Mr. Eggplant's journey from Providence, Rhode Island, to Brooklyn, New York starts as a relaxing day at the beach but ends in pure horror. Pure, delicious horror! After viewing the eggplant carnage, try out The Brooklyn Kitchen's recipe for ratatouille.
Previously
Photo of the Day: Eggplant Man
Photographs take by Elise Bauer
You don't need a fancy smoker to make great barbecue in your backyard. With the help of Hank Shaw at Simply Recipes, you can learn how to turn your kettle grill into a smoker. Just add water (in pans) along with a mix of charcoal and water-soaked wood chips beneath the grate. The meat should only lay on the side of the grate above the water pans. You'll have to periodically check the coals and pay close attention to the temperature to make sure it's low enough for a long, slow cook, but judging from these mouthwatering photos, the results will be worth it.
Related
How To Build a Cheap-Ass Grill for Under $10
Grilling Smackdown: Lump Charcoal vs. Briquettes
Gas vs. Charcoal Grilling: Where Do You Stand?
Next time you drive around town running errands, multitask by cooking dinner at the same time! In your car! Ben Carter cooked salmon en papillote by placing a salmon-filled parchment paper and foil pouch in a "cozy spot between the exhaust manifold's heat shield and the alternator." After 40 minutes, he was rewarded with a perfectly cooked salmon filet.
I'm not sure I'd want to try this with my car in fear of fish goo getting into places it shouldn't, but if I change my mind I'll have to pick up Manifold Destiny, a book dedicated to the art of cooking on your car engine.
Related
Don't Have an Oven? Use Your Car
Survey says ...
An article in the New York Times today (Recipe Deal Breakers: When Step 2 is 'Corral Pig') is all about that point at which you slam the book closed and scream THEY WANT ME TO DO WHAT?! It prompted some discussion here at Serious Eats HQ.
Raphael: "If you don't own a food processor when the recipe calls for one, you're SOL. Or homemade ice cream. Most people don't have ice cream machines."
Robyn: "Anything that calls for heating sugar to a specific temperature. Or calls for whipping things in a mixing bowl, since I don't have a stand mixer. I don't really deep-fry, either. Oh, and I don't have a grill."
Alaina: "Baking in general. I'm not a baking person. Pie crusts and such? Bread? No."
Adam: I'll be a bit more specific than my colleagues. There once was a meatloaf recipe I pulled from Martha Stewart's website. The minute I got to "1 stalk celery, strings peeled, cut into 1/2-inch pieces," I was done. "She expects me to peel the damn strings out of the celery?" I thought. "How do you even do that!? No way."
So, serious eaters, what are your recipe deal breakers?
Serious Eats community member and food blogger Kevin Weeks shares his tips on cooking for a crowd at NPR's Kitchen Window: "Catering a large event yourself isn't impossible. But it does require careful, even obsessive, planning. My cutoff point is 25 guests unless I have access to a professional kitchen and have professional help. And even then I'll only do it with the right menu.”
Matt at 37signals shares three food tips: make your own soda, order the dish named after its restaurant, and use fresh garlic.
Frustrated by differing advice, Rob Manuel at b3ta tests and documents four methods for poaching eggs, with results ranging from "I wouldn't feed this to a dog," to "It's bloody perfect." So what's the secret to making perfect poached eggs? Plastic wrap, possibly. [via David Jacobs]
Related: How to Poach an Egg tutorial video by cia_b. View all of cia_b's egg cooking tutorial videos.
Thinking of buying a fancy rice cooker but don't know which kind to get? Over at Just Hungry Maki Itoh posted a great FAQ about rice cookers regarding size, features, and price.
The Los Angeles Times tells you how to salt-roast, a cooking method that combines steaming and roasting and results in food that tastes intensely of its own natural flavors. It's easy to do in your own home; just make sure you have a bucket of salt on hand.
