Tag: beans

And set yourself on fire you shall. Particularly after eating this atrocity I invented last night.

Software:
1/2 lb. Ground Beef
1/2 yellow onion, diced.
1 med. Red Bell Pepper diced (this is a chile too, btw)
3 Habanero Chiles diced fine (fresh)
3 Thai Chiles diced fine (fresh)
1 Random Chile diced fine (Seriously. I bought a fresh "Hungarian" Chile from Vons. 
                                       Who the hell knows what subspecies of capsicum it is.)
2 Jalapenos diced fine (fresh)
3 tsp. Cayenne Chile (powder)
4 tsp. Naga Jolokia Chile (powder)
1 can Chipotles in Adobo (only use 5 of the chiles or so, diced)
1 14.5oz can Ranch Style beans
5 tsp. chili powder (I use homemade, store bought is sawdust)
1 cup beer (I used Peroni, because thats what I had)
Garlic Salt
Salt and Pepper

1. Brown the ground beef in a skillet, once browned, throw in onion and bell pepper. Season with Garlic Salt and Pepper to taste.
2. Done! (just kidding.)
3. Or am I?
4. No, I am. Drain the fat from the skillet. Throw in all diced chiles except the Chipotles. Soften.
5. In a soup pot, stock pot, pot of some kind, combine meat mixture, and rest of the ingredients.
6. Cook until it tastes good. Or until you can't taste anything because the chiles have beaten your
    tastebuds into submission/mass suicide.

On a side note: I wish the preview pane hadn't gone away, but I do like the new post editor Tele.

After seeing this completely and totally awesome page for minestrone linked off of wikipedia, I felt it was my patriotic duty to make minestrone. After all, I do live in Las Vegas, and anybody who lives here knows that italian restaurants outnumber any other kind of restaurant by a factor of approximately thirty-seven to three. I especially liked the basic assumption- that you can pretty much just buy seasonal vegetables, completely at random, throw them all together, and make some soup. I mean, you basically don't need to know how to do anything. How could this possibly go wrong?

So I went to Sunflower Market, since they sell local produce, and bought twelve of every vegetable they had. If you could screw up minestrone, I was going to figure out how. I came home, got a big stock pot out, and started my soffrito- a fancy word to say I rendered the fat out of some bacon and then threw in some onions, leeks, and shallots.

I also didn't have pig trotters or marrow bones or anything like that, so for thickening I waited until my 'soffrito' was pretty much sweated, then threw in some flour, like a roux. Then I spent TWO. HOURS. cutting up vegetables and throwing them in. I cubed the turnips. I chopped up the zucchini, summer squash, celery root, spinach leaves, potatoes, and carrots. It looked like I was carving up the grisly aftermath of a war against the vegetables, a war which I handily won. All of it drowning in six cans of chicken broth and a pitcher of water, with a sprig of rosemary (I fished that out after everything started smelling like rosemary), a bay leaf, and a parmesan crust. Then, because I was pretty much throwing in everything I had, I put in two cans of kidney beans and a cup of orzo. By this point I was in such a rut that I might have diced my children and thrown them in, had they wandered into the kitchen.

It cooked for HOURS. Three and a half hours. I felt like a witch, sitting there and stirring my massive cauldron of stuff. And then something magical happened. It started to smell like delicious.

So, basically, you'd have to try way harder than I did to screw up minestrone.

After a mixup where the beans I had originally planned for a Boston Baked Beans dish didn't manage to fully soak overnight, I had to run to the store and grab some ingredients to quickly whip up a backup dish, broccoli and ham gratin.

• About a pound of broccoli, stems included
• 8-10 slices deli ham
• Parmesan and cheddar cheese for topping
• Breadcrumbs
• 2 cups of milk
• 1 stick of butter
• 4 tbls flour
• Dried sage
• Black pepper
• Dry mustard

After cutting the broccoli down (including stems) to florets and small discs, I put them on to boil. After they'd softened slightly, I spread them across the bottom of the baking dish. Next, I mixed up a bechamel (melted the butter, mixed in the flour, then took off the heat and mixed in the milk). After putting the milk back on the heat and whisking heavily, I added a dash of sage and mustard, then ground in some pepper.

