science has shown that a person's character isn't really established until he's at least five years old

The final fate of the various boiled peanuts:

plain boiled peanuts in salted water

one pint smoked boiled peanut puree -- smoky, salty, fantastic, a soup base for some other time. The bacon of legumes. I might just thin it with broth and serve it on its own, or I might add dumplings or blue hubbard squash.

young peanuts cooked in coconut water with lime juice, ginger, and sriracha -- the winner of all the non-traditionals

peanuts boiled in Rogue chocolate stout -- fine but nothing to write home about, mostly a way to use up the stout

peanuts boiled with crawfish boil seasoning

young peanuts pickled with vinegar and Coca-Cola syrup

one pint or so, uncooked shelled green peanuts, frozen. Soup? Bean dip? Small portions of cassoulet? "Boston baked beans"? Chili? Refried beans? They're labor-intensive enough that I didn't want to shell more than this, so I can only really do one or two of the above.

Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention!

haiku (2)

no time to blog, doctor jones

working all weekend

but check out my awesome fruit

can you guess what all I've got?

(there will be no prize)

okay I love you bye bye

uh huh

Peanuts, water, vinegar, Coca-Cola fountain syrup, salt.

we've come a long way rising from the flame

I can't think of another American food as divisive as boiled peanuts. On the one hand, you have those who consider them such commonplace roadfood that requests for recipes are met for derision, while notices of mail-order sources are treated with contempt, as though the seller is trying to get away with something. Look around the internet and you'll find people who think it's silly to even talk about boiled peanuts, which clearly aren't "serious" food and aren't worth all the fuss of mentioning. On the other hand, you have the northerners, most of whom have never heard of boiled peanuts and who may react to them in much the same way that people react to the idea of eating insects. Boiled peanuts are everything roasted peanuts aren't -- wet, messy, soft, more pea than nut.

On top of that, you have the current brouhaha over peanut allergies, which even the AMA considers widely overreported among youngsters whose parents browbeat a diagnosis out of the pediatrician. To even point this out -- even with the necessary disclaimers about peanut allergies being perfectly valid and absolutely serious for those who do possess them -- is to invite criticism, of course.

What are boiled peanuts, though?

Peanuts go through a few stages. When they're first dug up, they're green -- not in color, but we call them green peanuts. (Southerners, bear with me while I walk through this.) After a little time passes, they start to dry out of their own accord, just like any other bean will. We call them raw peanuts at that point. Most of the peanuts you've eaten -- and the peanuts used in nearly any peanut product, like peanut butter or a Snickers bar -- are roasted, which develops the flavor in a particular direction. When you think "peanut flavor," if you haven't had boiled peanuts, you're thinking about roasted peanuts. That, and the crunchy texture of roasted peanuts, is exactly why boiled peanuts are so weird for people who haven't encountered them before.

I like peanuts. A few years ago, impulsively picking up a tin of Very Very Good roasted peanuts, I discovered that I REALLY like peanuts. I mean, Planters are fine, Trader Joe's blistered peanuts are even better, but if you can get some really high-quality roasted peanuts ... well, look, until then I didn't even realize there was a quality difference in roasted peanuts. This was part of my subplot, my discovery that there's a quality difference in damn near everything.

But you remember what I said in my first post. Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. To really grok peanuts, roasted wasn't going to do it for me. My aunt sent my family a gift package of various peanut things a couple Christmases ago. I selected the burlap bag of raw shelled peanuts (shelled is one of those weird words like inflammable that could be taken by your audience to mean either the thing it is or its opposite, so I mean peanuts without shells, all right, shellless peanuts) and played around with those. You can boil those, they'll soften up after a while. They make a good chili bean, actually.

But it's not the same.

Last year, as part of the same gardening experiment in which I declared that it would be possible to grow okra and black-eyed peas in the frigid north of New Hampshire, I planted some peanuts. They did okay; not as well as the peas and the okra. The yield wasn't high enough for me to do anything with them, though, and as a condo-dweller, I have only a handful of square feet of dirt to plant in.

So this year I ordered some green peanuts. Tom was very helpful, especially when the Post Office damaged the first shipment; they processed his claim and he was able to send me some replacement peanuts which took only two days to get here, still nice and fresh.

You boil peanuts in the shell, in a big pot of water. Seasoning is optional and some people frown upon it, much as a New Englander would frown at the idea of seasoning the lobster pot. After a couple hours of boiling in heavily salted water -- the cooking time depends on the age and size of the peanuts -- I had a bowl full of absolute delicious peanut heaven. Now, when you let somebody else do the work and the boiling for you -- especially if you buy pouches or cans of boiled peanuts -- your peanuts are somewhat homogenized. They're going to be roughly the same size, probably the large size people are used to. Larger, more mature peanuts result in soft peas inside the shell, but you need to tear the shell open with your teeth to get at them (along with a slurpable swallow of peanut brine). Somewhat younger peanuts can be torn open with the fingers. Younger peanuts still can be eaten shell and all. In the last few hours I've pretty much learned how to tell one from the other, and have been separating out my peanuts into categories while watching ESPN during my dinner break.



See? Look at that one that I broke open; the shell is thick and spongy when raw, and edible when cooked.

The taste is still peanutty. But there is no doubt that these peanuts are legumes. While they cook, they smell a lot like black-eyed peas. The flavor is ... well, it's salty, of course, and rich in a way a lot of beans aren't, but you have to be prepared for how very very far-removed it is from roasted peanut flavor.

