Biji croquettes

Minced: 1 carrot, 1 stick celery, 1 onion, 4 cloves garlic.
Fried with spices until onions were transparent.
Added: 2 c biji, 1/2 c rice flour (regular), some soy sauce.
Adjusted seasonings, then added 1 egg and mixed in thoroughly.
Rolled apricot-sized lumps of this mixture in more rice flour (seasoned with salt/pepper/garlic), compressed into patties, then shallow fried in high-temp oil (at medium heat) on both sides until brown.

Notes: Rice flour + egg make an even better binder for croquettes than wheat flour + egg. I don’t think these would work very well for grilling, but they work fine shallow fried — try pan fried next time to conserve oil?

Mussels, take 2

We decided to elaborate on the previous dish of mussels in white wine, to see what happened.

Didn’t have any shallots, so instead I used a tablespoon or two of scallion compound butter, plus three pressed cloves of garlic. When this started smelling, I added the zest from one tiny orange (probably 2.5″ diameter), added a glass of chardonnay, then dropped in a half-kilo of mussels and simmered as before.

Served this, once again, with the lemon-garlic pasta, except this time I added the juice from the same orange. Also, the only bread we had lying about was some green onion bread from 99 Ranch last Monday.

Verdict: Shallots are distinctly superior to garlic in this dish; the sweetness is helpful.  The orange zest was nice, but there was too much of it. The bread was a terrible match, didn’t go at all.  On the other hand, the touch of orange juice was a lovely addition to the lemon-garlic pasta.

Next time try this: Brown 2 garlic cloves in butter (for bitterness), add 1/2 c shallots, cook until soft. Add only a teaspoon of orange zest (plus maybe a little bit of minced fennel tops), then wine and mussels. When mussels are done, pull them out; temper the broth with a quarter-cup or so of the green-box soy milk, warm again, then strain into a bowl. (Ideally this bowl would already contain some chiffonaded arugula and basil, plus finely sliced fennel bulb.) Serve it with good Western bread and lemon-orange-garlic pasta.

Eeeeeurgh.

I just finished a rather yucky culinary task. Hope it turns out to have been worth it.

So it turns out that what I thought was chicken breast was actually an entire boneless turkey thigh, cut into a single sheet of meat with the skin still attached. Upon finding this out, I took the opportunity to make something resembling porchetta: I rolled the meat up with fennel tops, garlic, salt and pepper, wrapped it in the skin, tied it with twine, and marinated in salted red wine before baking in the marinade. It smells marvelous; I peeled the skin off and sliced it thin for sandwiches, since Daniel’s a big fan of turkey sandwiches. He says it’s tasty.

Byproducts:  All the skin (dyed excitingly purple on one side) and a bit of fatty tissue that didn’t cook out; pan juices consisting of boiled wine, drippings, and the fat that did cook out. I put the former in a lump in the container with the sliced meat and refrigerated it. The latter I poured off into a pan, where it turned into a weird meat-and-wine gelatin with a thick layer of congealed fat on top. These two sets of leftovers clearly demanded a plan.

Boiled wine and gelatinous meat juices, flavoured with fennel and garlic? Sounded like a start for a vaguely-medieval pasta sauce. I figured I should try mincing the cooked skin and fat really finely, so that when cooked with caramelized onions it would basically disappear into a puddle of oil with tiny crispy protein bits in it. Well, I just did that, and EWWWW. Seriously. Not only did my fingers get greasy and smell like meat, the stuff was of a totally nauseating texture — somewhere between wood-ear mushrooms and, I don’t know, boiled bacon or something.  And it was in these big rubbery sheets with extensive purple stains and a disconcerting fennel smell, and the whole thing just seemed like someone’s dinner from Unknown Kadath.

Anyhow. I’ll post about it later. I hope it turns out well.

ETA: It totally was. This was a phenomenally rich, sweet, medieval-tasting sauce — a proof that a tomato-less pasta sauce can be as gorgeous as a well-caramelized ragú.

I first soaked a handful of raisins in my own heavily-spiced dark rum and some hot water. I took the gross minced stuff aforementioned, added the fat from the top of the drippings, and melted it all in a saucepan until it was sizzling. Then I added one whole largish onion, sliced thinly, and a teaspoon or so of minced rosemary; mushed the raisins and three or four cloves of garlic through a garlic press and added them too; and cooked the whole mess until the onions were brownish.  I then added the fennel-flavoured wine jelly (which de-jelled immediately) and another teaspoon of minced rosemary, threw in probably a tablespoon each of white pepper powder and fresh-ground black pepper and a pinch of cinnamon, and added a dash of wine and a little butter to make a reasonable sauce consistency. Served this with penne rigate, which took up the sauce beautifully and let the little bits of caramelized onion get into their tubes, and a glass of the 2007 Casillero del Diablo Cabernet Sauvignon.

