Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

I've talked about Buffalo wings before. A lot.

I've also talked about how good home-grown celery is, what an intense flavor it has. This year my mother grew celery root, and I've been using the thin stalks and leaves to flavor, well, everything.

I grew Tabasco peppers this year, and because we got such a long growing season, they actually turned red. So I tried my hand at pepper mash again, which is the Tabasco method of making hot sauce: you mash peppers with salt, let it ferment, and then mix it with vinegar. This is the classic Louisiana style hot sauce.

In the past, my peppers have dried out without fermenting. I could have just added water and gone about it much like sauerkraut, but since the last time I tried making Tabasco sauce, I've gotten into kimchi. So I treated it similarly: mixing the main ingredient (the peppers) with seasonings, salt, and something with enough liquid and sweetness in it to kickstart the anaerobic fermentation.

The seasonings were the celery leaves and stalks - the liquid, half of a tomato. I blended those together with red ripe Tabasco peppers and salt, jarred it up, and let it ferment for a week, until it was bubbling like mad - then blended that with apple cider vinegar and red miso, and strained it. I also added a pinch of xanthan gum - it's a thickener, but it also helps keep the pepper from coming out of suspension, so that the pepper sauce doesn't separate.

Already I had something amazing - a rich, full-flavored hot sauce with a pronounced celery flavor, like the celery sticks you eat with your Buffalo wings. (After sitting a week, the tomato flavor became more noticeable, almost gazpachoey.)

But wait. I divided the sauce in half. One I left as is, as just described. To the other I added a stick of butter that had been cooked until browned. Again, the xanthan gum helps keep the sauce from separating, though in this case I think a bit of mustard would do the same.

It's like premixed Buffalo sauce, but ... so much better.

more coolage, less normalcy

As hot as summer was, fall arrived right on schedule - early even, shouldering its way in in a succession of days that alternated between the 80s and the 50s. This morning is an unequivocally fall day - most of the leaves have turned, and there's grey mist hanging on everything. Fall is like that friend whose spouse you can't stand - you're glad to see them, but it's never just them you have to deal with. It's not even the cold of winter that I mind as much - there's a good chance New England has settled into a pattern of mild winters punctuated by extremely cold or snowy ones - it's the darkness, which is so so much worse at northern latitudes.

I'm definitely very affected by that darkness, and have trouble waking up in the morning - despite being a morning person the rest of the year - and just as much trouble having any energy throughout the day. I have a Philips blue light - they didn't give me a free sample or anything, it was a Christmas present - and it works wonders, but it's still not as good as, you know, spring.

But for now it's fall. It's fall and I'm drinking my coffee waiting for Meet the Press to start, after which I'll get back to work on a horror story. Let's get you caught up in the meantime on the doings round the kitchen.

First, I won the internal poll in the Marx Foods cocktail/mocktail contest, and selected the Japanese juice sampler - bottles of yuzu, kabosu, and sudachi juice! - as my prize. Very very cool, and congratulations to Scofflaws Den, winner of the public poll.

Two important notions Caitlin had! First, corn and okra fritters - a basic fritter batter recipe (I winged it - flour cornmeal buttermilk egg baking soda and salt - and added more flour after the first few) with corn off the cob and chopped up okra, fried up in the deep fryer and served with deep-fried Cornish game hen and drizzled with honey:



And a sandwich that started out as "what if we did a tomato sandwich Croque Madame style," i.e. in a grilled ham and cheese sandwich topped with a fried egg and cheese sauce; my tweak was to replace the ham with leftover corned beef:


And then! Nikki and I did our annual green chile / apple exchange - I sent her a box of apples (which I should have packed better, since the chestnut crabapples were crushed in transit), she sent me this:




So many chiles!

I made green chile mac and cheese and green chile cheeseburgers, as I always do. But the new thing ... oh man. You know, we have been doing this for some years now, and I was aware that green chile apple pie existed. I don't know why this was the first time I made it. This is the "test pie" - a hand-pie of apple and green chile filling inside puff pastry, just to see whether it was worth doing a full pie. It was.




Maybe you're thinking, why the fuck would you put vegetables in your apple pie, and I don't even have to go off at you about how the fruit|vegetable divide in cooking is recent, artificial, and mostly imaginary - because the green chiles just don't play like a vegetable here, they play like a seasoning. Like ginger or cinnamon. What vegetal character they have just accentuates the sweetness of the apples - the way sharp cheddar does, maybe? - and the heat goes perfectly with apple pie spices. It works really, really well.

labor day 2012: cooking

Caitlin and I spent Labor Day weekend up at the lake, with a bunch of geese:






And a bunch of duk:



Duk are Korean rice cakes, like thick rice noodles or dumplings. I made a sort of tomato gumbo, let it cook a bit, cooked the duk in it, and then served it alongside slices of pork belly that had been simmered in heavily salted water for two hours and roasted for half an hour to crisp up.

