On Lamb

This Melissa Clark recipe for Lamb-and-White-Bean Chili was good. Full disclosure: I omitted the two poblano peppers (and two small green peppers substitute for the two poblano peppers), the cilantro (both the finely chopped stems and the leaves for garnish) and the two small jalapenos. Also, I switched the white beans for some very old white tepary beans I had in the cupboard and had been meaning to get rid of. I skipped the lime, as well, but we added dried mint afterward. So I sort of made this recipe.

How many recipes does this happen with? For me, it’s probably 90 to 95 percent of them.

Jen has been wanting to eat more lamb, so we tried chili with lamb. I think it’s kind of great: beans love fat, or more accurately, people love beans that commingle with fat. Speaking of oozing lamb fat, there was a good tip in this recipe, which was to brown the meat and let it rest on a paper towel on a plate, which soaked up a lot of fat.

For a cocktail, we tried a Jack Rose, which Jen read about in the new, improved Sunday Motherfucking Times Magazine. The hook in this particular piece in the new, improved Motherfucking Magazine was “the classic cocktail that never got invited to the oldies reunion.” It was OK. To be fair, we used the Applejack on hand and not the Laird 100-proof straight apple brandy in the recipe. But as they say, don’t let the accurate be the enemy of the available.

Here Are Some Things I Think I Need To Say About Sous Vide Carrots

I definitely love the immersion sous vide thingy Jen got me as a gift. And just to be upfront, I won’t talk about it like so many sous vide blog entries seem to: with a big disclaimer at the end that the gear they use is sponsored by one of the major manufacturers of the home cooking sous vide machinery thingys. All those posts freely admit that the gear is sponsored, but it never stops being strange to me. And the thing is that if you google “sous vide [blank]” nearly every goddamn post is somehow related to this one particular manufacturer. It beats you over the fucking head and while I’m perfectly willing to believe this is all rolling out according to plan, agencies involved in social media campaigns never seem that competent. So it’s crazy to me that [X] brand has cornered the market on information about sous vide recipes online.

And yet, so many of the posts are so relevant and useful that I don’t really mind so much.

Anyway, our sous vide thingy is not the same one that seems to dominate the googlescape. Jen paid full price for it. And it’s really cool and fun to experiment with and worth talking about.

So with that, carrots. I already mentioned before that I continue to be frustrated by a quest for super-sublime steak. The thing that is unimpeachable, however, is carrots. I first learned about this from one of J. Kenji López-Alt’s posts, and have made sous vide carrots pretty regularly since then. Everyone seems to like them.

(Just to be clear because two disparate thoughts are following in the above paragraphs, I don’t know if — and am not intimating — J. Kenji López-Alt gets complimentary sous vide gear but it wouldn’t matter to me because I always trust his writing.)

(As an aside, pork tenderloin is also pretty rockin’ with the sous vide thingy. Pork chops are unnecessary. The experiments continue.)

The sous vide carrots recipe is pretty straightforward: dill, salt, pepper and butter. I actually always forget about the sugar, but I don’t think you need sugar. It’s good. Tonight I looked at The Flavor Thesaurus by Niki Segnit, which was a gift from Goober and got the idea to substitute garam masala for dill after seeing cardamom and cumin mentioned as good matches with carrots. I thought the garam masala recipe I used included anise but I was mistaken. Oh well. Anyway, GARAM MASALA TASTES GREAT IN SOUS VIDE CARROTS. I just needed to report that.

Incidentally, I’m obsessed with this book. As I write this I’m dipping shitty Babybel mozzarella “style” cheese in dried basil, JUST BECAUSE I READ THAT MOZZARELLA AND BASIL GO WELL TOGETHER, WHICH IF I THOUGHT ABOUT IT FOR HALF A FUCKING SECOND WOULD HAVE BEEN OBVIOUS. But that’s part of what’s cool about Flavor — the inspiration is so great. Without that book I would have just been pilfering my kid’s shitty Babybel stash. This way, it’s elevated. Like an elevator. Or blood pressure.

The other thing tonight was chicken sausage. I make it a lot, mostly because I assume that Mr. Kiddo will eat it. He actually hasn’t touched it for months, but I’m not quite sure what to do and I have no time to think about other proteins.

Anyway, the recipe I tend to default to is probably a combination of a bunch of recipes that are forgotten to browser histories and then also the Frankies Spuntino cookbook, which Jen did get for free a few jobs ago. I would like to mention that it’s good. I use it a lot. I don’t totally get their obsession with white pepper, but whatever.

