edibleunknown
nobody loves you like we do
Supercook is a pretty darn awesome site, where you enter the ingredients you have and it gives you a list of recipes you can make with them. It assumes you have water, salt, pepper, and sugar (sugar is a pretty big one), so I've been trying to find the largest number of recipes for the smallest number of ingredients. So far, it's butter & onions (12 recipes)...
Update: make that butter and flour (79 recipes).
Recently, I had someone email and ask, why do you call yourself a masochist? Do you like pain? And the answer is... "Yes. I love pain. The pain that is imparted by our friend Wilbur Scoville". (Actually, all that guff about someone actually emailing me is just a shameless pretense to bring up the Scoville scale.)
The Scoville scale measures how much burny you're going to get on your tongue from eating said chile. Yes burny is a word! Why not?
Since I love me some code tags, I'm going to put our version of the Scoville scale in them. Take that, Web 2.0!
15,000,000–17,000,000 Pure capsaicin 9,100,000 Nordihydrocapsaicin 2,000,000–5,300,000 Standard U.S. Grade pepper spray 855,000–1,041,427 Naga Jolokia 350,000–577,000 Red Savina Habanero 100,000–350,000 Habanero chili, Scotch Bonnet 100,000–200,000 Rocoto, Jamaican Hot Pepper, African Birdseye 50,000–100,000 Thai Pepper, Malagueta Pepper, Chiltepin Pepper, Pequin Pepper 30,000–50,000 Cayenne Pepper, Ají pepper, Tabasco pepper 10,000–23,000 Serrano Pepper 7,000–8,000 Tabasco Sauce (Habanero) 5,000–10,000 Wax Pepper 4,500–5,000 New Mexican varieties of Anaheim pepper 2,500–8,000 Jalapeño Pepper 2,500–5,000 Tabasco Sauce (Tabasco pepper) 1,500–2,500 Rocotillo Pepper, Sriracha 1,000–1,500 Poblano Pepper, Texas Pete sauce 600–800 Jalapeno Tabasco sauce 500–2500 Anaheim pepper 100–500 Pimento, Pepperoncini 0 No heat, Bell pepper
Now, anyone who's never heard of the Scoville scale is wondering what the heck those numbers are up there. Well, basically thats the rating that Wilbur assigned each of the corresponding chiles using the Scoville Organoleptic Test. You'll never believe me if I tell you what the Organoleptic Test consisted of. Ready? Here it is. That's right, good old fashioned human test subjects. Ahh. The good old days. What peppers have I tried?
Everything on there with the exception of the Ají and the Naga Jolokia. I can't find them anywhere. But now I'm seriously considering spraying some pepper spray on my pizza at some point in the future.
I was at a baby shower yesterday and they had this great pink dip to go along with some fresh fruit (strawberries, raspberries, etc) and I had to know what it was. The answer I got was "It's Fluff!". Well okay, "But, what is Fluff?" Are you ready for this? It is 2 ingredients combined together...a jar of marshmallow cream and a small tub of strawberry cream cheese. And it is excellent.
Fluff
1 7oz jar Marshmallow Cream
1 8oz Strawberry Cream Cheese Spread
Combine the ingredients and serve with fresh fruit or graham cracker sticks.
While verifying the sizes of containers for you I found this site with an entire list of different ways to make a "cream cheese fruit dip". Here are two of them that I will have to try. They sound so good! (Note: The recipes below did not originally have names, these are just the names I have assigned them. Thanks.)
Coconut Fluff
8 oz. cream cheese
1 sm. jar marshmallow cream
1/2 can cream of coconut
Blend cream cheese until fluffy; add cream of coconut (be sure and stir the can up well before using). Beat in marshmallow cream.
Pineapple Fluff
1 8oz pkg cream cheese
1 small can crushed pineapple w/juice
1 small jar marshmallow fluff
Mix all and chill.
I have been making bread at home for about 3 weeks now. There is not a favorite recipe yet, but I have tried several different kinds of basic breads. Needless to say we have not bought any bread from the store in over a month.
For the last year when I have buying bread from Sunflower Market. No other commercially available bread compares. This bread is made in a small baker and they use only a few ingredients, none of which are preservatives or corn syrup (you wouldn't believe how many 100% whole wheat breads have corn syrup in the list of ingredients). In fact before my homemade bread extravaganza I refused to buy any bread that wasn't Sunflower Market bread.
Yesterday I was out of homemade bread and happened to be at Sam's Club for a few items. LittleRoq, BabyGirl and I stood at the massive rows of "factory made" commercially available bread at Sam's Club. I looked at it all and thought, "Ugg, I can't eat this nasty stuff. It is going to be all light weight and full of additives. Let me see what the boy thinks." So I ask LittleRoq "Would you like to get bread from here or should I make bread at home?" He gives me an extremely firm "Make the bread at home."
So there we have it. No nasty factory bread in our house. I have to keep homemade bread in the house from now on. No substitute will do. (Well except in a crunch and then I would definitely still be all over Sunflower Market bread, but no other.)
