Tag: sake

Well, as Tele has previously posted, the other night we went to Kobe. I think its a fine little sushi bar, and I must say that while I was there I fell in love with Red Snapper. That's some awesome fish, I tell you what.

The problem, however, is as much as I love sushi, I can almost never eat enough of it. I can eat .. well.. quite a bit more than I logically should be able to eat, and I fear that it's my voracious appetite that will condemn me to a) not eat enough at a sushi bar, b) eat so much at a sushi bar that the itamae and I have to battle in hand to hand combat because they have nothing left in the restaurant to eat, or c) I've eaten so much sushi that the Pacific ocean is declared devoid of life. A good example, is what I had to eat today. I had the following to eat:

• 4 cups of coffee
• 1 cup of tea
• 5 bottles of water (16 oz)
• 4 sandwiches
• 1 cup cheese popcorn
• 2 truffles
• 1 pear
• 1 stuffed pork chop
• 1 baked potato
• 1 bowl of cinnamon apples
• 1 bowl of coffee icecream

At the sushi place, if I recall correctly, I had:

• 5 pc cucumber roll
• 5 pc philadelphia roll
• 4 hamachi (yellow tail)
• 2 red snapper
• 2 crab roll
• 3 cups green tea
• 1 16oz sake

and we went out for frozen yogurt afterwards, in which I had a 16oz plain with pomegranate seeds.

I think I have a tapeworm. He and I understand each other.

I'm still formulating my article for my Greek Night dish, but in the meantime I thought I'd share something I had stumbled on the other day while making steaks.

First, a little background info. We bought some Omaha steaks from some wholesaler for pennies on the peso, and as a sort of celebration, we decided to have them with a pan sauce.

I get home, throw the cast iron 12 in the oven at 500 degrees, wait until its rocket hot, and start searing my steaks. While it's sizzling along, I start to look for things for my pan sauce. Button mushrooms, sure, those will work, butter, got that, garlic salt, check, white wine.... crap. There wasn't any white wine in the house. I did, however, find an old bottle of Nigori Sake, so I decided to give that a shot. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Sake-wise, go here.

Anyway, I finish up the steaks, a la Alton Brown style, and throw the cast iron back on the stove. I put two tablespoons of butter in the pan, and waited for it to melt completely before adding the mushrooms. I know, some of you are screaming "YOU SHOULD'VE DEGLAZED FIRST!@#!#!". The reason I didn't? Sake is acidic, acid + nicely seasoned cast iron = bad. Editor's note: You wuss. It's cast iron. Just do it.

So, I started with the mushrooms to provide some cover for my nicely seasoned pan. I digress. I garlic salted and peppered the mushrooms while they were doing the saute mambo. Then, carefully, I added about 4 tablespoons sake, and deglazed the pan with that.

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p>After deglazing was finished and the kitchen was filled with a smell not unlike a Japanese bath house, I added 2 tablespoons (approximately) of heavy whipping cream and combined. All in all, the sake made a fantastic substitute for white wine. It had a subtle sweet sake flavor, paired with the earthiness of the mushrooms and creaminess of the, well, cream. It just goes to show that necessity is the mother of.. something.

While I'm still at the point where every bechamel has a fifty percent chance of turning into gruel, I can admit with some well-deserved selling-out shame that I can do French Toast just as well as anyone else.

With indeterminate origins shrouded in the mists of time, French Toast (known colloquially in some American regions as 'Fried Eggy Bread', to the sounds of every dead Frenchman spinning violently in his grave) is known by several names throughout the world, including Bombay Toast, arme riddere ('poor knights'), and the term en francais, pain perdu.

Regardless of its origin, I got up this morning determined to eat something other than cereal or pork chops in hot sauce, so I started poking through the pantry looking for things that I might have, at one point in time, heard of as a potential ingredient in french toast. Unfortunately, her Tartiness immediately sensed the twinging of directionless fumbling resonating from deep within my Y chromosome, and hauled out her favorite french toast recipe.

As I reluctantly set down the Clabber Girl (we might have had an interesting breakfast indeed) and perused the recipe, my inherent fiddliness blossomed into full-on transmogrification mode. I mean, the recipe she gave me had six ingredients. Six! I believe in simplicity for simplicity's sake as much as the next man, but this morning I was feeling much more Da Vinci than Kazimir Malevich, and ornery besides. I glanced longingly at the Clabber Girl. Her disturbingly large Victorian eyes seemed to be pleading with me to ignore the pragmatic whims of my wife and instead follow her down a psychedelic yellow brick road of chaos, pestilence, and creative breads.