Some recipe, I can’t remember which, calls for marsala wine, which I keep on hand and use but which I skipped for a wine that’s been in the fridge for several weeks from when we had people over. It’s Baron de Seillac sparkling rose (thanks, MS!), which [googling] is a sparking wine made from 100% grenache grapes which is not particularly expensive. Let me tell you this, though: that wine with some tomato paste, oregano, salt, black pepper (sorry, Frankie, et al.), onion, mushroom and that’s it was really wonderful tasting. More research needed, for sure, but what the fuck am I tasting? I need to know!

Roasted Chicken

A while back a friend told me about the famed Zuni Cafe method of roasting chicken. I resisted, mostly because it involved flipping the chicken not once but twice. The last thing I want to do in life is try to flip a hot half-raw chicken. It’s actually not that big a deal.

So eventually I tried the recipe and, man, it is good. The method calls for salting the chicken and leaving it in the fridge for one to three days. It sounds gross to keep a raw chicken in your fridge for three days, but it’s actually pretty good. The above link calls for the daintiest 3/4 teaspoon of salt. This is too little. Dump a bunch of salt in your plasticware and roll the chicken around in it. Salty roasted chicken is worth it. In summer I use fresh herbs from outside. In winter there’s no need; in the end, I’m not sure how much flavor is actually imparted by the herbs.

In essence, the recipe calls for cooking the chicken at a blistering 475 degrees breast side up for 30 minutes, then flipping it and cooking it for 15-20 minutes, then flipping it again and cooking it for 5-10 minutes. In general I do 30 minutes then 12 to 15 minutes then 5 minutes. And 475 will make your house smoke. 450 is fine and I’ve lowered it a little more, too. The trick is to make the skillet really hot and pat the chicken really dry. Also, it’s more important to make the underside dry — as opposed to the breast. The drier and hotter it is, the less likely it will stick and rip off precious skin. At the end the skin is crispy and salty and ridiculously addictive. Perch it on a baking rack while it rests to make sure the undercarriage skin stays dry.

Before we had a fancy stove with a self-cleaning feature, it was a challenge; high-heat chicken makes a fuckin’ mess of the oven and cleaning the thing, while not impossible, is annoying. You’ll need a razor blade implement (called a “razor blade scraper”) to scrape off burned grease. It’s still probably worth it.

The byproduct of cooking a chicken in a skillet is of course the fat. At any given time I have several plastic containerof chicken fat, labeled by date. I don’t like to waste stuff, so it’s nice to find new ways to use it. Solution: Madhur Jaffrey’s South Indian-Style Green Beans. It’s just one pound of green beans, boiled for 5 minutes, then cooked in olive/canola oil with whole cumin seeds, whole brown or yellow mustard seeds, sesame seeds and cayenne pepper. And salt.

The flavors are great, but you know what is even better? Cooking shit in the chicken fat leftover in the pan. So, so good. We did the same with potatoes. Also, good.

Blood and Sand (Cherry Liqueur, Cont.)

Too lazy to flip through the Mr. Boston for whiskey recipes that use Cherry Heering so I googled it. Found this recipe for a Blood and Sand: 1 ounce blended Scotch, 1 ounce orange juice and 3/4 ounce Cherry Heering. It was good but wanted it more boozy (perhaps that’s because of using the lower alcohol Nalewka Lwowecka). As a rule I avoid orange juice because alcohol and orange juice reminds me of a screwdriver, but this was definitely not too orange-y. For what it’s worth, I used Grant scotch, which isn’t the cheapest one on the bottom shelf, but it’s close. The bottle does have a charming triangular shape that I like to think is somehow space saving. I haven’t found a cheap go-to blended scotch mixer — part of it may be my ideas about what constitutes “cheap”; my go-to cheap bourbon has been Evan Williams and cheap mezcal has been that thing with the gnarly worm . . . [googling] . . . Monte Alban. Here are About.com some more recipes that look good; also, seems like there are variations on Blood and Sand.

Remember The Maine

You can usually follow, to a certain extent, the backstory of cocktail names in the Mr. Boston guide. Remember The Maine (page 192) does not fall into that category. The cocktail is 2 ounces rye, 3/4 ounce sweet vermouth, 1/2 ounce cherry Heering and 1/4 ounce pastis. What cherry Heering has to do with the USS Maine, I have no idea, but I was geeked to try this after coming across cherry Heering in all these recipes and never having it, then finally seeing it at one of the local liquor stores today. Full disclosure: I actually bypassed the cheery Heering luxe pack on sale (including two snifters) for a $12 bottle of some Polish stuff next to it called Nalewka Lwowecka. I guessed they were the same [checking] or apparently Heering is slightly more alcoholic.