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Oh, that little ubiquitous display in the produce section of the grocery store. You know exactly what I mean- the really expensive-seeming meat and cheese display, where markets display their largesse and where seemingly only the rich and epicurean seem to shop. |
I've long lusted over this section, as it seems to have the most concentrated stink of adventure in the entire grocery. Seriously, even more than the cultural foods. On one weekend, our curiosity was so potent that we had to take the dive and grab ourselves a hefty chunk of diversity.
As Americans, we tend to be less curious about cheeses than our friends overseas. I'm guessing a few too many folks who watched Pepé Le Pew get mistaken for limburger as children grew up frightful about the entire variety cheese concept. Wake up, America. You're missing out.
In the center of the cracker tray above is a container of Greek-style hummus, a Middle-Eastern favorite made of garbanzo beans and tahini (which is essentially sesame-seed butter). Hummus is fantastic. If you're not eating it, you're missing out. This particular variety was strongly flavored of pepper, garlic, and lemon juice.
The triangular wedge on its own platter is Brie, a relatively familiar French cheese. The white coating on the outside is mold, but don't let that put you off- soft, spreadable Brie is fantastic with or without this part, but definitely has a bit more zest if you take it altogether. Brie is a cow's-milk cheese, and is nutty-flavored and delicious.
The other plate has a few pieces of summer sausage, as well as some folded pieces of Italian salami, cured in oil. Off these meats, we played a few different cheeses.
In staying with our American/British roots, there were some slices of hickory-smoked cheddar, probably the most familiar cheese in the States. Cheddar is named for the process by which it is made- stacking the cheeses until the bottom ones are pressed firm. As a result, it is a sturdy and strongly flavored cheese.
The small white-yellow strips of cheese are Gruyere, a Swiss cheese (but not 'the' Swiss cheese, which is known as Emmenthaler). Like Emmenthaler, it is a bit waxy, and is very delicately flavored- I was a bit put off by it, because the flavor was not apparent when combined with other ingredients.
Possibly not showing in the photo above were some slices of Havarti, a Danish cheese often impregnated with dill. This tasted almost exactly like Emmenthaler, but with a much more pleasing texture. It's enough to make me swear off the Swiss cheese for good.
Finally, there is a small container of goat's cheese, or chevre. This has a very strong flavor that is somewhat gamey; we ended up not eating very much of it. But I did use it later in the Greek night lamb recipe.
Don't let fear get you down. Eat the cheese. Learn to experiment. Live a little. You only get to do it once, after all.
I wanted to have a sauce ready so I could make burritos, enchiladas, or chili colorado at a moments' notice, so here's what I did:
Got one of those $2 bags of large dried red chiles. The ones I tried tonight were Californian; we've also got some New Mexican ones on backup.
Removed just the stems and tossed them into a blender (I like hot sauces). Blended them into a fine powder (break them in half and blend them in phases).
Added all my powder to a can of diced tomatoes and half a clove of garlic (peeled). Back to the blender, to make a thick slurry.
Melted some butter over the stove (1 stick), added some salt, onion powder, and cornstarch.
Poured the mixture on top, cut heat, added chicken broth and a little soy sauce, and whisked furiously to integrate. Added more cornstarch at this phase.
I ended up with a dark red, slightly hot paste. I can't wait for those enchiladas.
Recently, the Edible Unknown crew celebrated our Asian cuisine night, where we all laid around on tatami mats, chased the dragon, and then slapped at imaginary bugs.
Okay, maybe not.
Anyways, after the huge derailment that was trying to get a bunch of simultaneous dishes done for Tapasgeddon, we were all considering doing much smaller dishes. In my corner, I decided to make egg drop soup.
If you've never made egg drop soup, let me inform you that it was basically cheating. The mode of cooking is so simple, it's like you never cooked anything at all.
Boil some chicken broth- I used about 4 cans, with 2 cans of water added in- and add some miso. [I used about a quarter cup of white miso]. Throw in chopped green onions, bring to boil. Add a little black and red pepper and some onion powder to taste.
When it comes to a rolling boil, back down on the temperature and beat the heck out of some eggs. The point is to pour a thin, slow stream of egg into the soup, and for that you need to make sure it's pretty well beaten.
That's it. Almost no work, almost no counter space taken.
When Savory and I go on cooking binges, we tend not to mention that we each have a raging and private yen for the sheer art of complexity. Our reptilian epicurean mindsets require, as it were, a tremendous number of ingredients, sensitive temperature and timing, or at least a bit of showmanship before we consider ourselves as having truly lived up to the task of cooking something.
While I'm certain that if ever there were a recipe which required us to write a Unix shell script in time with our food, we'd be shuddering in (separate) orgasmic delight, there is something to be said for the simple. In fact, sometimes the simple is the most wonderful thing one can have.
Case and point: oven-roasted corn on the cob. I grew up in a family with both Southern American and German roots, and corn on the cob was something one boiled, slathered in butter, then consumed with those little pokey ceramic things suspending it like some sort of corn spit before our mouths. And of course, the butter ended up all over everything- kind of like inviting the Tasmanian Devil to an all-you-can-eat crab restaurant.
