Bronze Dies & Pasta

What's the deal with the "bronze-die extruded pasta"?

The answer is simple. Bronze dies give the pasta a rougher surface which allows the sauce to adhere to the surface better. The trouble is that the extrusion has to be slower and the die wears out so it needs to be replaced.

In the spirit of false economy, the majority of the industry switched to teflon-dies which don't wear out as much but the quality of the pasta suffers.

The difference between the two is totally obvious even to the naked eye, and certainly to the palate. Needless to say, the CC's favorite place carries the bronze-die extruded good stuff.

Garlic Scape Pesto (with Almonds)

This is truly delightful. Blend some garlic scapes, parmigiano-reggiano, olive oil and almonds, and a dash of lemon and serve with fettucine and a light rosé and you have a truly wondrous summer meal.

Mushroom Hunting in Central Park

The CC went mushroom hunting in Central Park with the New York Mycological Society.

Part educational, part forager's dream, we had a great morning.

Here are the CC's edible finds. (Please don't try this without experts around. Many many wild mushrooms are deadly poisonous. Part of the training is to identify the deadly ones.)

The recipe is a classic. Fry some garlic and a hot chilli pepper. Saute the mushrooms with salt and pepper. Add the spaghetti and parsley and serve topped with more black pepper and parm.

Purple-Bloom Russula (russula mariae)
Mild and peppery with the texture of oyster mushrooms.

Black-stained Polypore (meripilus sumstinei)
Intensely mushroomy. Can get leathery when older. Needs to be cooked longer. Steak-like texture and taste.

Spaghetti with Wild Mushrooms

Oyster Fest

Last night, the CC celebrated with an oyster-fest. The favorites (which were surprisingly consensual) were the local Fisher Island and Malpeques.

The Pacific Coast Roy Miyagi's were a close third.

The CC definitely has a taste for the more briny minerally Atlantic oysters rather than the Pacific ones which tend to be a little sweeter and smoother.

Sorrel Soup

This is one of those joys of nature. The power of pure technique over ingredients (there are only five - six if you count salt!)

It has a very strong lemony (from the sorrel) and peppery (from the black pepper) flavor.

Sometimes an egg is blended in at the last moment but that tends to undercut the sorrel taste so the CC skips it.

Ingredients

1 large red onion (diced fine)
2 potatoes (diced)
3 bunches sorrel (deveined if the veins are thick)

broth (or water)

salt
lots and lots and lots of black pepper

Recipe

Fry the onions at a medium-low heat. Do not hurry this step. Yes, it takes forever.

Fry the potatoes at the same heat. Again do not hurry this step. Drink a martini while it fries languidly.

Add the broth. Let it simmer for 20-25 minutes till the potatoes are cooked through.

Add the sorrel. It will wilt almost immediately changing color from a light green to a dark one.

Turn the heat off, and blend in batches. You can reheat the soup when needed.

Garlic Scapes

They are the immature stems of the garlic plant. They have a mild garlicky taste and a texture of french beans.

Please note that they are different from spring garlic or ramps.

East Coast Oysters

Why deny it? When the CC went to Boston, he went crazy over the local oysters.

The CC openly admits his biases - he loves briny and minerally ones which means East Coast. The West Coast ones lack character (relatively speaking.)

Only relatively local oysters were consumed, and the CC's favorite were the ones from Onset and Island Creek (both in Massachussetts.)

Briny slurpy goodness!

Foraging in Chinatown Markets

On a recent trip to Boston, the CC had a little time to kill in Chinatown. Needless to say, he went into the stores looking for interesting stuff.

Among the haul were dried rose buds, lily mushrooms and hedgehog mushrooms (along with shrimp crackers and crab crackers!)

You may have read the saga of the CC and the roses before.

The mushrooms are new. The CC had never heard of them. Clearly, they must be tried out. So they were bought, and the package enjoyed a free trip to Boston because there was no way in hell that the CC wasn't going to purchase everything right that minute.

It has been commented upon that the Chinatown markets act upon the CC a bit analogously to introducing a Snickers bar at a Fat Camp!

Lily Mushrooms
Hedgehog Mushrooms

Summer Corn Chowder

Ran into some terrific corn in Chinatown on the trip back from Boston, and decided to make a light evening meal of it.

Here's the recipe.

Scrambled Eggs with Ramps

How does the CC describe this?

The texture is like that of french beans but the taste is agressively like leeks and garlic. If you're a garlic fiend (and what true foodie isn't?) you'll be in hog heaven!

Bean Bag

The CC received these heirloom beans as a gift. He is thrilled, thrilled, thrilled!

Beans, beans, the magical fruit,
The more you eat, the more you toot.
(Source: Rancho Gordo.)

Lila Beans
Midnight Black Beans
Moro Beans
Santa Maria Beans
Vallarta Beans
Yellow Indian Woman Beans
Yellow Eye Beans

Green Borscht

The CC has been trying to replicate this ever since he first ate it last year.

Mere words cannot describe how delectable this soup is!

Ingredients

1 large red onion (diced fine)
1 head green garlic (diced fine)
1 bunch sorrel (stripped of stems, chopped)
2 potatoes (diced into smallish cubes)
1 bunch scallions (green and white parts, chopped into rounds)
1 large bunch fresh dill (chopped)

4 cups broth (substitute with water)

oil
salt
lots and lots and lots of black pepper
dash of vinegar

Recipe

The recipe is straightforward.