Last night I cooked a really tasty dinner with farmers' market–purchased ingredients without using a cookbook. It was a real Alice Waters moment, and I must admit I felt triumphant (and full) afterwards. I didn't really set out to channel Alice Waters this weekend. It just happened.
Although I love food blogs, I tend to stay away from recipe blogs because the part of my brain responsible for cooking skills is about the size of an emaciated fruit fly. But when I came across The Pioneer Woman, I couldn't look away. I mean, I could've looked away, I just wouldn't have been happy about it. My middle finger locked onto my mouse's scroll wheel as vibrant step-by-step photos of recipes for butter-laden meats and sweets (and I mean really step-by-step, like dedicating three photos to chopping up sticks of butter) and humor-laced commentary whizzed by on my monitor. Thank you, oh Pioneer Woman, for without you I wouldn't have the urge to whip up a "testosterone beef fest" sandwich.
Spotted via Laughing Squid, we love this video interview of food anarchist and supper-club host Marc Powell, who presides over a regular meeting of like-minded San Franciscans who pool their talent, curiosity, and food budgets to come together and make a great meal. The interview is care of the excellent Ryan is Hungry site, which offers many food-related clips in its video archive. Well worth checking out.
An amusing ersatz Swedish cooking video with a satiric nod to the late Julia Child.
If you'll humor me, I've got two more burger-related items for all my Meatheads out there today, and then I'll give the beef stuff a rest.
The first is a set of photos from Joshua "Meatwave" Bousel that shows that it really isn't that difficult to grind your own before grilling your own. Those are Bousel's pix above; click on them to view the rest of the series.
Will the heat of the kitchen force the Amateur Gourmet to seek professional help? Find out as Adam Roberts battles a lobster in an attempt to make the tasty crustacean into lobster rolls—with help from Rebecca Charles (Pearl Oyster Bar).
Friend of Serious Eats Matt Haughey, who happens to be Grand Poobah of the community weblog MetaFilter, bought a new grill for his backyard recently and asked his loyal followers for tips on learning how to use it.
There are lots of recommendations of books to buy in the thread, many of which don't just have chapters on grilling but are all about it, but the best thing is that people are also sharing both their favorite recipes and their best tips. Here's a bit from my favorite response, from Mr Gunn:
One method taught to many people when they're just starting out is to hold your hand out flat, palm down, fingers and thumb parallel. Feel the firmness of the muscle between your thumb and first finger. Close to the bone of the first finger is the firmness of a well done steak, and as you move out to the side of the muscle, it gets softer. Medium is about half-way out. I don't know if this helps, because you still have to get a feel for it, but some people use it.
Photograph from iStockPhoto.com
I love the "Listening With" features in the New York Times even when they don't have cooking references, but this quote by the great jazz singer Dianne Reeves made me fall in love with her. "Explaining how she likes to cook, she said, "It's the same thing with how I sing. I work with my ear to try to make it feel right, or I just keep changing it until I like the way it tastes."
Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes just emailed:
I thought you might want to see this video on preparing (skinning) a rabbit to cook, by an American working in a 3-star restaurant in Paris.
The idea of knowing where your food comes from has been a huge topic in the last year, and if you're a fan of wild hare, this video will certainly leave you with no illusions.
Past the jump, the footage. Not for the faint of heart. Proceed with caution.
Cathy Erway on the allure of cooking together:
... we can hopefully relate to the experience of getting much closer to someone through the uniquely messy experience of cooking together. Would Annie Hall really have been the 31st greatest American film ever made without that scene in which Annie and Alvy chase evasive lobsters around her apartment floor with the pots all bubbling? Surely it would have slipped out of the top 50.
Julia Child once said, "If you do not have a good wine to use, it is far better to omit it, for a poor one can spoil a simple dish and utterly debase a noble one," but in today's New York Times Julia Moskin says cheap wine works just fine.