Gumbo in progress:


Onion, celery root and its stalks, okra, and tomatoes - all from my mother's garden except the yellow tomatoes on top. A few shakes of Tabasco sauce. Chicken stock, seasoned with bay leaves.








That cooked for a bit, first covered and then uncovered, and then I added the duk, which only take maybe five minutes when there's a lot of liquid like that. Both the okra and the rice starch from the duk thickened the gumbo.

We also had oxtail, and because this was a dinner, the light isn't as good. This was sort of haphazard. I simmered the oxtail in tomatoes and okra, but the stove and oven both run hotter than I expect up there, and the tomatoes cooked down and scorched - enough that I was afraid I might have burned things, so I lifted the oxtail out into a pot of fresh tomato puree, so that we had a mix of both. Served that, once it was heated up, with ratatouille and chevre ravioli from local company Valicenti.



One of the nights - Sunday night? - we had steak sandwiches with black truffled twice-baked potato, which is very simple. I cooked up shaved steak in the pork belly fat, with a few crushed cherry tomatoes that cooked down. Made grilled cheese sandwiches with the cheese scraps we had left - a little aged gouda, a little sage cheddar, a single slice of American cheese divided between two sandwiches. Put the steak on the grilled cheese, and meanwhile had baked a potato (rub fat around it, bake it at 400-450 for an hour), sliced it in half, scooped out the innards, mashed them with grated Pecorino cheese, about three tablespoons of black truffle butter, and an egg yolk, replaced the mashed potatoes in the shells, and baked them for 15 minutes.


That's my travel cooking knife on the left by the dish detergent.

Brunch on Monday! A quick bite while we were getting ready to leave. I had, a week earlier, cooked some unusual duck confit - after curing a duck leg quarter overnight in salt and fresh herbs (basil, tarragon, rau ram), I had cooked it at a low heat all day in butter, rather than duck fat.  Because I didn't have duck fat ... and I did have butter.  So we wound up with both duck confit, and duck-fat butter.

I reheated that duck confit, shredding it from the bone as it cooked, and then scooped it, still sizzling hot, onto two tomatoes. The tomatoes had been prepped by slicing the top off, slicing around the interior to create a channel, and making vertical cuts. I sort of pressed the duck confit down into the tomato after scooping it in.



We could have used some crusty bread to sop everything up!


So long till Columbus Day, goose.

labor day 2012: drinks

Not many photos of our drinks from Labor Day up at the lake, except this one - one of my drinks, which I kept coming back to: Campari, gin, and fresh squeezed lime juice. (In this case I drizzled the lime halves with honey and hit them with the blowtorch first, to warm them up and make them juice better, and to add more bitterness.) It's your basic Campari summer drink, a Negroni with citrus instead of vermouth.

Caitlin wants to make sure I note the drink I made for her so we remember the proportions: more or less 1 oz gin, 1 oz lime juice (perhaps a bit less), 1/2 oz orgeat, 1/2 oz Chambord, with a few drops of chartreuse elixir vegetal.

Following up on the raspberry-almond combination of that drink, we had a Campari-orgeat fizz, for lack of another name: more or less 1 oz gin, 1 oz lime juice, 3/4 oz orgeat, 1/4 oz (perhaps a bit less) Campari - just enough to make it pink - and an egg white, shaken like hell with a few ice cubes, more or less strained, and topped with a few drops of orange bitters.

Farmstand update 8/22/2012 - my mother's garden!

Tons of corn - it's been coming strong for a couple weeks now. A grocery sack full of corn that's a little too starchy to eat off the cob - probably I'll use it for chowder, atole, or those fresh corn arepas.

Tons of tomatoes.

So many hot Cubanelle peppers - every time my mother plants chiles, they grow like crazy. We were expecting the Cubanelles to be a sweet grilling pepper, but they have a New Mexico like heat.

A couple Asian eggplants.

Cantaloupes aren't ready yet - maybe a week.

Red okra!

vir-gin and tonic and spiced butter rum and coke

Another Marx Foods contest - in this one, they sent out a package of ingredients and bloggers had to make both a cocktail and a non-alcoholic drink, using at least one ingredient in each drink. The ingredients were saffron, fennel pollen, dill pollen, juniper berries, long pepper, and dried pineapple.

I decided to use juniper berries and long pepper because they were the ingredients I had done the least with. The result: Vir-Gin and Tonic, with tonic water, juniper-blueberry-lime "shrub," and cucumber juice; and the Spiced Butter Rum and Coke.

Vir-Gin and Tonic

The idea here is not to emulate the gin and tonic per se, but to come up with a drink that is as refreshing and as complex as a gin and tonic, without alcohol. Gin's complexity comes from its botanicals, usually about a dozen of them - the most prominent of which, the only one required by law and definition, is juniper. That piney taste gin has - that's the juniper. I originally considered pairing it with spruce tips, but in a recipe contest I don't know how useful it would be to include an ingredient that isn't commercially available (mine were foraged in Alaska and purchased on eBay).

