some days I feel like my shadow's casting me

Basically, think of this blog as a place where I list all the words that I know, in no order except as I think of them, and then tell you what I know about the words and some sentences they're useful in.  Only the words are food.

For instance: fat-washing is the infusing of alcohol with flavors from fat or something fatty.  That which is fat-soluble is also alcohol-soluble, so if you combine something greasy and full of flavor with some flavorless alcohol like 100 proof vodka, the flavor tumbles down the hill from the high point to the low one.  (I don't know if this means you can make bourbon-flavored non-alcoholic butter. That would be nifty, though.) 

You've heard about this because you're on the internet and you've seen bacon vodka or bacon-infused bourbon or a bacon Old-Fashioned, and so on. You introduce the fat to the alcohol, let them sit for a while, and then put the thing in the freezer so that the fat becomes solid and easy to remove.  That way you're not dealing with greasy vodka and bacony mouthfeel later.

For instance, I made butter-infused single-malt whiskey. (Not Scotch.  I used Wasmund's, an American whiskey made very similarly to Scotch.  "Whiskey" basically describes a process of distilling alcohol from grains, which may or may not be malted; malted grains are germinated (so that they sprout) and then dried to keep them from developing further. Single-malt whiskey is composed purely of whiskey produced by a single distillery; the term is associated with Scotch, obviously.  Whiskey terminology is complicated, fairly stupid, and widely misunderstood -- keep an ear out for how many times people in movies say "whiskey and bourbon," when bourbon is a type of whiskey.  For that matter, even most people familiar with whiskey think bourbon has to be made in Kentucky; most of it is, but the term describes a specific process and spectrum of ingredients, and bourbon can be made on the moon for all that it matters.)

I melted the butter, combined it with the whiskey, and let it sit for a few days before putting it in the freezer.  Unlike the people who've described fat-washing bacon and the removal of a disk of fat from the top of the frozen bottle, my butter stayed pretty well distributed throughout the whiskey.  But the solids were solid enough that they could be filtered out with a mesh strainer without a problem.

Took the butter-flavored whiskey, blended it up with vanilla ice cream, grade B maple syrup, and some dots of Angostura bitters on top.  Tada.  Butterscotch cocktail.

blue suburban skies

I don't know what my favorite vegetable is. It's so context-dependent. Send me off to death row and the most prominent vegetable in my last meal will be a tomato sandwich with a good tomato fresh from a garden -- but saying I love good fresh tomatoes is the same thing as saying "hey, 46 weeks a year I don't like tomatoes."

Corn would have to be high on the list because it's so useful, flexible, and goes with so much. You've got corn kernels, cornmeal, grits, hominy. You can use it in any course of the meal, and add it to almost any dish. Corn is a workhorse.

The chile pepper might arguably be the vegetable I rely on the most, though. Certainly high on the list.

Somewhere in there I'd have to include okra, fresh fava beans (sadly, canned and dry do not show up anywhere on the list), cucumbers, potatoes, garlic, beets, radishes for about two weeks a year (they're fine year-round; they're spectacular fresh from the dirt), and greens of all kinds.

Purslane is on the list, and the newest addition thereto. Nothing else is quite like purslane. It's an invasive weed, and people may be surprised to see you (i.e. me) growing it on purpose. They say it'll take over your garden, and God I hope so -- my front yard is hostile to gardening, repelling most of the things I try to grow there; only equally invasive mint has flourished, though peppers and tomatoes do all right in a good year. (This is not a good year, and if it doesn't stop raining, my pimiento peppers won't ripen, and I WILL BE VERY DISPLEASED ABOUT THAT.)

This is my biggest purslane plant, growing in a container on the deck. Brought it inside so I could trim some of it for lunch (with ribeye steak, sriracha, and bourbon-barrel-aged soy sauce).

As you can see, it's raining today. Again.

Purslane has a definite green taste, but it's distinctly different from greens like collards, spinach, etc.  The leaves are very slightly mucilaginous inside -- not to the extent of okra, but enough that cooked purslane is used as a thickener.  They're succulent -- you're not chewing a dry leaf, here, you could probably juice these things.  They're also tangy -- from barely-noticeably-so to downright sour, depending on the weather and/or the time of day.  I haven't actually figured out yet, what corresponds to the tanginess -- but I can tell you that today, very warm, rainy, cloudy, mid-day, the purslane was at the mild end.  (I've wound up not trimming any to freeze, for that reason.)  At its tangiest, you wouldn't want to add much vinaigrette to a purslane salad.

