Peeling and Cutting Butternut Squash

Someone once remarked that the best way to peel a butternut squash is to use a lathe.

The CC fully concurs.

However since most of us don't have a spare lathe sitting around — those of you that do can leave now! — here's how to cut it open in ten easy steps without cutting anything else open.

1. Slice off the top and bottom so that it can sit flat on a surface.
2. Put it on its side. Roll it around to see where it is most stable and using the chef's knife, make a length-wise incision. Press down. Let gravity do the work.
3. You will NOT be able to cut it into a half (most likely, sometimes it works.)
4. In that case, stand it up vertically. (This is where cutting the top and bottom works.) Now slice down vertically using the above incision as a guide. Again, let gravity do the work.
5. Congratulations. You have two halves. Start scooping out the stringly innards and the seeds.
6. Lay down the two flat halves face-down on a surface, and cut downwards with the knife letting gravity do the work.
7. This is the tricky part. You will have four quarters. They tend to be relatively stable when the triangular sections are facing upwards. Cut gently into eighths using the ridge as a guide again letting gravity do the work.
8. With a sharp vegetable peeler, cut the outer skin away from each of the eighths. This is straightforward since each one can be easily grasped. It's a lot of boring work but as they say, "Better boring than ER."
9. Wash, slice and dice.
10. Be thankful you don't run a restaurant.

Thanksgiving

Champagne with Pomegranates
♥ Bruschetta with Spicy Roasted Squash, Onion Jam & Feta ♣ Roasted Lamb with Rosemary, Caramelized Lemons & Black Pepper  ♦
Pear, Oyster Mushroom, Pomegranate, Pinenut & Prosciutto Stuffing
♦
Fingerling Potatoes with Figs & Thyme
♦
Cheese Course ♦ Chocolate

Things that make you go hmmm ...

Have you ever read a recipe in a cookbook and said to yourself, "There's no fuckin' way that can work!"?

Happens to the CC all the time. He then ends up yelling at the book which classifies him as one of the crazies but that's him, isn't it?

It comes with experience to all cooks even if you are not familiar with the cuisine in question. It's frequently just a matter of timings which have clearly not been tested and/or are more than a touch speculative. The amount of the sizes could also be all bollocksed to high heaven (tablespoons instead of teaspoons is all too common), or the proportions could be upsized and upchuck-worthy. (4 cups of water in 1 cup of flour will not yield a dough — it will yield a liquid mess!)

Here's a classic blooper from Lathika George's "The Kerala Kitchen".

(In the parlance of our time, this bitch be smokin' some serious crack!)

It's a classic egg curry found all over India. You hard-boil some eggs and separately make a curry. At the end, you cut the eggs length-wise and mix with the curry, re-heat and serve. Hardly complicated.

The trick that makes this specific recipe work is the same trick that makes classic French Onion Soup work. It requires a mass of onions to be browned and then a whole ton of spices and tomatoes are added to it. This turns into a dry curry.

The recipe in the book calls for the onions to be fried for 2-3 minutes and after that, the tomatoes to be cooked for two minutes.

In your fuckin' dreams, lady!

Even twenty minutes is too little for this to work. The last time the CC made a French Onion Soup, it took more than an hour for the onions to do their magic.

This is the principle of IST (Indian Stretchable Time) applied to cooking where five minutes really means fifty. (A lot of cultures have this principle encoded as a joke. There is even the concept of NST used by the "suitable in-crowd" and the CC will not translate that particular one.)

Now admittedly, this stuff is cooked at medium-high heat instead of the relatively gentle burble of the onions for the soup and the soup calls for a vastly larger number of onions but still. There is absolutely no fuckin' way in hell a mass of onions plus tomatoes is going to give up all that moisture in a total of five minutes. Incidentally, that's what frying really is — a precise way to remove moisture.

A significant fraction of this can squarely be blamed not on the author but on the editors. You needn't look towards the travesty of Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee. They are just the logical culmination of something that has been going on since Edouard de Pomiane in La Cuisine en dix minutes, ou l'Adaptation au rythme moderne.

We like speed. We like convenience. Cooking can be a chore even for the most committed amongst us. We are, alas, all too human.

Except that Pomiane was a genius. He clearly states what can and can't be hurried up and his entirely elegant solution for "hurrying up" is that if a recipe can't be hurried up, you shouldn't make it or serve it to your guests on a weeknight. Genius!

Pomiane's book is hands-down a work of a master and someone deeply steeped in the art of cooking. You will learn better from him how to make a classic sauce hollandaise than from all the textbooks and French chef's of the world. He has idiot-proofed something that is considered a "junior chef's challenge". (Science is why his technique works and since he was a physician and microbiologist, chances are that he understood in detail what he was doing.)

Editors, listen up! There is no shame in saying that something takes thirty minutes instead of three. There's no fuckin' shame in explaining in simple terms the science behind a recipe. People are smarter than you think and those that are likely to buy an obscure cookbook are much more likely to spend thirty minutes than three.

So don't try and push it. Not only do you get a travesty of a recipe but also you get an inedible fuckin' mess!

