Asparagavaganza!!!

Eight pounds of asparagus and eight eaters. You do the math!

Asparagus with different salts
Bruschetta with asparagus, peas and pecorino
Asparagus Soup
Rotini with Asparagus & Walnuts in a Lemon, Goat Cheese Sauce

Practical Herb Lore

Practical stuff for people who are growing the herbs in a window garden.

Don't water them too much. Wait till they look droopy, and give them a little water. They will recover rapdily. This pretty much eliminates the risk they will get attacked by fungus and pests. And only give them very little water (the CC cannot emphasize this point enough!) This means more "monitoring" but c'est la vie.

Give them a lot of sunlight. (The CC realizes this is not under your control. Do your best.)

Give up your fantasies of growing bushels of basil, etc. You are basically gonna grow stuff to add as accents to recipes and are still going to be dependent on the market when you need large quantities. They grow extraordinarily slowly indoors. (If you have large pots and a verandah, this doesn't apply to you.)

Bon appetit!

"Cooking Makes You Human"

An excellent review from the New York Times: Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid.

Human beings are not obviously equipped to be nature’s gladiators. We have no claws, no armor. That we eat meat seems surprising, because we are not made for chewing it uncooked in the wild. Our jaws are weak; our teeth are blunt; our mouths are small. That thing below our noses? It truly is a pie hole.

To attend to these facts, for some people, is to plead for vegetarianism or for a raw-food diet. We should forage and eat the way our long-ago ancestors surely did. For Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and the author of “Catching Fire,” however, these facts and others demonstrate something quite different. They help prove that we are, as he vividly puts it, “the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”

“Catching Fire” is a plain-spoken and thoroughly gripping scientific essay that presents nothing less than a new theory of human evolution, one he calls “the cooking hypothesis,” one that Darwin (among others) simply missed.

“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”

He then delivers a thorough, delightfully brutal takedown of the raw-food movement and its pieties. He cites studies showing that a strict raw-foods diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply, and notes that, in one survey, 50 percent of the women on such a diet stopped menstruating. There is no way our human ancestors survived, much less reproduced, on it. He seems pleased to be able to report that raw diets make you urinate too often, and cause back and hip problems.

Mr. Wrangham also dismisses, for complicated social and economic reasons, the popular Man-the-Hunter hypothesis about evolution, which posits that meat-eating alone was responsible. Meat eating “has had less impact on our bodies than cooked food,” he writes. “Even vegetarians thrive on cooked diets. We are cooks more than carnivores.”

This is an eminently judicious argument for one extraordinarily simple reason - that plants have no defense mechanisms against predators is completely risible.

And we humans are fierce predators!

It just turns out that the various fiery techniques - roasting, steaming, boiling, etc. negate the defense mechanims in very aggressive ways (for example, look here.)

The CC may make fun of the vegetables occasionally because they are effectively guilt-seeking hairshirt-types with a completely bullshit pseudo-moralistic view of the world (and the CC is a frisky, guilt-free, pleasure-maximizing hedonistic omnivore) but the vegans and the raw-foods are the complete and utter retards. They simply do not understand at a functional level how cooking and eating actually proceeds. To cut the crap, they are simply wrong.

Mixed Vegetable Coconut Curry

Naah, it's not quite aviyal (no yogurt) but the CC likes this better.

(Recipe to follow - how else to get you to read, huh?)

Authors

The CC rarely comments on food writers but rest assured that Michael Ruhlman is one of the absolute worst food writers that ever lived and ever will live. He's clearly made his career by sucking the right cocks!

His book, The Making of a Chef is an absolute disaster. How it got past the editor's table is a fuckin' mystery!

It's filled with dangling pronouns. How can that work? You have no clue who "his/her/he/she" refers to. It's unbelievable that an editor actually let that book past the editing table. It's total garbage. The chapters are incoherent. You have no clue who did what to whom and what food substance in what order!

And they let him write a sequel. Un-fuckin'-believable!

It's shit, shit, shit -- shit, shit, shit, shit.

And the blogosphere is all over blabbering over his man's latest book? The CC shits over his book just on general principle.

Jeebus Cripus, if this man can "write", then Nixon's presidency is a bloody masterpiece of politics!

Tortellini in brodo di pomodoro

The brodo (broth) comes from here and the tortellini come from here.

You think the CC exaggerates but he would kill for this stuff on a weekly basis. Just the smell of the broth, just the smell.

Toss in some fresh oregano to make it all better.

But he doesn't have to. It's quite easy to make. Takes time but no effort (embrace the difference, cooking warriors!)

So what exactly is your excuse?

Idlis

After pissing around forever, the CC has finally managed to make the idlis of his dreams.

Fluffy, fluffy, fluffy, fluffy, fluffy deliciousness.

Here are the practical problems in a nutshell:

The CC lives in a colder climate. The CC lives in a climate where there is serious temperature variation between day and night. The CC lives in a drier climate.

All of these are real problems that need to be solved. Many of these do not apply to the Californicators or those in God's Waiting Room, the Floridians. Congratulations on your luck!

Ingredients

1 tbsp fenugreek seeds (soaked)
urad (soaked)
idli rava (read below)

patience (and lots of it!)

Recipe

Soak the fenugreek seeds and the urad for 6-8 hours.

Grind the crap out of the stuff to produce an extremely smooth paste with as little of the soaked water as possible.

Now, add 2.5 portions of the idli rava by volume. Add some water to make a thickish paste.

Now, comes the patience part. You need to let the stuff ferment in a warm-ish place at a relatively stable temperature. What only takes overnight in India can easily take four days out in the US. An oven with a pilot light works wonders.