Truly, a beautiful thing. I’m going to have to make a point of caramelizing onions with minced soaked raisins more often. Incredibly decadent-tasting, quite medieval in effect with all the sweetness and spices and no tomato or pepper.  The Cabernet, one of our faves, brought out the raisiny notes in the sauce just right. The slight funkiness of the meat fats (strongly-flavoured terrestrial meats always disturb me a tiny bit) was smoothed out by the sweet and sulfurous onion and the various spices. And all this from the parts of a marinated roasted boneless turkey thigh that one might reasonably discard… it was totally worth the gross fingers yesterday.

Then again, a culinary pleasure today is almost always worth an inconvenience yesterday. It’s one of those principles that keeps me going.

Things to do with meat

The recent spate of neighbors moving out has left us with a great deal of scavenging to do. In addition, a dinner we did back in October at my parents’ place left me with a whole lot of chicken bits. This forced me to figure out what to do with various kinds of scrap meat. Here I am recording some of the things I tried.

From 4 dozen bone-and-skin-on chicken thighs which we skinned, deboned, and de-fatted:

• Femurs go for stock. Note: next time do not use cabbage, as it emitted a noxious fume some time about 12 hours after initial boiling. Experimented with cracking the bones to allow the marrow to perfuse the liquid; this has certainly done no harm, though it hasn’t been cooked long enough for the bones to soften up yet. Will clarify in the fridge and then freeze, as before.
• Fat and skin chopped fine with an onion, rendered, then strained, yielded about 3 cups of very nice schmaltz and 2 cups of gribenes. Salted these immediately, then refrigerated them to use as crunchy pseudo-bacon bits. Note: Running the skins through some kind of food processor or grinder rather than chopping would be a much, much easier and less unpleasant experience, as well as yielding more uniform gribenes.

From ~2 lbs lean pork steaks, looking a bit gray and sketchy when I moved it from the fridge to the freezer:

• Cubed the frozen pork into 3 cm chunks for carnitas; added cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, frozen roasted peppers (3 jalapenos and about 2 poblanos), a few bay leaves, trimmings of an onion, and 8 cloves of garlic that had started to sprout. Cooked in slow-cooker on high until the meat is very tender, then picked out the meat and fried it (with fat and broth skimmed from the cooking pan) in a pan until brown. Daniel says it’s very good and not at all sketchy-tasting; I didn’t try any, as the taste of pork does not make me happy except in very small quantities. The cubes are now freezing individually, to be added to beans and such for a touch of pork flavour. The leftover broth is cooling; I’ll strain and freeze it in the morning, maybe eventually use it as a base for making Mexican rice or something.  I would use a pressure cooker to really sterilize this meat, given the choice, but I don’t have one. (ETA: I did use it to make Mexican rice, and it was very good and not excessively porky.)

From about 1 lb ground pork, frozen:

• 1/2 mixed with 2 cups bulgur into sort-of kibbeh patties, but seasoned with shallot, sage, and thyme. This was reasonably good, but not stellar.
• A large batch of (modified) ragù alla napoletana is on the stove right now; I’m letting it sit overnight to let the flavours mingle, and tomorrow will freeze in 2-serving-size increments. I got some top-notch organic celery at the farmers market, which was part of the impetus. Besides 6 stalks of this, also 2 onions and 2 carrots and olive oil for the soffrito; a large can of whole tomatoes plus 8 rather unfortunate-looking fresh romas, 2 cans of tomato paste, a good bit of scraped nutmeg, pinch of oregano, 1 T butter, a half-cup or so of over-oxidized red wine, and a whole lot of fresh ground black pepper.

Still have a block of what looks like frozen chicken breasts; not sure what to do with that.

Incidentally, I should remember that fennel tops, sliced thinly (greens and stalks), salted, and refrigerated, make a lovely salad dressing combined with lemon juice and Sciabica olive oil. Not what I’d planned to do with them, but improvisation once again wins out.

Pardon Our Dust

We’re just getting moved in. Probably no-one will see this, but we hope to have indexable and readable content relatively soon. Of the two people who will be posting here, one is an erstwhile geologist working for a solar energy company and the other is a microbiologist, so look for a lot of the following when and if the blog becomes functional:

• gardening chatter and pictures
• food chatter, pictures and recipes
• amateur anthropology and epistemology
• random cool sciencey stuff
• occasional political dribblings
• the intersections (such as food/agricultural politics, soil science, and culinary anthropology)