If you simmer some peanuts in your leftover smoked pork stock until they're as soft as cooked beans*, and then smoke the peanuts and stock for a few hours, and then use those smoked, salty, porky peanuts as the bean element in your chili ...

... you make a chili that tastes (in a good way) a lot like a chili dog.

Sooooo now you know how to do that.

*I've mentioned this technique before - simmered nuts, anyway, not specifically in smoked pork stock. At some point I plan to simmer some cacao beans.

Recent Boston food adventures!

Bon Chon Chicken

The Korean fried chicken franchise. Fried chicken strips - crispy and excellent. Skewered hard-boiled quail eggs wrapped in bacon (from the kushiyaki section) - terrific. Bulgogi bibimbob - also terrific. Volcano roll from the signature makimono section - good, but the weak point. It sounded interesting - salmon, kimchi, and cucumber in the roll, topped with mayo, mozzarella, and tobiko, broiled, and topped with chili sauce and onion chips. But the salmon ended up cooking, and that's just less interesting than raw, and mostly what you taste is slightly spicy salmon and a little cheese.

The main thing about Bon Chon is how expensive it was - almost twice as much as some other places we've tried in Boston.

Soulfire

A barbecue joint that makes the best fried chicken I've had this far north. That alone is going to bring us back. The fried chicken was just absolutely amazing. It's a shame they only fry up wings. I suppose they have a reason, but when you can fry chicken that well, it's a shame to limit it. But yes, it's a barbecue joint, and we got other stuff too -- brisket served in chunks, in a sauce that made it taste like smoky chili; ribs that were properly smoked (still clinging to the bone as they should); smoked sausages; and croquettes of fried macaroni and cheese. Now, the interesting thing about the sausages is that, because it's Boston, they were spicy Italian sausages that had been run through the smoker. Trust me, that's not what they mean by hot links in Texas, nor anywhere else in the South as far as I know. But it's the kind of sausages they can get here, I guess. Still very good! But it wouldn't satisfy a hot link craving.

Mt Everest Kitchen

Nepali food! Boston actually has multiple Nepali restaurants. Because Nepal shares a border and a lot of history with India, there is a similarity to Indian food, and a lot of Nepali restaurants - Mt Everest included - serve some non-Nepali items like naan to offer more food that's familiar to people who are used to Indian joints. As it turned out, the garlic naan wasn't very good, and the lentil soup that comes with most of the entree orders was bland. But the rest! Oh man. We ordered a goat dish because we both love goat and don't see it on menus very often -- in this case it was pieces of goat on the bone, in a stew that was slightly spicy, somewhat reminiscent of Indian curries but not as strongly flavored, with some cilantro. Very good.

But even better was the quatee and the momos. Quatee is also spelled quantee some places on the internet, and apparently there are both vegetarian and non-vegetarian versions. Ours was vegetarian -- a curry of 16 different kinds of beans, in a spicy sauce that I don't know how to describe. The menu refers to "Himalayan herbs" -- there was a fresh herb that tasted a little like mint, and one (it may have been the same herb) that tasted a little like lemongrass, and I don't know what else. It's not often that I run into flavors that are completely new to me, as opposed to being used in new ways and new combinations. But this was such an occasion. It was delicious, and I'll definitely order it again.

The momos were steamed dumplings filled with chicken (pork and vegetable are also available, and they can be pan-fried instead of steaming), with a chutney dipping sauce that, again, I don't know how to describe except to say that it was delicious. In fact the quatee and momos were both so good that I can't imagine getting food from Mt Everest and NOT getting these two things.

Flour Bakery

We stopped by the Cambridge location on the way back from a movie, mainly to get the famous sticky buns - which certainly earn their fame. Covered in pecans and infused with caramel goo. Fantastic. The pain aux raisins (a brioche spiral with raisins), brioche with creme fraiche and cinnamon (like a danish, kind of), and "homemade pop tart" were all good too, but the sticky buns are something I'll get every time.

Central Bottle

A wine shop next to Flour, but we weren't there for the wine. We were there for the fantastic cheese selection. It may not look like a lot at first - the grocery store down the street from me has more kinds of cheese. But then you look at what they have, and it's like a greatest hits collection mixed in with some well-chosen deep cuts. For instance, they only have a couple cheddars, but one of them is the Cabot clothbound cheddar. I was happy to see that they sell O'Banon, made by folks in Indiana (Capriole Farm) who I used to see at the farmer's market all the time when I lived in Bloomington.

We got small amounts of lots of cheeses:

a very old (I would say 3 year) gouda.

