've been happy with beans from Rancho Gordo, which are sometimes carried in stores, or available from the website.  They're not cheap.  But for entree beans, rather than afterthought beans, they're not expensive either. 

One of the reasons I'm digging these beans is because they're good and satisfying with minimal adornment -- anybody who's spent more than passing-through time in the South knows there's nothing wrong with a bowl of beans and maybe some cornbread, but your supermarket canned beans need a lot of hot sauce or other seasoning to keep from being one-dimensional.  (Black beans are an exception worth mentioning; canned black beans can have surprising depth and complexity.  There are probably a handful of other exceptions, though I have found canned black-eyed peas, for instance, to taste less "earthy" and more "like dirt.")  Really good beans come with more than one dimension right out of the pot.

bahaha

Fish tacos, I thought, when I put this Lent plan together.  I'll figure out how to make fish tacos.

See, fish tacos are totally outside the Mexican cuisine I'm familiar with.  A fairly recent product of Baja California cuisine, they've been popular in San Diego since the 80s, but Bajan cuisine is as distinct as, say, Oaxacan, and hasn't spread through the US nearly as much as other regional Mexican cuisines have.  So I know of them, but I'd never had one -- I don't think I've even seen a classic Baja-style fish taco on a menu.

But the idea is pretty simple.  You fry some firm white fish -- I used cod -- and wrap it in a tortilla with several sauces.  Cabbage is a traditional topping -- I used sunflower greens instead because I happened to have some, and they're very good but haven't got a long shelf life.

The sauces: sriracha; spicy avocado sauce (avocado, lime juice, Tabasco pepper; more lime juice than guacamole, and thinner/tangier); mayonesa sauce (half mayo, half yogurt, with lime juice, green onion, and dill pollen).

whiteboard

The camera's acting up again, it took me way too many tries to get this not very good shot of the Lent whiteboard.

carnival

So like I said, I'm giving up meat for Lent.  Here's how that breaks down:

Duration: Ash Wednesday to Easter.  February 17 to April 4.

Exceptions: Sundays and St Patricks Day. The traditional Lenten fast applies to meat and poultry, but not fish.  It was often extended to eggs and dairy, but not always, and I'm allowing them. 

Those are the Catholic rules.  My addition: no fake food.  Tofu is fine, for instance -- tofu isn't imitation something-else, it's real tofu.  But no textured vegetable protein, no quorn, no tofu dogs, no meatless hamburgers, no imitation chicken.  That's all nonsense.  I have a blog to run here.  I'm not going to stock up on horseshit junk food and all that college kid crap.

This isn't some sophomore fling with vegetarianism, after all.  This is about Lent.  I've been neglecting both seafood and vegetables since moving to New England, because my options are so much poorer in both departments than they'd been in the past, but committing to do this will force me to explore what options I do have, and come to terms with them.  There's nothing wrong with meat ... but sometimes it's too easy.  Sometimes "sear this, with a side of sauteed that, and some sauce of the other" is a little lazy.  There's nothing wrong with good beans.  You don't have to put a sausage next to them or mix them in with ground beef.

So.  Coming up in the next seven weeks: Pistachio and camelina oil.  Vinegars: red pepper and tomato from Gegenbauer, unfiltered aged cider vinegar from Pierre Gingras, beer vinegar from my own kitchen.  Minestrone.  Gumbo z'herbes.  The underappreciated carrot and radish greens.  Eggs.  Cheese.  Pasta.  Peanuts.  Platonic fish.  Courtbouillon.  Fish tacos.  Patatas bravas.  Three- or four-bean chili.  Lampascioni.  Clams.  Erstahs.  Maybe a lobstah roll.  Who knows what else.  I've got notions.  There's plenty to talk about.  We'll be back to pork belly and burgers later on down the way.