Isn't this entirely obvious?

So here's the classic egg curry from Kerala reworked for your benefit.

(And yes, the CC used a timer to time it as opposed to the gormless Ms. George who clearly did not test worth the proverbial Indian dam!)

Egg Curry

Ingredients

6 eggs (hard-boiled)

3-4 cups onions (very thinly sliced)
2 tomatoes (finely diced)

12 curry leaves
1 tbsp ginger (chopped into very thin slivers)
4 cloves garlic (sliced thin)
3-4 chillies slit lengthwise

1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chilli powder (or to taste)
4 tbsp black pepper
salt

Recipe

First make the eggs. Cover them in cold water. Bring them to a boil and turn the heat to low. Cook for 8 minutes. Remove and immediately dunk into an ice-bath to cool off.

You will get perfectly hard-boiled eggs without the yolk turning chalky and none of the green sulfurous ring around them.

Peel them and set aside.

Combine the turmeric, salt, chilli powder and black pepper with a few tablespoons of water to make a thick paste. Don't add too much water.

Heat up some oil and when heated (7 mins) dump in the mass of onions. Let fry on a medium-high heat until they change color but are not blackened. Roughly 17 minutes.

Twenty-four minutes and counting.

Dump in the curry leaves, ginger, garlic slit chillies, and let fry for a bit (3 minutes.)

Add the tomatoes and spice paste. You may need to add some water to make sure it doesn't burn. Let cook at a low heat for about 8 minutes until the tomatoes turn saucy.

We're up to 35 minutes now, you clueless bitch!

Cut the eggs length-wise into halves and add them yolk-side up and let them gently heat up to the sauce. About 3 minutes. Serve.

So nearly 40 minutes not counting the time to make the hard-boiled eggs.

Tomato-Flavored What Now?

We haven't had a good rant around these parts in a while so presenting ... tomato-flavored vodka.

The CC couldn't think past the obvious "bloody mary" but supposedly, it will "inspire" ideas.

Inspire away in the comments section!

Pepper Jelly

We love audience participation on this blog so the CC presents (a lightly edited) version of reader Marcus' post about preserving an excess of peppers in the South.

Recently, I sent a photo of some peppers to the CC. Upon seeing the cornucopia, he asked me to write a guest post. About what I wasn't sure but since my original email included mention of peppers and jelly, I thought I would write about the Southern tradition that is pepper jelly! 

Here in Arkansas, pepper plants grow from March until the end of October (our first freeze was last night). I start my peppers in January indoors and transplant them in late March or early April depending on the weather. Peppers produce fruit relatively quickly, so you can get a LOT of peppers from a single plant through the year, which makes food preservation a necessity (waste not, want not). The first photo is about 1/3rd of the peppers in my garden on the day these where picked, about a week ago. I measured 6.4 kg total. This is an assortment of cayenne, serrano, jalapeno, anaheim, poblano, bell, and a variety of other sweet peppers. 

Pepper jelly is one of those rare items I have never seen for sale (or maybe just never looked for) in a grocery store but with which I've been acquainted all my life as with eating certain wild game. We were given some wonderful pepper jelly last year — that's where it always comes from, you see, someone gives it to you — and were thus inspired to try our hand at making some. Neither the wife nor I had ever made the sweet concoction, so it was a first for us both. The second photo is a shot of the final product. This photo is actually all the jars from two batches. 

Last night while filling jars from the second batch, I had the forethought to pull some off for later. It can take two weeks for jelly to set but I wanted to try a bite sooner. I put the small portion on my eggs this morning. It's quite a bit hotter than most people would make, but I like the heat. Very delicious! My 1-year old insisted on having some on her eggs as well (she refuses to be left out of anything). She would take a bite, cough, drink some milk, then take another bite! 

(Edit from the wife) Because this recipe is high on the heat factor, the recipe card is now labeled "Hot Pepper Jelly", instead of Pepper Jelly. In future batches, I may deseed the peppers or select fewer of the hot varieties so we have options on the shelf, similar to mild, medium and hot salsa.
 

For the record, the CC has only one thing to add, "Go, go, go, little baby!" (for the heat-loving factor.)

On the Love of Specialized Instruments

The CC owns something called a "bird beak paring knife". It's a paring knife with a curved beak (presumably like that of a bird.)

Mostly it's used for carving stuff - you know, edible roses and stuffed cherry tomatoes. The kinda fussy stuff which the CC generally doesn't get to very often.

It originally came in a package set and has been gathering dust ever since.

The CC has finally found a very good use for it. It's perfect for de-seeding and de-pithing the inside of a bitter melon when you want to stuff it.

The stuffing for this recipe is from Kashmir. Specifically, it seems to be a relatively modern vegetarian adaptation of what must inevitably originally have been a Mughal meat dish.

That it is a vegetarian response to the original marriage of Mongol and Persian traditions to Indian spices can hardly be in doubt. That it happens to feature the altogether New World potato means that it can be no more than 250-300 years old (long enough for the potato not only to cross the shores but enter into a routine upper middle-class vocabulary.) There's a variant that uses paneer which may be marginally older. (And then there are hybrids which are just the normal evolution of any dish.)