Bijou, from Vermont Butter and Cheese, which is now my favorite goat cheese - incredibly flavorful and creamy, with absolutely none of the pungency you get from the rind of so many young cheeses. The texture is a lot like fudge. Yes, I now have a goat cheese I like better than Humboldt Fog.

Pecorino Ginepro. Oh my God! Okay, one of the discoveries for me the last couple years has been realizing how much I love Pecorino Romano, so I keep an eye out for other Pecorinos (a family of hard Italian sheep's milk cheeses). "Ginepro" here is juniper - the cheese is submerged in balsamic vinegar and juniper berries. It's not as aged as Pecorino Romano - it's a little crumbly, and not too salty to eat straight. It's amazing. I love this cheese so much.

Some brie-like fresh cow's milk cheese I keep forgetting the name of, which was great on sandwiches.

They have some stuff made in-house, too, like mozzarella, ricotta, broccoli raab pesto, and chicken liver pate. I was hoping to find burrata, but they didn't have any that day.

They also have a good selection of Italian and Spanish cured meats -- including jamon iberico bones, which you can use in soups and beans and whatnot. I love it when people sell that sort of thing instead of letting it go to waste. Now I'm wishing I'd bought some to cook with greens! Ah well. What we did get was lardo (flavored with lots of black pepper), guanciale (Italian jowl bacon), and nduja (soft spreadable salami).

I hadn't had any of the three before, though I'm familiar with them, and when I lived in Indiana, jowl bacon was quite common. The guanciale was spiced a little differently, but it's still recognizably the same thing.

Lotte

Caitlin noticed a Korean store on the way to the bus stop from Central Bottle, so we immediately hopped in. Hell of a find. Korean food is one of those things I don't have nearly enough experience with: Asian markets in New Orleans were Vietnamese, in Indiana were Chinese, Japanese, or Filipino, and up here are Cambodian. So I was glad to not only replenish my supply of barley miso, which I'd run out of - and to do so with an imported brand this time instead of a domestic (we'll see if it makes a difference) - but to pick up leek kimchi, sliced cooked pigs foot, corn tea (it tastes like Corn Pops!), kabosu juice (a citrus juice), and some gummi candies (muscat and mangosteen).

I had some of the pig's foot for lunch today - steamed rice in my just-reviewed rice cooker while steaming the sliced pig's foot in the tray, then picked any bones out of the pig's foot slices and mixed them into the rice along with some of the leek kimchi and the hot sauce that came with the pig's foot. Good good stuff.

review: zojirushi rice cooker

Once again CSN has provided me with a free product to review, which I'm late in reviewing this time because, like the deep fryer, I wanted to live with it for a while and see how often I ended up using it in the course of my normal cooking - not just when I'm specifically testing it out for the blog. The answer is ... all the time.

CSN sells all kinds of stuff through various linked niche stores, from home office desks to hot plates. This time, though, I'm talking about rice cookers - the Zojirushi 3-cup rice cooker.

It's almost impossible to mention a rice cooker without some wag saying, "Really? A whole gadget just for cooking rice? What a waste. I can do that on my stove."

But somehow, the toaster sits there without drawing comment, the most ubiquitous single-use gadget around, with some of them -- not the toaster ovens, mind you, just plain old toasters -- costing just as much as a rice cooker, sometimes even more. A whole cottage industry of the convenience food sector has built up around the assumption that if you have a kitchen, you have a toaster.

Toasters and rice cookers are equal in utility: they do nothing you can't do without them, but they do it better and easier.

"What?" that wag goes on. "How hard is it to cook rice?"

How hard is it to make toast?

Sometimes a dedicated appliance simply does a better job of an easy task. Even knowing that, I never got round to buying a rice cooker myself. Oh, I knew and accepted this logic, but it didn't make a rice cooker seem necessary. I read Ebert's widely circulated rice cooker column -- which has been expanded into a cookbook -- and when Matt got his rice cooker and loved it, I made a note to think about getting one eventually.

It just never seemed necessary.

Well, it isn't. But neither is a toaster. Or a blender, or a food processor for that matter.

So this was a good candidate to get for review from CSN. As it happens, I got the same model Ebert is talking about. You can find bigger rice cookers. You can find much, much more expensive ones. But the Zojirushi does a noticeably more reliable job of cooking rice than a pot on the stove does.

The main thing is that in a pot on the stove, the rice on the bottom is being heated more than you want it to be, and can stick. If you've never had a pot of rice turn unexpectedly gummy on the stove, or dry out without fully cooking ... well, I just don't know if I can believe you. Rice is a little finicky, and the better the rice is -- the more you move away from Minute Rice and Uncle Ben's -- the finickier it is.