If you've got a gas broiler, you can come darn close to barbecue-level corn on the cob by:
Once the whole thing is pretty much roasted, you'll have the most amazing corn ever produced from an oven. In four ingredients.
Of course, now I need other methods to deplete my spice rack. Lest it grow, gain sentience, and claim sovereignty over my newly annexed kitchen. Gotta go.
One sushi bar ingredient I have a love-hate relationship with is kappa, known in English as the cucumber. Apparently, the Japanese term is based on a river goblin, named Kappa, who has a fondness for cucumbers. Nice circular logic, there; if I were going to name members of my family for the things they ate, I could name my daughter Random Scraps Of Paper and my wife Tasteless Vegan Filth. But I digress.
Cucumbers aren't exactly my favorite sushi ingredient, mostly because the fresh taste and crispness seems somehow wrong inside something made of raw fish; it tends to make me think I just bit willingly into a bone left in by some sadistic itamae, getting revenge for me not pointing my chopsticks towards magnetic north when I put them down on my plate. But in cucumber salads or sunemono, they come into their own.
Looking at online recipes, I saw an awful lot of recipes that include sake and rice wine vinegar. Since I'm too lazy to drive to Chinatown for one ingredient, and my children don't really need any extra sake in their diet (says the woman; personally, I believe that drunk children are sleepy children), I decided to play with the recipe a bit. And by 'play', I mean get retardedly creative.
I like rice wine vinegar, and I use it in an awful lot of foods. In fact, it's my second favorite vinegar upon God's slightly fermented green earth. However, I do hold true to the belief that the Japanese would have never invented rice wine vinegar if they'd had the miracle that is balsamic vinegar. I'd gush and all, but I believe the Masochist detailed his unending love for the purple here.
Now, people who know stuff about cooking, like to complain, and have way too much time on their hands to search the internet for blogs may interject that "balsamic vinegar is nothing like rice wine vinegar", on the basis that the first is sweeter, thicker, and much more complex. Thanks. Gee, I didn't know that. Of course balsamic and rice wine vinegar are different. Read the previous paragraph.
However, there is a very important factor here- the differences mean that you can't adulterate balsamic vinegar with salt and sugar in the same proportions as rice wine vinegar and end up with a similar salad topping. In fact, Italian cuisine purists might even argue that to adulterate balsamic with anything at all is akin to blasphemy, like some massive malediction called down upon Vatican City.
Luckily, I'm Protestant.
After cubing two cucumbers and mixing them with alfalfa sprouts (no mung beans... darn), I contemplated the balsamic like some sort of scrying pool. And the oracle revealed to me that mixing the vinegar with one third its volume in sugar and microwaving to combine was, as it were, All Good. And there was a tiny amount of salting and peppering, but not enough so as to offend the NeoRomans.
For a final flavor kick, I put about two tablespoons of sesame seeds on foil and put it under the broiler on high for about four minutes, just to toast them for salad purposes. And you know what? I thought it was superawesome. Our resident Tartologist thought it even better the next day (today).
So maybe I'm crossing roads that aren't meant to be crossed. The point is, make do with what you have, be aware of subtle (or blatant) differences, and always smile like a killer when someone else takes their first bite.
Curse those fancy chefs.
You know who I mean. The ones who sort of offhandedly whip up some crazy roux and serve it with diminished flair by squeezing their thick, colorful pastes from what we suburbanites call ketchup and mustard squeezes. The ones who manage to generate two or three sauces for use on the same plate.
My first few experiments with roux, I have to say, were shameful. Sometimes I generated something blissful; other times, I'd end up with a pot full of flour porridge.
Was it the AP flour? Was it the temperature? Was there too much (or too little) whisk action? Actually, it was part flour and mostly temperature. But enough of that.
I doubt I'll ever be accepted into a French cuisine chat group, let alone hall of fame, but cornstarch is the simple American answer to a difficult task. Sources indicate that cornstarch thickens at low temperatures instead of high ones. Bah, I say. I don't do sauces over high heat anyways, for risk of scorching the butter, and I've never had a cornstarch sauce come out lumpy.
Oh, they say. But the roux. It will be marred by the flavor of cornstarch. Maybe it's because I'm a smoker, or maybe it's because old wives' tales start in the kitchen due to those chauvinistic simpler times- cornstarch sauces taste like whatever I put in them.
The technique: melt a stick of butter, or put in some tomato sauce, or chicken broth, or whatever you want to use as your base. Add cornstarch to your liquid [edit] very slowly, and in small portions. [thanks Savory] Whisk like the devil. Add seasoning. Presto- a sauce that tastes exactly like what you put into it, without lumps, without suffering, and without all that uncertainty that comes from novices attempting roux without the Necronomicons of chef-ery. Which is a word I just made up. Because I am an expert.
Let me tell you- any situation that calls for 'seasoning' is technically a sauce waiting to happen. And if you want to get all fancy and squirt designs all over your plate- well, that's your business, isn't it? Recent dinners here at Edible Unknown Research Center Zero (EURC-0) are simply blossoming with wonderful sauces. Live it. Love it. Accept it. The sauce commands you.