Archive for October, 2007
If It Ain’t Broke…
If It Ain’t Broke… Good Magazine on things that still work best when done the old-fashioned way.Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies, Tropical Ice Cream and Picatta di Pollo
A few recipes snuck into Mark Bittman Week that didn’t originate with him, making for one great success and two moderately good do-overs.
- Oatmeal Scotchies, another stellar recipe from The Amateur Gourmet, turned out the best of the bunch. My only problem? I didn’t realize that the recipe produced 4 dozen cookies. Luckily, Deja and Reg were willing to ruin their diet to help alleviate the surplus.
- Perfectly Creamy Homemade Banana Ice Cream, from Chowhound, lived up to its name, perhaps too well. The texture was amazing and it is easy to see why people rave about homemade ice cream. The taste? Well, the Banana flavor was too much, overpowering all the other delicious ingredients: macadamia nuts, chocolate, and rum. Lisa’s theory is that I didn’t wait for the bananas to ripen enough, which is a good enough sounding excuse to make me try again.
- Picatta di Pollo (Chicken cutlets with lemon and capers), another Chowhound recipe, jumped off the page when Lisa saw it and she’s been hounding me to make it ever since. I wasn’t really leaping at the opportunity to cook it, seeing as lemons and capers are at the bottom of my list as far as foods I want to consume, so Lisa took the initiative and made it herself. The end result was actually quite delicious. The chicken was a bit overdone thanks to the still-unraveling mystery that is our new oven, but it was certainly a dish we’ll be trying again.
Mark Bittman Week
Serious Eats has an ongoing feature called Cook the Book, in which they highlight recipes from a cookbook that they’re giving away that week. I was intrigued by the idea of doing recipes from a single source for an entire week and Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything has been my go-to cookbook for several years, so Mark Bittman Week was born. The intricacies of the schedules of myself and my wife as well as our varying levels of willpower led to Mark Bittman Week becoming Mark Bittman 1 3/4 Week, but that’s okay.
The results? A mixed bag, but largely positive, with several recipes becoming instant staples.
The food:
Baked Macaroni and Cheese (How to Cook Everything, pg 153) - This was the best of the pasta dishes I’ve made so far, which isn’t saying all that much. They’ve all been lacking, mostly due to poor interplay between the pasta and the cheese. It’s as if the cheese was an echo from previous dishes cooked in the same vessel. Maybe I’m falling on the Bittman side of the Bittman vs. Batali Saucing Debate, but then again, this was Bittman’s recipe.
Roast Chicken with New Potatoes (How to Cook Everything, pg 359) - I had just come off a miserable failure with James Beard’s recipe for Poulet Saute a l’Estragon and aside from the recipe’s casual instructions highlighting my weakness when it comes to reliance on strict instructions, my biggest problem was butchering the chicken. It was a slippery, brutal mess, and I could’ve gotten cleaner results if I had used dynamite. Still, chicken dishes were noticeably absent from my growing arsenal and so the idea of a whole roast chicken, carving required after cooking, was very appealing. The dish came out excellent, with perfectly cooked, moist and tender meat (something that can’t usually be said about chicken) and crispy potatoes, although I don’t understand why I had to have the potatoes elevated with the chicken on the rack…couldn’t they have benefited from the chicken fat below? The dish couldn’t really have been more simple, and so it’s elevated to staple status.
Broiled Chicken Wings (The Minimalist Cooks Dinner) - This recipe’s whopping three ingredients (chicken wings, extra virgin olive oil, tarragon) screamed “weekday meal” and it came through nicely in that regard. We’re still becoming acquainted with our new oven/stove, so the chicken turned out a bit dry. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed by moving down the rack or using the Low broiler setting, which seems like a contradiction in terms and just serves to make me nervous about undercooking.
Basic Meatloaf (How to Cook Everything, pg 495) - Is there a better dish with a less appealing name? One of the great things about the Bittman cookbook is that it gives you the basic recipes for some great dishes and then gives you several (sometimes several dozen) variations that you can make with only minor substitutions and alterations. The possibilities with meatloaf are seemingly endless, so it was only natural to get acquainted with the basics. The result was spectacular. We seriously considered throwing out the rest of the week and just eating meatloaf the rest of the week, perhaps the rest of our life. As a testament to Bittman’s recipe (or perhaps just the silliness of my recipe rigidity), the meatloaf came out perfect despite our figuring out that our instant read thermometer was broken well into the cooking process.
Chicken Adobo (How to Cook Everything) - Mark Bittman notes that many of his friends consider this the best chicken dish in the world. If I could have sex with my food (and really, no one’s stopping me, so maybe next time), I would make sweet love to this dish. It’s everything you could want from a dish: a return far in excess of the minimal investment of time and effort you put in. The only daunting part was that this dish required me to butcher a chicken again, which, after the James Beard incident, had me putting it off until I could no longer. I invested in both a paring knife and a boning knife just for the occasion, and it made the whole process infinitely easier. The knives cut through the skin with no effort, and the smaller blades made prodding for and finding the joints to sever a snap. I also used an alternate method for butchering chicken than the one I had previously gotten from the internet, this one found, where else, in Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The whole thing went smoothly, except for the part where I sliced open the side of my finger, but that was more a rookie mistake than any fault of the process. Lisa and I swooned over the dish, staring at each other in disbelief between bites. My only regret is that I boiled down the sauce a bit more (or just didn’t pour on as much) as I kind of made a soup at the bottom of our dishes. If I do that again, maybe I’ll just make more rice.
Cheese Quesadillas (The Minimalist Cooks Dinner) - a main course that got turned into a snack when friends came over on Saturday. It was ridiculously simple and only took about 15-20 minutes including both prep and cooking time. The only changes I would make would be to shred my own cheese as opposed to using preshredded, a shortcut Lisa had tried to use behind my back.
All-in-all, not a bad track record for a single cookbook, especially since most of the missteps can be attributed to me. Bittman Week will appear again soon, as he does podcasts for the New York Times under the Minimalist banner, and I’m anxious to make some of the simple, tasty dishes I’ve previously only envied from a distance.
Delhi’s Deputy Mayor killed in monkey attack
Delhi’s Deputy Mayor was killed recently by a horde of wild monkeys.American Lawbreaking
American Lawbreaking is the first of a series of articles by Tim Wu that examines those laws that are still on the books that are rarely, if ever, enforced.AVClub: 10 Films That Couldn’t Have Happened Without Wes Anderson
AVClub: 10 Films That Couldn’t Have Happened Without Wes Anderson
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Laughing German Midget
A German Midget Laughs at a Camel. From Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small.
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