But here's the thing, it's really a grain cooker. Even before you go off the res and start making soup and things like that in this - which you can, but I don't know if I see any reason to unless you're cooking in a dorm room - you've got the whole breadth of grains available to you. Oatmeal in the morning. Grits with dinner. Wheat berries or wild rice or what have you. The rice cooker doesn't come with instructions telling you how to cook those other grains, but the internet is full of information, and it's not hard to figure out, particularly if it's something you've cooked on the stove before.

You don't need a rice cooker, in the sense that it's not going to unlock anything for you - there's nothing it'll do that you can't do already. But that doesn't mean it isn't extremely handy, and you'll wind up using it a lot. What I particularly like about this model is that the footprint is small - smaller than the deep-fryer, for instance, and about the same size as ... well, a toaster.

The store had smoked pork tails for $3 - the first time I've seen pork tails of any sort in New Hampshire (I always look for them in Little Cambodia) - so naturally I bought some.

And these were very smoked. The smoked ham hocks I buy aren't all that smoky, but these had been smoked so long they'd dried out a bit - I simmered them for three hours, which gave me five nice-sized tails and a quart of smoked pork stock rich enough to gel at room temperature.

The stock, I'll use for beans or greens.

The tails, I waited until they had cooled some, but were still warm so that everything was supple. This makes it easy to find the bones, see, which popped out pretty simply. Not sure how easy it'd be if you hadn't worked with pork tails before, but ... well.

Tacos!

I deep-fried the boned tails to warm them through, crisp up the skin some, and render out some of the fat. Roasting would've done fine too. After each tail was cooked, I wrapped a corn tortilla around it, pinched the tortilla in place with my tongs, and held it in the deep-fryer to cook the tortilla.

The salsas are just a jarred red salsa (I like Green Mountain Gringo) and that garlic/cilantro/avocado salsa I made the other day. Would've used cheese but didn't have any.

The nice thing about these tacos is that it sounds like a lot of work - it IS a lot of work - but only for the clock. I worked while the tails simmered, took a couple minutes to pop the bones out, did the rest a few days later when I was making lunch.

gratin

Gratin doesn't mean "with cheese." It means "it's crunchy on top." That can be from breadcrumbs, from cheese, from both, from neither - my favorite gratin is gratin dauphinois, which can be made with just potatoes and milk: the starch and the milk protein makes a delicate crispy topping after a long bake.

But with lunch today I had Brussels sprouts gratin, which had both cheese and breadcrumbs. It started with quartered sprouts and chopped onions, sprinkled with Old Bay and cayenne:

Top with bread crumbs and a little grated parmesan, pour in a little milk and cream until the level of liquid comes halfway up the sprouts. Bake - I forget what, 350, 375? - until the liquid has reduced and the top is crisp. Super tasty.

Also on the plate, pimento cheese meatloaf and greens (3 parts turnip, 1 part collard, 1 part chicory):

american tuna

I need to tell you about this tuna.

First of all, if you are happy with your brand of canned tuna, go away. Don't read this post. Stick with the tuna you have. Don't make yourself miserable.

Second, I got this tuna for free as part of a Serious Eats tasting panel which I don't think has ever been posted. It was one of several ingredients, but it's the best of them. They gave me two cans. I still have one.

Because I'm saving this tuna for a special occasion. It sells for $5 a can, which is $15 a pound. It's packed in neither water nor oil - the can is simply filled with tuna and a little salt. (It also comes in flavors apparently.) "Cooked only once in its natural juices." I don't know anything about standard tuna-canning practices, so I don't know if that's a surprising thing or not.

I don't like canned tuna. I really dislike tuna noodle casserole, Tuna Helper, tuna salad, and tuna salad sandwiches. I never liked them, not as an adult, not when I was growing up. I have only ever eaten them to be polite. This is just one of those little quirks you can use to impersonate me after my death, like how in my teens and twenties everyone I dated was 23 and in alphabetical order.

I like fresh tuna just fine, but I was still pretty skeptical of this canned tuna, until we made the most amazing sandwiches with them, based on the pan bagnat sandwich. I took the tuna, divided it among two pistolette-sized rolls, dressed it with sliced onions and chopped garlic and plenty of smoked olive oil, and made sure to salt it, and wrapped them individually in Saran wrap and let them sit in the fridge for a few hours to let the flavors mingle.

Holy shit.

One of the best sandwiches I've ever had.