Instead, I combined equal amounts of cucumber juice, tonic water, and a sort of shrub. Shrub is a sweetened vinegar syrup that dates from Colonial times; mine uses lime juice instead of vinegar.

Cucumber juice:

Peel cucumbers and remove the seeds (which contribute bitterness) by scooping out the centers with a spoon. Blend and strain through a mesh strainer, pressing on the solids.

Cucumbers.


Cucumber pulp.


Cucumber pulp, strained, gelatin added.


Cucumber pulp, strained, frozen.



Cucumber pulp strained, frozen, strained - cucumber juice.

To further clarify, strain through cheesecloth several times or add a little dissolved gelatin - bloom a couple pinches of gelatin in a spoonful of cold water, heat it up to melt the gelatin, stir it into the cucumber juice, freeze the whole thing, and then thaw it in a strainer over a bowl in the fridge. As it thaws, the gelatin will bundle up the solids so that what thaws is just juice. If you use too much gelatin, it will stay too Jello-like when it thaws.

Juniper-blueberry-lime shrub:

Grind a spoonful of juniper berries.

Crush fresh blueberries lightly in a pan, heating over low heat until they darken and start to release their juices. Add a few spoonfuls of sugar - it depends on how many blueberries you're using, but you don't need a lot since the tonic water is sweetened - and the juniper berries and stir until the blueberries are fairly juicy. Remove from heat, let cool to room temp, and add an amount of lime juice equal in volume to the blueberries.

Let sit for a little bit, then strain. Chill.

Vir-Gin and Tonic:

Combine equal amounts cucumber juice, tonic water, and shrub. You get the tang of the blueberry and lime, the freshness of the fruits and cucumber, and the piney note of the juniper matching the bitter quinine of the tonic water. This is a "mocktail" that's more than an afterthought.

Vir-Gin and Tonic; Spiced Butter Rum and Coke

Spiced Butter Rum and Coke

I've talked about fat-washing before. Those flavor compounds which are fat-soluble are also alcohol-soluble; therefore, combine fat and alcohol, wait, and then remove the fat, and the flavor from the fat has transferred to the alcohol. This is why citrus liqueurs with a true fruit flavor are so much easier to make than other fruit liqueurs, for instance - because the flavor of the rind, the smell of the fruit, is contained in its oil, whereas the flavor of an apple or a grape is primarily water-soluble (which is why we ferment the juices to make brandy and wine, more often than we use them in infusions).

Bacon bourbon in Bacon Old Fashioneds gets a lot of buzz, because the internet loves bacon, but brown butter is more interesting to me. Brown butter is simply butter heated in a pan until it stops foaming and sizzling, at which point the milk solids have browned, giving it a richer, deeper flavor.

Heat a couple tablespoons of butter accordingly, and let the brown butter cool (it will be very hot). Add to a cup of rum and a long pepper, cover, and wait about four days.

The easiest way to strain anything fat-washed is to put it in the freezer, so that the fat becomes very solid, and then pour it through a mesh strainer or cheesecloth. I allowed a few bits of butter fat to remain in the spiced butter rum because I like the effect of butter flecks on the surface of the drink.

Long pepper is really, really awesome. Chile pepper and black pepper eclipsed it in part because it's harder to grind than they are, but for centuries it was a major commodity in the spice trade. The flavor is more complex than even the best black peppercorn - the heat of black pepper, but with a pronounced fruity fragrance, pronounced enough that it's the dominant smell even in this drink. The pepper heat is mainly in the aftertaste, and it blends in perfectly with Coca-Cola's botanicals (which are nearly as numerous as gin's). The butter adds richness that goes well with the sweetness of the soda, without the mouthfeel of actual hot buttered rum.

Add spiced buttered rum to cold Coca-Cola to taste - I suggest a shot of 1 1/2 ounces in a rocks glass of Coke. Normally I add lime juice to rum and Coke; I wouldn't add acidity here, with the butter flavor.

Farmstands, 8/20/2012

I always used to say that the thing about produce in New England is you wait all year and then it comes all at once. Thing is, I was exaggerating - New England's fruit and vegetable seasons are as well-defined as those of Louisiana or Indiana, they're just very very short, and if you ignore strawberries and rhubarb as early outliers, they're compressed into a tiny slice of the year.

This year I'm not exaggerating. Everything is available at once. Corn, tomatoes, apples, blueberries, grapes, melons - it's all cowboys and dinosaurs, it's all compressed together. It's kind of weird.

This weekend Lull's and Kimball's had everything they had last time, plus a couple more varieties of apples, plus grapes - no Concord grapes yet, but Kimball's has their other varieties, which are my favorite thing about summer after tomatoes and sour cherries.