I haven't even tried it cooked yet.  I'll blog about it when I do.

the whiteboard.

Whiteboard, July 30. I mean, I'm still a writer first; this is how I work.

through early morning fog I see

There's a whole category of beverages of which I'm a big fan, in which two things are mixed together. I'm not talking about cocktails here, but more or less equal proportions of two beverages, sometimes alcoholic, often not.

My awareness of it all started with suicides, when you take a cup at the soda fountain and hit every nozzle until you've filled your cup with a mix of everything.  Jeff Noon has a terrific short story about that sort of thing.

Then there are shandies -- yet another food word that sees a lot of variant usage, but generally half beer, half soda of some kind. European thing. The Europeans also give us half-Coca-Cola, half-lemon-soda; and half-Coca-Cola, half-orange-soda (available premixed as Mezzomix, which is really kind of awesome stuff).

THEN you've got calimocho/kalimotxo/etc., a blend of red wine and Coca-Cola, which from what I understand is mostly popular among teenagers -- a wine culture version of sorority staple Diet Coke & vodka, maybe, though in theory I love the idea, even if the hangover prospects afear me.

I am maybe the world's only fan of iced coffee (black no sugar) and Coca-Cola, which is one reason why Coke Blak did so poorly (a terrible 90s-style name, the use of both artificial sweeteners and sugar, and top-shelf pricing didn't help, and I don't blame you if you suspect Bialystock and Bloom shenanigans). I mean, there's a whole subplot in my culinary intellectual biography that spins out of combining coffee and Coca-Cola, and breaking Coca-Cola down to its constituent flavors (kola, vanilla, lavender, various spices, citrus), most of which are already combined with coffee on a regular basis, and then pursuing the coffee-orange combination which I first encountered through "Cubic Scoops" ice cream as a kid. It was alternating bits of coffee ice cream and orange sherbet. I'll probably have a whole coffee-orange post sometime. But what works about coffee and Coca-Cola, see, is that if you get the proportions just right -- use little enough coffee that the resulting mixture is still noticeably fizzy -- the coffee dilutes the sweetness of the Coca-Cola without overpowering its flavor profile.  It's really a remarkable synergy.

But my favorite of all this stuff is yuanyang. Half tea (strong, with milk and sugar), half coffee.  Hot or cold.  Doesn't matter.  Black tea, green tea, doesn't matter, and though I usually use Luzianne's family-sized iced tea bags, I also love it made with genmaicha (green tea with toasted brown rice).

two drifters and stuff like that there

Check it out, right. If the blog seems busy lately, it's because people have been suggesting I do this for a while, and at the same time I've been meaning to organize some thoughts in a place other than the whiteboard or the kitchen notebook. There's a lot of backlog. I estimate I have about two years worth of blog in my head before I'd need to think of new things to say. A little ink more or less, depending on the organization -- like yuanyang and coffee/Coca-Cola could have been two separate entries, or the various rosehip or huckleberry entries that will come up could have been condensed into solos. 

Anyway. This one. This is the first of some huckleberry talk.

Look, I grew up in blueberry country, standing up in a canoe to fill Burger King Star Wars cups with blueberries from the bushes that'd hang out over the water on Squam Lake. I know full well just how much better wild blueberries -- small, intense, dark -- are than those mealy khaki-fleshed cultivated blueberries you can buy in the store.  I grew up with port-dark blueberry pie, blueberry pancakes, blueberry jam, Boo Berry cereal.  I am well aware of the greatness of blueberries.

And I tell you what, the huckleberry is better.

There are no cultivated huckleberries, and hell, a lot of people don't know there are ANY huckleberries, tout court.  But it's not a regionalism for the blueberry, the blackberry, or any other blackberry, it's its own damn thing and it commands your respect.  The taste is like ... a more intense blueberry -- a more intense wild blueberry -- mixed with plums (the way plums are supposed to taste, not the way they so often do) and blood-red wine and something else that isn't anything but huckleberry.  I can't really tell you what a huckleberry tastes like. It's like, what's a strawberry taste like?  I can spray words around its edges to show you the silhouette, but they won't touch the heart.