After tearing the ham into shreds and laying it across the top of the broccoli, I added the bechamel, covered the top with cheese and breadcrumbs, and put it into the oven at 350 degrees for half an hour.

Unfortunately, I let it cook a little longer, and I really shouldn't have; the broccoli dried up a bit. I'm looking forward to trying this one again sometime soon, however.

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.

Romano's Macaroni Grill 2001 N Rainbow Blvd Las Vegas, NV 89108

Teleolurian It must have been a busy night.

When we got to the Macaroni Grill, we faced the usual line-out-the-door setting that you get when you decide to go to a popular restaurant on the spur of the moment. Since I wanted to review the food, I decided to forego showing off my crayoned press pass and instead settled in for the half-hour wait.

In recent years, the Grill has gotten quite the menu facelift. Dining here is now more in the vein of classical Italian signature dishes and less of an upscale Olive Garden; however, the prices are still decent, with most dishes in the $10-$20 range.

Upon reaching our table, the server informed us that they were out of bread dishes and wine glasses, finding us some tumblers for drinking the house Red. Luckily, I'm not a bouquet snob, so I used the wine for fuel as I wrote scathing commentary ("she's just using you for your bed") on the paper tablecloth. With a communal bread plate, oil and balsamic vinegar, and an unspoken no-double-dipping rule, we sat around and chatted while our dishes came out.

For me, it was chicken scallopine ($9.49)- a bit heavy, but absolutely superb. The lemon-butter sauce didn't wimp out on the lemons, and the capers were heavily drenched and therefore delicious. Tender was the chicken, and tasty; the leftovers were even rather tender the next day (something you don't get in, say, a country steakhouse).

Savory Masochist

Ding dong the traditional dish is dead. Wait. no. I just didn't get one.

After we got our red wine in tumblers and tore off a few chunks of bread, I decided to go with a build-your-own pasta deal. Macaroni Grill offers these little checklists that you insidiously mark as if you were building your own Frankenstein. I decided on a Penne, with Tomato Cream sauce, and Sun Dried Tomatoes, Roasted Red Peppers, Pine Nuts, and Chicken. It was pretty good, although I can't say as I would get it again. It's my own fault really, for just hitting rand when I was looking at the menu. Oh well. The company was good and we hadn't had a date night in near a decade, so it made up for my pasta. After that, we wrote some generally strange things on the table paper, and we were off! to another crazy adventure.

Oh, I would write a longer review, however Tele pegged most of it in his.

Queen of Tarts
Okay, so when Macaroni Grill opened they had food that was so-so. In recent years the flavors had been stepped up and they redeemed themselves, until...that fateful night. If we offered to do the dishes I think they might have allowed us to do so. They were obviously understaffed being the day after Christmas, but no bread plates and no wine glasses wasn't the end of it. When the SM put in his original order it included artichokes. The waiter had to come back and let us know that they were out of those too. Apparantly not only did we need to do our own dishes, but we needed to go do our own grocery shopping for the ingredients before arriving at the resturaunt. Crazy!

Usually if I am at an Italian place I automatically order manicotti (if its Mexican then it is a bean and cheese burrito enchilada style), but I am trying to branch out a bit. So, on this evening I ordered Chicken Cannelloni (Hand-rolled pasta stuffed with oven-roasted chicken, melted cheese and spinach, then baked in an Asiago cream sauce. Topped with tomato sauce) for $9.99. The dish smelled and looked wonderful. I immediatly dug in and ate one out of the three stuffed pastas. Half way through the second shell I started to wonder "Where is the chicken?" I am a "recovering vegitarian" (as Tele calls it) so it really didn't bother me that I couldn't taste it or find it until I realized I am paying for chicken I can't find. Must find the chicken. So I tore apart the third shell in search for chicken. I eventually found a small sliver of shredded chicken. If this was Iron Chef the plate wouldn't have gotten high marks for the "theme ingredient" being the dominant flavor. Overall the taste of my dish was excellent, but I was dissapointed that with the name Chicken Cannelloni the chicken was not easy to find in the dish.

I have not given up on the Macaroni Grill yet because I must say that there bread rocks (mmm, bread), but I hope to never have the lack of service that we had that night again.

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.