She did a blind taste test of three risottos, each made with a different red wine. The most expensive was a $70 Barolo, the cheapest was a Charles Shaw cabernet sauvignon Trader Joe's shoppers know as Two-Buck Chuck. Barolo is "made entirely from the nebbiolo grape, is a legendary Italian wine; by law, it must be aged for at least three years to soften its aggressive tannins and to transform it into the smooth aristocrat that fetches top dollar on the international wine market." Not only did the risotto made with Two-Buck Chuck come out on top, but none of the judges had the risotto made with Barolo as their top choice.
Last week I wrote about cooking with beer, so today it seems only fair to point to Josh Rubin of the Toronto Star on pairing food with beer with Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver, who "enjoys going toe-to-toe with sommeliers when it comes to food pairings. Cheese is a favourite tool for his battles, but he has also used stews, cassoulet, seafood and dessert."I've had some Iron Chef-style events where I'll be matching foods with beer, and the sommelier will be matching the same foods with wine," says Oliver. "But beer against wine is like fighting someone with one hand tied behind their back. I haven't lost yet, and the people in the audience doing the judging are usually wine people or friends of the sommelier." You could say no one's more qualified to speak on the subject than Oliver, who's written a book about it titled The Brewmaster's Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food.
It's also no coincidence that this story is from the Toronto Star—the city has a restaurant called the Beerbistro, where not only are 80% of menu items cooked with beer, but there is a "suggested beer pairing with every menu item along with a separate beer menu that includes product backgrounds, explanations of beer styles, and beer tasting notes, assists diners in exploring our large and carefully-researched selection of beers." They have twenty beers on tap, hundreds in bottles, and will recommend beer pairings to your tastes beyond what's on the menus. Chowhounders speak well of their food!
Mary Vuong of the Houston Chronicle talks to chefs and brewers about how cooking with beer can enhance the flavor of food. But if beer is so great to cook with or in food pairings, why does everyone always choose wine? "Marketing, Wagner replies. "Beer historically has done a lousy job" of selling itself as a serious beverage. People associate it with hot dogs, pizza, buffalo wings, bikini-clad women, juvenile humor, sporting events — nothing that suggests you stop and appreciate the drink."
All photographs by The Paupered Chef
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn last weekend, people began to stick their heads out of their doors and windows. They went out nose first, suspicious and hopeful, like dogs. The weather reports, pipelined in from weather.com or cable television, were reporting warm weather. By mid-morning it was confirmed. People were walking their pets up and down the sidewalks, and the cafe on the corner had a chalkboard sign outside with a tentative joke about sunshine. On Friday, the high reported in my ZIP code was 34, just enough to melt the snow so it would turn to slick ice overnight. By early afternoon Saturday, the temperature had reached 56 degrees.
When there is a warm day in March, spring recipes begin to seem practical. Asparagus, spring’s tender manifestation, has indeed been showing up in produce markets—not gray and woody, but green and flexible.
"While fish consumption has climbed steadily since 1970, rising by more than one-third, averages are still low enough to conclude that some Americans (maybe many) don't eat fish at all, or rarely. And those who do more often leave the cooking to others, since surveys show that fish is savored in restaurants twice as often as it is served at home." Most of us are apparently too scared to prepare fish ourselves since we don't understand how to do it, so the Philadelphia Inquirer's Marilynn Marter talked to chefs Guillermo Pernot and Anthony Goodwin and came up with thirteen key points to choosing and cooking fish right, like cooking to what traditional instructions consider slightly underdone ("less dry and flaky, and slightly translucent at the center"), and only salting after the fish is cooked in order to preserve moisture.
I've kind of gained a reputation in my circle of friends as someone who can't cook, which I feel is unfair—it's not that I can't do it, just that most of the time I don't think it's the effort because buying ingredients for just one person is expensive and anyway there are so many great and affordable places to eat within a five block radius of my apartment. And, you know, washing dishes really sucks. At least I know I'm not alone; Emily Shartin of the Boston Globe, has a piece today on singling out meals to cook for just one:
Take-out meals, microwave dinners, and prepared foods are readily available these days, so cooking a homemade meal for one can seem like too much trouble or can seem even more expensive to make than a prepared meal. There is the challenge of buying ingredients -- many shoppers lament the fact that fresh vegetables are not sold in smaller portions. There are fears about a lack of kitchen skills. There is the time commitment. It all adds up to the view that it can be easier, even for families, to order out. And of course, there are the dirty dishes.