Some auxiliary observations:

Do not add salt up front. This prevents the sourdough from forming.

Do not use chlorinated water.

If the batter seems dried out, add water and stir periodically.

The thing will ferment eventually, and you will get fluffy soft idlis.

Patience, young Jedis!

Who's Your Pasta-Daddy, Huh?

Well, the CC was drawn back to the well of desire which is hardly surprising.

They are so sanguine about the CC that they don't ask what the CC wants but how many pounds is the CC willing to carry today!

Love or co-dependent pasta drug-dealers - you decide!

A Sichuan Meal (at Home)

Stir-fried mushrooms with Chiles and Sichuan Pepper
Lotus roots in sweet-and-sour sauce
(Source: Fuchsia Dunlop.)

Recipes to follow. (And just for the record, the CC thinks she walks on water!)

Thai Green Curry with Bay Scallops

(Source: Kasma Loha-Unchit.)

Couple of notes. Used bay scallops instead of making the dumplings.

The green sauce is more like a green-gray sauce. It seems to me that commercial sauces (whether packaged or in restaurants) must be adding cilantro leaves to make it greener.

The CC added veggies as the Thai are wont to do as well. (There are eggplants, carrots and baby corn in there.)

Asparagus Soup

This is a wondrous testament to Italian cucina povera, cooking born in poverty which produces magic with the most minimal of cheap and throwaway ingredients.

The sore "indulgence" here is the asparagus. The broth is made out of water and the rind of a piece of parmigiano-reggiano.

You'll have to eat it to believe it!

Ingredients

1 bunch asparagus
1 large red onion

1 parmigiano-reggiano rind

4 cups water
salt
lots of black pepper

dried bread crusts to serve

Recipe

Separate the asparagus heads from the stems. Cut the stems into rounds.

Fry the onions and garlic at a low heat. This will take the better part of 12-14 minutes. Fry the asparagus rounds for a while. Add the water, the parm rind, salt and pepper and bring to a slow boil.

Let it simmer for 40 mins or so. Keep skimming the stuff that comes to the top. Remove the rind.

Blend the mixture, and pass through a fine sieve. Bring to a heat again. Add the heads just before serving. Serve over dried bread crusts.

On Martinis

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most,
After three, I'm under the table,
After four, I'm under my host.
Who else but the inimitable Dorothy Parker?

Beech Mushrooms

The CC had never ever heard of these but he encountered some at a Korean supermarket and was hard-pressed to resist. Called buna shimeji in Japanese, they are tiny and must be cooked. Lovely in stir-fries or soups or even to add depth of flavor to a mushroom stock.

Krachai (gkrachai)

Krachai is a rhizome that is used in Thai cooking. Usually found in the pickled form. It has a unique perfumy scent and is generally used in seafood-based curries.

Fresh Pasta

The CC has a new toy - a pasta maker.

It's easy enough to make fresh pasta (shown below - drying) but hoo boy! does the thing make an unholy mess!!! It's like a flour bomb went off in the kitchen.

Fresh pasta cooks very very quickly - barely three minutes will get you to al dente.

The recipe is simple enough. Fry rosemary in butter, fry the peas. Add the fresh pasta, top with grated parm.

Fresh Pasta with Rosemary and Peas

Cucumber Gazpacho

Ingredients

2 lbs cucumber (peeled, coarsely chopped)
8-10 sorrel leaves
2 cloves garlic
4 cups yogurt

8-10 dried baguette slices

salt
black pepper

Recipe

Blanch the sorrel leaves really quickly (less than 15 seconds or so or they will just "melt".)

Soak the bread in some water for about 15 minutes.

Pull it out, squeeze the water out. Place all the ingredients in a blender, and blend.

Pass through a fine sieve.

Chill and serve.

Snakes on a Plate

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports: Man finds snake head in his broccoli.

The sight of a severed snake's head under his broccoli made Jack Pendleton lose interest in dessert.

Pendleton said he found the head, the size of the end of his thumb, while eating Sunday at the T.G.I. Friday's in Clifton Park.

Pendleton said he ordered vegetables instead of fries with his chicken sandwich. When he started to eat his broccoli, he saw something gray on the plate he at first thought was a mushroom. "I start to turn it over. I see this gray-green patch," he said.

Next he saw a V-shape that turned out to be the mouth of a snake. "I could see these black, rotted eye sockets on the top," he said. The severed head also had bits of tendon and part of the spine attached, he said.

"I stopped eating. I told my girlfriend, 'I think this is a head,'" he said.

Pendleton snapped a photo with his cellphone camera, then summoned the waiter. He covered the dish with his hand and described his find.

"He thought I was joking until I took my hand away," Pendleton said. The waiter grabbed the plate and took it back to the kitchen, the diner said.

He and his girlfriend had planned to attend a carnival after their meals, he said, but as he pulled into the lot he decided he didn't have the stomach to go on the rides.

King Oyster Mushrooms

King oyster mushrooms (pleurotus eryngii) have a wonderful meaty texture and all the umami of the mushroom family.

Why these wonders of the mushroom family are not better known is beyond the CC's ken!

Naw-mai Farang Pad Nahm Man Hoi

Stir-Fried Asparagus & Oyster Mushrooms in Garlic Oyster Sauce.

Simple to make and absurdly scrumpalicious if you have the ingredients (isn't that always that way?)

(Source: Kasma Loha-Unchit.)

Decadence Florentine Style

The CC has already talked before about the Tuscan love of beans but today he encountered a Florentine recipe from the decadent 1920's that calls for Beluga caviar served on top of white bean paste (fagioli con caviale.) The author tartly observes that "surely this must be the most expensive way of salting your beans!"