Okay, sure, the smoked olive oil helps here. There are two brands of smoked olive out, one from California and the other one - this is the other one, smoked over pine. I haven't had the domestic, it might be great, but I know this one is (sorry I'm forgetting the name, but La Tienda sells it).

But the tuna!

I don't even know how to explain why it's so good. It tastes like tuna! Like real tuna. Not like canned tuna. And it doesn't have that cat food smell. But there's got to be more to it, because somehow I know using freshly cooked tuna wouldn't make the same kind of sandwich as the canned stuff did. It's like this can of tuna tastes to me like what other cans of tuna taste to people who for some weird reason love canned tuna. Like I finally get it.

$15 a pound sounds ridiculous, but it's $2.50 a sandwich, and I've made cold cuts sandwiches that cost that much, and steak sandwiches that cost considerably more.

But still.

I'm saving this can for a special occasion.

amaro: campari, rabarbaro zucca

Like I said, on Okay Check It Out twenty-eleven is the year of the amaro. We've talked about amari before. I'm using it as more or less synonymous with "potable bitters," which some people object to - Campari isn't considered an amaro, for instance, and furthermore anything that isn't Italian shouldn't really be called one.

But there just isn't another good word. "Potable bitters" is a little bit shit, and it's a jargony term that only exists because there's nothing better. So I'll use amaro. The distinction between what technically really truly is and isn't an amaro will never ever be important, I promise.

What I mean by amaro, then, or by potable bitter, is, to recap, a liqueur with significant levels of bitterness -- or alternately, a low-proof bitter with added sweetness. It all depends which angle you look at it from. We're not talking about Angostura, is the point. You can use an amaro by the dash, the way you do Ango - and you can use Ango by the shot, the way you do Campari - but traditionally you don't.

There's a wide range of flavor in this category - potentially as wide as in "liqueur" itself, but in practice most amari are some combination of fruity, herbal, minty, anisey, or medicinal, in addition to their bittersweetness.

I mean to cover one a month, but we're starting with a doubleshot because Campari is the best known and most widely available amaro, and Rabarbaro Zucca is quite similar to it. Both are kind of fruity - not compared to Aperol, and not as much as the bright red color of Campari would make you think, but fruitier than many other amari. Though Zucca means squash/gourd/pumpkin, that's just the name of the family that's been making Rabarbaro since 1845, and rabarbaro means rhubarb. It's delicious stuff. Not exactly the same as Campari by any means, but closer to Campari than any other amaro I've had.

It's ridiculous the way you hear people describe the flavor of Campari - seriously, google it and you will find multiple cases referring to it as a cherry liqueur, with which it has nothing in common but its bright red color - so I won't add to that. Campari doesn't taste like anything else, really. Amari have so many different ingredients that you mostly wind up with something that tastes like itself. What does curry taste like, coconut? Yes and no - it may have coconut milk in it, but if you got "curry tastes like coconut" fixed in your head, you'd be awfully confused by your dinner.

What is true of Campari - and Rabarbaro - is that it's quite sweet. A lot of people, especially newcomers to the category, don't realize this at first, because there is this persistent notion that bitterness and sweetness are opposed. But the truth is that once you get used to the flavor of amari, the limiting factor on drinking something like Campari sweet isn't its bitterness - it's its sweetness. It's simply too sweet to drink straight up, as sweet as limoncello or maraschino.

You can drink any amaro with club soda or tonic, and that's my default for trying a new one out - it's the perfect way to experience the flavor of a new amaro without being distracted by whether or not it's working with the rest of your cocktail ingredients.

The most common Campari recipe is the Negroni - equal parts Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth (Punt e Mes is my favorite when using Campari; Noilly Prat and Dolin are both much superior to the Martini & Rossi in your supermarket). This was my gateway not only to Campari but to cocktails: I wasn't even sure I liked it, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, because nothing else had tasted like that. The age of Negroni novelty is ending, if it hasn't ended already; wiseass twenty year old kids will be mixing up cocktails in their dorm rooms that they read about on blogs now, instead of making do with rum and Coke or Canton and Sprite like I did, just like they're jumping into sous vide and mail order molecular gastronomy kits instead of wrestling with the Joy of Cooking for a few years. That's just how it goes. But for me, the Negroni was far outside my drinking experience, my tasting experience.

The Americano is a lower-proof Negroni, substituting club soda for the gin. Campari also works well with ginger (I love it with Buffalo Rock Southern Spice ginger ale), pineapple (you can't quite tell in the photo, but I often drop a pineapple core into my Campari bottle), all citrus juices, gin, genever, and whiskey. I've never really gotten it to work nicely with tequila, but I can't say I've tried too hard either - I don't do a lot of tequila drinks.