In reality, it's a lot of effort," says Andrew Urbanetti, who is the chef de cuisine at Lumiere in Newton and teaches several classes, including one called "Cooking for One" at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. But he and others believe the effort is worth it. While a homemade meal might not always cost less, it is likely to be better for you. "You know exactly what goes into your food," says Urbanetti, who also believes it is important for people to have basic kitchen skills."
Photo credit: iStockphoto.com
The best recipe I own came from my mom. It was passed down to her from her mom, a first-generation Polish woman who, from what I remember, never actually cooked. Unfortunately, the recipe isn't from the Eastern European "homeland." And sadly, it wasn't lovingly passed down by my great grandmother. No, it's a recipe for Swedish meatballs.
And better yet, there's not one ingredient in it that's fresh. (Actually, that's a lie—the meat is fresh, thank goodness.) But why is that better? Maybe it's because out of all the figs I stuffed with gorgonzola, all the expensive pounds of gouda-goat I've charged to Visa, out of all the farm-fresh tomatoes I've diced for bruchettas, there's some indescribable satisfaction in knowing that the best appetizer recipe I own consists of one packet of Lipton onion soup mix, one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, and one chicken-flavored bouillon cube. There's a teeny nugget of pride in knowing that what people are lapping up involved no chopping, grating, or reducing. And that this recipe, one that's totally unnatural (and let's not even talk about the sodium content), is the one that I'm asked to share the most, out of all the expensive, time-consuming, silly little dishes I have served. And it costs less than $10 to make.
Regina Schrambling, on tricks to cooking for two: "The best thing about dinner for two is that you can brave dishes that would be too labor-intensive and time-consuming for a crowd. You can fry up little corn cakes to top with smoked salmon and crème fraîche, or skillet-roast a whole duck cut in half, or sauté two skate wings that can go from skillet to plate without waiting for four or six more to be cooked. But when you want a night to remember, you can pull out more stops and spend a little more money. In polling coupled friends on their ideal menu with wine but no cliché roses, I found the ingredients and dishes always differed, but the underlying philosophy was the same: special but simple."
Other highlights:
Chickenjoy, eel rolls: Pop goes the fast food, by Susan LaTempa and Leslie Brenner: "The new generation of chains, with names such as Santouka or Pinkberry or Pollo Campero, has a youthful pop-culture aesthetic, with food that's a bit distinctive and instantly likable. They've got bubble. They've got swirl. But what do they have to eat? And how does each measure up?"
(I think Pinkberry is overpriced but wow, their green tea yogurt really is delicious; it's light, clean and has that special tang you only get in Asian yogurts for some reason. Also they're either dead wrong about Jollibee's Chickenjoy or the US franchises have a lot to answer for, Chickenjoy is incredibly tasty and crispy in its native market and Jollibee is the biggest fastfood chain—the Philippines is one of the very few markets McDonald's is in that it doesn't dominate.)
"Swirled in soufflés, pooled under pastries, frozen as ice cream, crème anglaise sexes up almost any dessert." Amy Scattergood explains how to make the simple stove-top custard that accompanies many a delicious dessert at your favorite fancy restaurants.
Erin Hartigan's Sure-Fire Rules for Sparks in the Kitchen is about the do's and don'ts of cooking as a date activity: "When it comes to cooking together, an otherwise compatible new couple can break down faster than a sauce sabayon. The annals of my own dating history are singed with kitchen mishaps. During a triple first-date cooking night at my best friend's place, each couple helped produce a meal of chicken pot stickers, spaghetti with meat sauce and Key lime pie. Nobody wanted to take control; we socialized as pasta turned to mush and pots boiled over. What began as a promising soiree ended early, with six scowls and three inedible courses."