The smell is deep and powerful and intoxicating, musky even. This is the paragraph where we'd say something about it being like "blah blah blah on crack" or "blah blah blah to the nth power" or "mainlining blah blah blah" or "the 90s are gonna make the 60s look like a blueberry," or whatever, if we still said stuff like that there.

Damn, these are good. I don't know, maybe it's like movies, like books, like records -- maybe you have to come back to it when the novelty's worn off and everything's familiar, to really know what your favorites are. But right now this is one of my favorite fresh fruits.  Montmorency cherries, calamansis/calamondins, black raspberries, tangelos, apples, and of course my darlin' clementines.  And now huckleberries.

I froze a bunch.  It's that time of year.  I half-filled a Mason jar and topped it off with vodka.  I froze half an ice cube tray's worth of huckleberry juice.

But how are they once they're cooked? Think of how much a blueberry changes.  Think of how much a strawberry changes.  The first becomes deeper and more flavorful; the second does take on some new qualities, but fresh strawberries have all kinds of fragrance and flavor that you lose to heat.

My first time, I wanted something basic. Missionary huckleberries, you know. Some huckleberries and a little sugar, a pinch of salt, a pinch of flour, baked with puff pastry on top. Barely a thing. A spin around the block.

Man oh man. The flavor all still seems to be there. There's a definite wine character that becomes more pronounced, like with cooked blueberries.

Damn, man.

handcuffed to a fence in mississippi

"Do you need a juicer?"

My mother called me from a yard sale in Connecticut, where she was visiting her father. There was a "W.W.I. Juice Extractor" there and she wanted to know if I was interested.  WWI is the brand name, apparently, not the vintage.  

I had considered juicers when I made more money, but never found one that didn't seem ... too exorbitantly priced, regardless of the fact that I could afford it.  But a yard sale juicer, likely never used?  Sure.  Why not.

The thing isn't very efficient and I haven't tried it on anything harder like beets or carrots yet, but I got a few cups of peach juice out of some so-so local peaches, reduced it down with a few peppermint leaves from the front yard, and added gelatin and lemon juice.  Chilled it until I had a firm jello, and sliced.  No added sugar here -- instead I reduced the peach juice until it was intense enough.  Had they been better peaches, I would have wanted to preserve the fresh flavor, but that's not what was going on.  Some creme de noyaux -- I'll talk about that another time -- would have worked well, or some ginger.  Cinnamon maybe.  Port.  Bourbon.  Plenty of possibilities.  The lemon here is pretty pronounced, it's almost a peach lemonade gelatin.

Plain old cream, from good old Hood.

we both lie silently still in the dead of night

More interesting ingredients: rosehips and squash blossoms.

Squash blossoms are pretty well known now. They're often stuffed and fried, but I just didn't feel like doing that for dinner, and they don't keep for very long -- so I sauteed them in butter, and had them with a fried egg and a quick sauce of a local greenhouse tomato broken down in brown butter. Nevermind olive oil's strutting around: butter is fantastic in a tomato sauce.

Squash blossoms have a delicate flavor which is neither exactly like squash nor entirely unlike it. Aren't I handy?

Now, rosehips.  Rosehips are a goddamn pain in the ass.  They're the fruit of the rose bush, all right, and as if the thorns on that plant aren't enough, these fruit are filled with hard rock-like little seeds -- wait, we're not done -- and little hairs which can't be digested, and therefore ... cause discomfort ... if not removed before eating.

So you have to cut open each of these grape-sized fruit and scrape out the seeds and hairs, and then rinse everything a few times.

Thankfully I'm going to use half the rosehips for a liqueur, for which that won't be necessary.

So dessert, dessert was just a piece of frozen puff pastry folded around a handful of sweetened seasoned fruit -- some of those red plums I picked up this morning, some of the rosehips, a little ginger, a little fresh lavender. Lavender is tricky, you don't want things to taste like soap. But this lavender I have -- and there are lots of varieties with different notes -- has a pepperiness to it that I really like, so I'm trying to find things to use it in.

What surprised me about the plums was how very tart they became after cooking. These are the blander of the plums, which is why I was cooking them; cooked, they're vibrant and tart, almost sour, like a sour cherry tart with what would for some people be not quite enough sugar.

Very cool.