Even if you don't end up stuffing bitter melons, do make this recipe. It would be amazing stuffed in just about anything - peppers, tomatoes, zuccini, squash. It's all about the spices.

Several versions are presented below. Feel free to pick from any of them because the magic is in the texture and the spices. In fact, the CC guarantees that you will have to stop yourself from stuffing yourself just from the stuffing.

Just for full disclosure, this recipe is definitely "fussy" and time-consuming. Its origins clearly lie when emperors had armies of cooks from whence it filtered down into homes with cooks from whence it filtered down into regular homes where the wives stayed at home all day and were bored. It's not going to jive well with modern sensibilities but it made a lot of sense when the CC was cooped in all-day after a pesky little hurricane.

Q: What does he do when he's bored?
A: He stuffs fuckin' karela's.
E: Nice!

For the modern-day readers' convenience, short-cuts are suggested but you will definitely miss out on some of the textural element in the dish.

Ingredients

8 bitter melons (prepared - read below)

Stuffing

1 large red onion
4 green chillies (finely diced)

Meat or Potatoes

3 large potatoes
or
2 potatoes
1 cup crumbled paneer
or
2 cups minced meat

Spice Mix 1 (Whole)

1 tbsp fennel seeds
2 tbsp nigella
2 tsp turmeric
2 tsp chilli powder
2 tsp dried ginger (substitute by fresh)
3 tbsp amchur (dried green mango powder)

Spice Mix 2 (Ground fine)

2 tbsp fennel seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds
2 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tbsp garam masala
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds

Recipe

First prepare the bitter melons. You need to scrape them clean till they are pale green and look like naked dead skinned green mole rats. Using a very sharp paring knife, cut them length-wise gently making sure that you don't slice them down the middle. This is harder than you think because every once in a while you will encounter a hard seed. Have no fears! Jump over the seed and continue. The problem will fix itself.

Gently with your fingers separate it along the edges. Be careful of both ends. They have a tendency to break. Using the bird-beak knife (or your fingers), gently reach inside and start scraping away at the seeds and the pith. This will take a few tries but as it does you will notice that it becomes easier and easier. (This was a surprise to the CC!)

There are pesky seeds at either end of the length of the bitter melon every once in a while. It's quite tough but you can do it! They must be removed.

You will have eight stuffable bitter melons which you need to thoroughly rinse and set aside until they dry.

When dry, thoroughly salt the inside and the outside of the bitter melon. Set aside in a colander for at least an hour. At the end of the hour, you will notice that the bitter melon has turned very very soft and flexible because the salt has changed its celullar structure and drawn out quite a bit of the bitterness. Thoroughly wash the melons both inside and outside one more time and set aside until they are dry.

Meanwhile, while the bitter melons are salting, prepare the stuffing.

The potato needs to be diced into what the French would call a small dice. You could do a brunoise but then you would really have to be extraordinarily bored. (Crumble the paneer with your hands into tiny irregular pieces.)

Hurrah, meat-eaters! You have something over the granola's after all. You don't need to do anything. All the prep above is doing is simulating the texture of ground meat.

The onion also needs to be diced really fine. So the meat-eaters can't really escape from the prep after all. Welcome to the jungle, my friends!

(Since the CC promised short-cuts, you can just dice the potatoes and do a quick mash with a potato masher in the pot and let cook for an additional 6-7 minutes. However, not the same. Be aware, be strong!)

In a large shallow pot with a lid, fry the onions and green chillies till the onions are translucent. Add the first set of whole spices, and fry for about 30 seconds. Add the potatoes (or meat) and fry for about 6-7 minutes till it changes color. Add water and cover.

Let cook until done. It's different for different versions. At least 15 minutes for either one, and possibly a tad more for the vegetarian versions.

Uncover and let cook till it's relatively dry. Toss in the second set of spices and mix thoroughly.

Let the stuffed mixture cool down.

Stuff the bitter melons. (Try not to eat all the stuffing. You will attempt anyway. You will be hunted down like the animals that you are by your own families so beware!)

You can pre-prep this recipe upto this point and let the stuffed vegetables sit in your refrigerator for a few days.

In a shallow skillet with a lid that can hold all the bitter melons, heat up some oil. When it is shimmering add the stuffed bitter melons gently face-down and let them fry for about 7 minutes at medium-high heat. Turn them over gently with a pair of tongs and let them fry for an additional 4-5 minutes. Gently add about a cup of water and cover the lid. Let cook for about 10 minutes on a very low flame till they are completely tender.

Serve with some parathas and some raita.

What a Wonderfully Odd Fact!

Sometimes the best part of an article is a throwaway sentence that illuminates so much.

The process of sun-drying shrimp was introduced to Louisiana over a hundred years ago by Chinese and Filipino immigrants who saw the shrimp-rich region as an opportunity for export.
 

How wonderfully amazing!

And then local cooks started incorporating the concentrated flavors of the dried shrimp into their gumbo!