Other highlights:
In A Drink to Make You Feel Your Oats, Walter Nicholls ventures (25 miles northeast of... Manhattan? What?) to Blue Hill at Stone Barns to feature their popular winter cocktail: Infused Vodka With Oats and Honey. The recipe makes 36 ounces and is best consumed between its second and fourth week chilling in the refrigerator.
Tony Rosenfeld offers up an easy Valentine's Day menu for two, from appetizer through dessert: "Much of the rest of the meal can be made ahead, which hits another one of my rules of engagement. It's not that you or I couldn't do the Emeril thing and make amusing chitchat while we prepare a meal, but on such a relationship-focused night, it's nice (and a heck of a lot less stressful) to sit down and relax together while dinner is cooking."
Today's à la carte: "How many times have you seen a recipe instruct you to “season with salt and pepper”? This is incorrect! You season with salt, but you flavor with pepper. Yes, pepper is a flavoring, not a seasoning. And it’s only one of the flavorings used in French cooking."
Tikka in No Time: "Food manufacturers and even local grocers are now tempting people to cook easy Indian—a concept that once was oxymoronic—through the use of time-saving products."
Easy-Bake Ovens are not traditionally marketed to boys. The commercials (see below) are festive and feminine, with girls grinning ear to ear as they bake mini pizzas and cupcakes with a high-powered light bulb. The colors on the box are pink, the spokesperson’s voice is female. A little boy watching a commercial for an Easy-Bake Oven should roll his eyes or make a fart noise with his mouth to assert his masculinity. Unless that little boy leans closer to the screen, scratches his head and wonders how he can tell his mother or father that he doesn’t want a bicycle for Hanukkah or a Light Bright. He wants an Easy-Bake Oven so he can learn to cook.
Foodblogs, as a rule, are borne of passion. I have explored pizza and hamburgers in passionate and mind-numbing detail on Slice and A Hamburger Today, respectively, but if I were forced to create yet another foodblog, I'd depart from the path of iconic American foods and look toward the East. That's because my third-favorite food is the Japanese-style curry known as "curry rice." For what it's worth, I actually did create a third blog to explore my other food passions, but it was short-lived; this ode to curry rice is from that site, but I thought I'd share it with you here on Serious Eats, as it's a perfect wintertime comfort food.
Jason Perlow started celebrating Hanukkah ahead of time this year. His early kick-off is to your benefit: Follow along with this step-by-step how-to, and make some flavorful potato pancakes for your own festivities. Republished here courtesy of Off the Broiler.
This last Sunday, my wife Rachel’s family got together and had a Hanukkah party a week early. We were given the task of making the latkes, the venerable Ashkenazi-Jewish pan-fried potato pancakes.
It's so easy to bash Rachael Ray, so maybe that's why I found David Carr's column in yesterday's Times so interesting.
My two favorite lines from the story: "But Ms. Ray's folksy approach belies the sophistication of her message. She is part of the cut-to-the-chase genre of media, like Lucky, Domino and Real Simple magazines, and their success is built on this fact of modern life: if people are more secure economically, it is only because they are working longer and harder than ever before." And: "Ms. Ray's recipes may call for store-bought turkey loaf she is really trafficking in the ultimate modern luxury: time."
Carr's piece was really the first one I've seen that tries to place the Rachael Ray phenomenon in context without declaring that she's some kind of cultural cooking antichrist.
I don't know Rachael Ray (I met her once at a party, and she was pleasant and friendly in a hopped up, caffeinated way), and sure I wish her taste and take on food were more sophisticated, but the bottom line is that Rachel Ray empowers lots of people to prepare meals for themselves and their family without feeling overwhelmed or overmatched.
