This Is Just To Say

This is just to say . . . we had a leftover bottle of a Tuscan wine made from 55% Sangiovese, 25% Syrah and 20% Merlot (a 2011 Ruffino Il Ducale, which I’m pretty sure was brought over here by someone) that tasted great — great! — with our bastardized Zuni-style roasted chicken. I wouldn’t have expected it to work because, you know, it’s red and it’s chicken and it’s leftover and we — or at least one of us — doesn’t know shit about wine (really), but this was awesome. When you tasted it with high-heat chicken fatty roasted chicken, the wine’s flavors jumped out and sharpened into something beyond what what there. One of those revelatory pairings. It turns out that “Il Ducale Toscana is the perfect accompaniment to herb-roasted chicken . . .” And, indeed, if you Google something long enough, you’ll find some evidence to support that: “Pair Sangioveses with rare steaks, roasted game birds (or wild boar), rich chicken or mushroom dishes or anything with tomato sauce” — “rich chicken”; I’ll take it.

You Take The Good, You Take The Bad: “On Experimentation”

Most of the time when you “experiment” it ends up being fine. Because, honestly, unless you’re some kind of superfreak with bizarro animal parts, there’s a small swath of culinary territory that people traverse. It’s not really all that experimental to dump rooster sauce on some noodles; I’m sure most ingredients we have on hand interact well together. So it was with not a small amount of hubris that I dumped almost a full bottle of leftover beer in our gruel the other day.

And just to be clear, when I say “leftover” what I mean is a half-consumed bottle of beer left out overnight because we were too “tired” to finish cleaning. Two of them.

In short, I learned that you can’t really use beer to cook lentils/quinoa/bulgur wheat. One, it tastes like shit. I’m not really sure why, but it does. Intensely yeasty, overbearing and, frankly, mostly bizarre. I’m not totally clear why this is, but I’ve tasted it and know not to ever try it again.

Two — and this is not insignificant — after doing a little bit of googling it seemed that the alcohol doesn’t really get cooked out as fast or as thoroughly as you assumed, making this a poor choice to feed young children. In short, I cooked it, but ended up throwing it out.

So that was that. But then there was using orange zest in the weekly lamb “koftas” or more accurately oblong meatballs made from lamb. There’s a Greek sausage called Loukaniko that has an orange flavor. It turns out that that flavor actually comes from orange zest (or peels, but that seems a little intense). So then it makes sense that dumping the zest of an entire orange would work. Because it did! These hefty oblong-shaped meatballs cooked to lamb perfection at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.

Googling Your Way Toward Diabetes

If udon noodles were good for you I think I’d eat them every day. Or at least I’d feel like I wanted to eat them every day. As it is I feel a craving and a pull often enough for udon noodles. Big, fat, chewy ones fried in fucking meat-sugar-soy this-or-that. You know.

But there’s nothing particularly nutritious about udon noodles, so I don’t usually eat them. Except for tonight, when I had really old leftovers and needed to get excited about how to consume them (without intestinal distress, fingers crossed) and remembered that I had some cheap vacuum-packed noodles I got at a box store. And the side of the package had an easy stir-fry recipe that included teriyaki sauce.

I don’t keep teriyaki sauce around, but I googled it once and found this lovely rankumphant food.com recipe for it.

I would like to take a minute to discuss food.com. First, it’s one of those URLs that is so ridiculous that you can’t possibly believe it’s on the up and up. Who was lucky enough to get food.com? (The answer is here, by the way: Microsoft alums in the last millennium.) And food.com — besides “food” what’s left? “Shelter”? (In fact, “shelter.com” is taken, but not used.) “Money”? (“Money.com” redirects to the Time magazine site.) “Sex” is what you think it’s going to be (and nothing says “sex.com” like scrolling an endless page of pornographic .gifs in the middle of the day . . . Jesus Fucking Christ . . . oh, the About Us link is at the top). (That said, the sex.com Wikipedia page is interesting.) “Death.com” is a parked domain (fortunately for her, the parked domain lady is not found there). Elsewhere, fun.com seems to be a party supply store. Sad.com is a parked domain with a picture of a sort of pensive looking person. I think I’ll stop now.

Anyway, a lot of the user-generated food.com recipes are weird (I think I got a recipe for frito pie on food.com) but a lot are Sandra Lee-simple and useful for dicking around on a weeknight. That teriyaki recipe, for one. Teriyaki is basically soy and sugar, although I guess there are more traditional versions that I suppose, were I all that interested in dousing shit with sugar, I will check out (and it’s funny because it’s not like I don’t have that stuff around). Rooster sauce makes it good, too.

You Had Me At “Chicken Fat”

Asparagus and mushrooms massaged with chicken fat, spicy pretzel mustard (no, really — an add-on from a large pretzel order from a Philly chainlet), salt and white pepper. Wokked (wokked?) in avocado oil (don’t know if it’s a thing but I bought the high smoke point oil from Costco so eh) and let the liquid thicken. This was good.

Eat What You Clean With

At home we use cleaner made from a mixture of water, vinegar and a little essential oil. It’s a homemade mixture. And if you’re not familiar with water and vinegar, it’s actually very good for cleaning. The essential oil just makes it smell nicer (though when vinegar dries it stops smelling like vinegar, meaning it’s impossible to have your place smelling like vinegar all the time).

Sometimes, usually when I’m cleaning up after breakfast, lunch or dinner, I start thinking about how neat it’d be to use the same thing both to season food and clean tables, and how it’d confound the Health Department, and what the place would feel like when there was this scent floating about.

All of which is to set up what happened tonight when I used vinegar to deglaze the skillet we cooked pork chops in. Jen grabbed the pan and dipped the roasted broccoli in the vinegary fat mixture. It was good — the vinegar made it almost lemony tasting.