I haven't got much time to blog this week or next, but I'm doing a lot more with these peanuts, as I can. Green peanuts in the shell supposedly don't freeze well. I'm going to try to freeze some shelled ones for use as beans, but it's hell on the fingernails trying to pry uncooked green peanuts open (dry raw peanuts have more brittle shells which open easier). Most of the rest will be boiled -- some seasoned, some just salted -- and then what I don't eat right away will be frozen in Zip-Loc bags with their brine. But then, then, I have plans to pickle some of these little guys -- the young ones with edible shells -- in a vinegar sweetened with Coca-Cola fountain syrup.

haiku

first ripe tomato

survivor of blight and rain

damn yankee summer

first ripe tomato

way too small for a sandwich

the frog is for scale

there are maybe ten or twelve things

What will happen eventually is that someone will ask me, "Hey, that thing you made that time, that was good, how do you make that?" and I'll say "oh, check the blog."  This signature tag is for that.  These aren't necessarily things I've concocted myself, just things I make a lot, particularly for other people.  Mostly I meander, you know -- a month of Thai food here, a summer of pretending Indiana is the Low Country there.  But there are things I come back to, and things people ask me to make again.

One of those is vinegar chicken.  I don't even remember now where I first ran across it, some eight? years ago, but I immediately saw in it -- an Italian dish -- a probable ancestor of Buffalo wings, invented in the 1960s by the Italian-American owners of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo NY.  Though nobody gets Buffalo wings right anymore -- move around the country a bit and you'll see all sorts of things, some of them (the spicy wings served with tomato dipping sauce at The Italian Pie in New Orleans, for instance) good despite their utter nonresemblance to Buffalo wings, others (hydrogenated soybean oil concoctions on battered wings) just disappointing.  Buffalo wings should be unbattered, sauced with butter and cayenne/vinegar hot sauce (Tabasco, Louisiana, Frank's, Texas Pete).

Vinegar chicken isn't Buffalo wings, so nevermind that.  It is similarly spicy and tangy, forming an emulsified pan sauce of reduced vinegar, hot pepper, and a little chicken fat.  I'm not saying it's the definite ancestor of Buffalo wings -- I've never seen it mentioned in articles about their origin -- but whether the similarity is intentional or not, it certainly acts like that dish's rougher uncle.  There is an echo here, too, of Filipino adobo, which I will make when the weather is colder.

Vinegar chicken is crazy simple.  You could damn near make it by accident, tripping on a banana peel in your kitchen or something.  The hardest thing is the first step: with a good sharp knife or cleaver, you chop up a bunch of bone-in chicken parts until you have bite or two-bite sized pieces of chicken.  Chop right through the bone.

At that point, you heat a little oil in a pan -- not too much -- brown the chicken skin-side down, flip the chicken over, add crushed red peppers like you put on pizza, add vinegar until the chicken is covered, and cook until the vinegar has reduced to near-nothing and the chicken is cooked through.  That's it, that's it, that's it.

It lends itself easily to variation -- you can use various kinds of vinegar (I've always used whatever happens to be in the house), you can make much spicier chicken by using vinegar-based hot sauce instead of the vinegar, you can add other seasonings.  Fresh-ground black pepper is a good addition, but I have found that no source of spice is better in this dish than the crushed red peppers.  That was counterintuitive for me -- I was sure fresh chiles, or other dried chiles, would be better, or ground cayenne -- but comforting at the same time.  Growing up in exurban southern New Hampshire, the first source of spice I encountered was crushed red peppers, at pizza parlors with checkered tablecloths, Ramblin' root beer, and video jukeboxes.  As dumb as it may sound -- look, kids, we didn't have cable, we had six channels on TV and one of them was PBS and another one just showed Creature Double Feature and The Courtship of Eddie's Father -- I didn't really know spicy food EXISTED, for a long time.  Not as a genre, especially.  I understood that some varieties of salsa were spicier than others.  I knew that if you put a ton of crushed red peppers on your pizza, your mouth would hurt, and that you could get hot peppers with your steak bomb.  But this was sort of like "knowing rap exists" because you'd seen that Blondie video that time.  In the pizza parlor.  With your Ramblin' root beer.

All of which explains why, the first time I cooked with habanero chiles, I added about two cups of them, coarsely chopped, to my batch of chili.  You know, about the same amount I'd use of bell pepper.

Yeah, you don't make that mistake twice.

Tonight, though, tonight we're back to the crushed red peppers, but I'm switching up the vinegar chicken otherwise.  Despite what I just told you about chopping through the bone, I'm using boneless (skin-on) chicken thighs here, chopped up -- mostly out of curiosity (in the end, I think it's better with the bone in -- you get more flavor -- but using boneless thighs is a valid solution for people without a good knife).  There's black pepper in with the crushed red peppers, and I blended black garlic up with red wine vinegar for the vinegar component.

Black garlic is well worth pointing out.  It's an aged garlic which, simply through the process of aging, turns somewhat soft (not quite spreadable, I find) and solid black.  In the process, it becomes less sharp, sweet like roasted garlic, with a sort of soy sauce umami character to it.  Great stuff, but expensive compared to other garlic.  Use it when you can foreground it.

Because of the vinegar, vinegar chicken goes best with a starch to soak up the sauce, and/or some sort of minimally seasoned green vegetable (roasted asparagus, for instance).  I went with little fried patties of smoked potato (potatoes smoked in a stovetop smoker, mashed with cream cheese and bourbon-barrel-smoked paprika, pan-fried in patties).

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.