So maybe it's time to move on and let Rachael be Rachael. If she's not for you, that's okay. She clearly taps into something primal in her audience's psyche, and that is clearly good enough for Rachael and her millions of fans. And you've got to give her credit for not trying to be something she's not. There's not an ounce of pretension in her shredded cheese bag.
She's not the cultural food antichrist. There are plenty of famous, successful people in our culture who are far more deserving of our scorn and derision. Like, say, Paris Hilton.
The Times' Kim Severson wrote a nuanced profile of Rachael a few months ago.
Pableaux Johnson wrote rapturously about cherries and other fruit in the Hood River Valley in Oregon, and though I've never been there, his story had me thinking about a roadtrip.
The folks at Chefshop have been sending me many reminders about the fantastic cherries they will start shipping from Batch Family Farm in eastern Washington. I know you can get cherries at your local market starting right about now, but the Batch cherries are something special. I've had the Lapins, which are juicy and huge, with a deep cherry flavor. This year Chefshop is also selling BFF Sweetheart cherries, which are a new strain of sweet cherries first grown in British Columbia. These are picked right after the Lapins, in mid to late July.
These cherries are expensive (about 17 bucks a pound with shipping), but worth every penny.
Meg Hourihan wrote a lovely, lyrical post about successfully creating a dish without using a cookbook that any self-taught cook (like me) can relate to.
Fairly often my wife gets fed up with our eating regimen (lots of grilled cheese sandwiches (made with great cheese or sometimes Kraft Deluxe American slices), salads, hot dogs and burgers) and demands that I make her a home-cooked meal. So yesterday I bought a container of roasted vegetables at Fairway, one of my local gourmet stores, to use as a sidedish with the boneless pork roast I was going to make. After liberally salting the meat with kosher salt I browned the outside of the pork roast in a saute pan on top of the stove in some olive oil and a little butter. Put the butter in after the olive oil has heated up or else the butter will burn. I then put the pork roast into a 350 degree preheated oven. I cooked the small (a pound and a half) pork roast until an internal meat thermometer reads 155 degrees. Then I put the roasted vegetables in the saute pan I had browned the pork in. I then put in the pan three or four tablespoons of Saba, cooked grape juice made from Trebbiano grapes, the same ones they use to make balsamic vinegar. My friend and co-author Dave Pasternack (chef-partner of Esca) calls Saba Italian maple syrup. It has a fruity, sweet, surprisingly complex flavor, and Saba makes just about anything taste better, especially pork and roasted vegetables. Cook the saba down until it's just about the consistency of maple syrup. Slice the pork roast, dip the slices in the saute pan to soak up the pan juices and saba, and then plate the vegetables. You're ready to eat. My wife loved the meal. I did, too, and now I get to order pizza tomorrow. Out of the frying pan into the pizza oven, so to speak. Saba is available at many gourmet grocery stores. It's also available online from the Zingerman's catalogue.
New York Times food reporters Kim Severson and Julia Moskin (full disclosure here; I know both of them and the three of us have broken bread together) had a front-page story today detailing the growth of meal assembly centers around the country. People looking to save time and money and still put what can only loosely be called a "home-cooked meal" on their family table go to one of these centers and make "12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200." I wonder what Alice Waters, who has been saying for years that the disappearing "family meal" is one of the chief causes of the de-evolution of family life in this country, thinks about these centers, which use preassembled ingredients from mega-food suppliers like Sysco. I suppose it is a form of progress that people do sit down together at a family meal. But if they are serving pre-assembled meals (made of substandard ingredients) that are only technically homemade it seems to me these stressed out folks are only exchanging one problem for another. That is, they are eating pre-fab food assembled from lousy ingredients TOGETHER. What would be interesting to find out is whether there are centers where you can come and assemble meals made of locally sourced, responsibly grown foodstuffs to serve at home. That would truly represent progress. I think even Alice Waters would admit that. That kind of operation would probably cost more than $200 for the 12 dinners for six and would by definition segment the assembled meal market.
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