Fry the onions and garlic. Fry the potatoes. Add the sorrel and fry till it wilts. Add the broth, salt and black pepper. Simmer till the potatoes are soft (20 mins roughly.)

Add the scallion and dill towards the end. (The soup should be just lightly sour. Add a dash of vinegar if not sour enough.)

Scrambled Eggs with Sorrel (and Rye Toast)

Mmmmm mmmmm .... mmmmm. Lemony goodness!

Brighton Beach

The CC went out there for a birthday bash, and since he's a food-a-holic, he picked up sorrel, ramps, frozen vareniki, lots of dill and some great Russian dark rye bread.

They also have these walnut shaped pastries that are stuffed with walnuts. Quite delicious.

Even More Herb Lore

As pointed out here, water them when they are droopy.

If you water them in the morning, you can see the results of the non-droopiness in about 6-8 hours.

The real reason to water them in the morning is that all the spillage you make over the leaves (which you will) will evaporate and not cause fungal damage.

To Boldly Go Where No Spice Has Gone Before ...

Chipotle in your Bloody Mary - good idea.

Chipotle brewed in your beer - not such a good idea; one might even say terrible idea.

You have been warned!

Store Wars

Birthday Bash

The CC got what he wanted - a fun food-filled evening!

First, a Sri Lankan place where we gorged on fish rolls followed by chicken lamprais and a sri lankan crab curry, succulent and heavily redolent with black pepper both washed down with a peppery grüner veltliner.

Then, a frisky hazelnut gelato at GROM.

More Herb Lore

Mediterranean herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano, lavender, sage) really like slightly alkaline soil.

You can dry some egg shells, whiz them to a powder (= calcium carbonate) in your coffee grinder, and sprinkle the soil. They really love it.

Wine, Cheese, Coffee and ... Thievery

The Telegraph reports: UK recession: There's a new thief about...

Lock up your shaved white truffles! Throw a cordon sanitaire round the cashmere cardies! Don't take your eyes off those lovely Cath Kidston placema... – oops, too late, they've been half-inched by that respectable-looking woman in the Boden skirt with the Orla Kiely handbag. Forget reports about the rise of living on the never never and the re-emergence of a buy-now, pay-later mentality – huge numbers of us don't want to pay at all. Middle-class shoplifting is the new crime.

As the recession brings the City to its knees and cuts a swathe through the shires, an unlikely new criminal class is emerging. Former pillars of the community are pilfering balsamic vinegar from supermarkets.

The manager of a Somerfield supermarket in West Yorkshire, Richard Lay, recently declared that he was shocked by the new breed of shoplifters. "In one day our store detective caught two of them. One was a middle-aged supply teacher in a suit, stealing £3.30 worth of cheese and celery for his lunch. The other was a 63-year-old office worker in really smart clothes, who paid for some products but added things like a pack of ham and cat food to her basket. I've been in this business for 15 years and have never seen shoplifters like this. They say they are stealing to 'top up' their shopping because times are tough."

Tesco electronically tags pecorino in some stores.

The chains tend to security-tag items on a store by store basis, providing a fascinating snapshot of local mores. In Borders Books in Islington, The Opera Collection boxed CD sets are tagged; copies of Jade: Fighting to The End are not. Across the road in Waitrose, there are security caps on the bottles of Mersault but not the Chablis Premier Cru. The Pimms is capped, as is the Limoncello and Veuve Clicquot. The more downmarket Margarita Mix is uncapped; more puzzlingly, so is the Moët.

Pecorino is tagged but not the champagne.

Jamie Oliver, take a bow. You definitely popularized the right shit but to the wrong people, boy!

LOL.

BWAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHHHHH!!!

Cold Tomato-Cilantro Soup

These proportions may seem off but the soup is really meant to be served cold so you need to amp up the usual spices a bit because cold blunts the edge of the spices.

Incidentally, it also makes a terrific Bloody Mary!

(Source: Martha Rose Shulman.)

Ingredients

1-2 small bunches of cilantro
1 large red onion (diced)
3-4 cloves of garlic
tomato paste
2 tsp cumin (roasted, ground)
1 tsp red pepper flakes
1 28-oz tomato can
2 limes

salt and black pepper to taste

Recipe

The recipe pretty much proceeds as this except that you add the cilantro bundle and simmer for 30 mins.

Remove the bundle, blend in a blender and pass through a fine sieve.

Chill, and add the lime just before serving.

Reheating Seafood

In general, reheating stuff is hard.

The microwave, while ubiquitous and convenient, is overall pretty much an agent of disaster. Let us first recall what the microwave does. It fires radio waves that are absorbed by water, fat and sugar, and just like a baseball being thrown to an stationary ice-skater, this is turned into motion which at the molecular level is the same as heat.

But there are consequences attached to this. You are effectively only heating the water, fat and sugar portion and depending on statistical mechanics to transmit that energy to the other molecules. It works well enough for many things but not for all. For example, the surface tends to get crusty, or the fat and sugars start to caramelize around the edges, and seafood gets both nasty and tough.

Well, when that happens, it's back to being ol' school. Put up a double boiler. Underneath a bubbling pot of water, and on top a heat-resistant glass bowl with the food. Takes longer to heat but you are guaranteed great results.

Hors d'oeuvres for Hee-Haw!

If you're really pressed for time and/or are lazy, just roast some walnuts, pulse them lightly in a food processor, buy a goat-cheese log, roll the log in afore-pulsed walnuts and serve with crackers.

Yep, that's a lot of instructions but that's as close as the CC comes to "fast food".