Unfortunately, looking at the bread and thinking 'yellow brick' inspired in me an unsettling urge to return to simplicity.

In a Pyrex baking dish, I added the two eggs, mixed in brown sugar (take that, recipe), and mixed in the rest of the ingredients in old-school eyeballing fashion. Since it was French toast that I was making, I used half a stick of butter and made sure to scorch each piece slightly.

The result was delicious- but heavy. Brown sugar and butter with a particularly absorbent bread do indeed yellow bricks make. Though they were pleasantly crunchy in a waffle-like fashion, they weren't too sweet, and didn't mind being dusted with confectioner's sugar (I think it was confectioners sugar, but where did little miss Clabber go?), nor did they mind a little pure maple in the tradition of the great French Toast Eating Lumberjacks that used their mighty axes to pave the way to our modern landscape of McDonalds and california rolls. I only managed to eat one piece, but the other slices quickly disappeared due to guerilla action from the other family members. Let freedom ring.

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.

Go ahead. Use Google. Search for fried chicken. You'll find a plethora of articles that all tell you the same basic things. Everybody knows how to fry chicken. It's the next step on the evolutionary ladder above boiling water. The ability to fry chicken is what makes us BETTER than the most common bird on the planet, for goodness sakes. It's part of our genetic cerebral snide superiority- if we can eat it, we're better than it is. That's why people seek out alligator, bear, and shark meat in markets- the ability to eat something that has at some point eaten one of us makes us not only better than the animal, but the poor primate it managed to digest.

But I digress.

I'm not going to tell you how to fry chicken. It's more intuitive than the screwdriver. But there are certain things that should be part of your regular shopping list and they all make our ruthless domestication policies worthwhile.

1. BUY LARD. Or, if you're one of these health-conscious types, BUY SHORTENING. For the sake of the species, buy SOMETHING that is thick, greasy to the touch, white, and melts into a massive pool of chicken frying goodness. Any neighborhood is likely close to an ethnic or just-plain American store that sells pig kidney fat in huge blocks (love the Manteca). If nothing else, invest in a deep fryer (with which you can cook EVERYTHING) and some peanut oil. Culinary adventurers, buy ambergris. Shark fat. Clarified schmaltz for the ultimate one-upsmanship of the chicken. Or take a note from Fight Club (enough said).

2. Get something to bread chicken in. I use tupperware. Grandma used paper lunch bags. Dump in flour, breadcrumbs, and whatever you want- last night I used basil, thyme, cayenne, pepper, garlic salt, and anything else I could grab from the spice cabinet. Don't get the expensive spice jars full of old, tasteless stuff- buy the cheap little sacks on the sidekick-display at the end of the produce aisle. 99 cent cayenne goes in everything. Even a little cayenne and paprika will make it taste better without appreciably increasing the hotness factor (capsaicin pansy).

3. Have chicken on hand. I've been stalled from frying chicken several times just by not having it around. During Hobo Week, I buy the huge bags of frozen, genetically-engineered Elephant Whale Buffalo chicken breasts. Boneless and skinless = easy cutting. This is an economy based upon ease of attainment and use, people. Get your nearest livejournal self-inflicted injury specialist and a razor blade to cut the meat into strips if all else fails.

4. Insert chicken in choppy chunks into your mixed and shaken flour-crumb-goodness mixture. Raise temperature to medium (for shortening, which otherwise has a slight tendency to EXPLODE) or medium-high (for good old god-given lard) and let it boil into a puddle of clear, fatty goodness. Have a skillet lid, or at least another skillet. Burning fat hurts, which is why they used to dump it from crenellations onto erstwhile castle invaders.

5. Since not everybody appreciates spice like I do, I don't put crushed red pepper into the crumb mixture. Instead, I buy the bag of whole dried peppers and crush them in my fist into the heated lard. I am therefore genetically superior to the red pepper. Don't let the pinks crush the peppers for you- nothing says loving like the horrible imagined screams of chiles while you pulverize them in your opposable-thumb having fist (people without thumbs: you're still superior to them. The chiles aren't going to squeeze YOU into boiling lard).

At first, I was just pouring in the seeds; however, since I know that the heat actually comes from the chile's placenta (which coats the seeds), I just toss the whole mangled pepper corpse in.

And yes, I talk about corpses often while cooking. And eating.

Cook until meat stops being pink, then cover and jack that heat up to high (take THAT, shortening can warnings) so you get a mild scorch on your crumbs. Then reduce heat, flip chicken, and scorch it AGAIN.

Covering the skillet makes for juicier chicken. Minor scorch action makes for crispier outsides. You can do what you want to it- you're BETTER than chicken.

If we weren't meant to eat them, they wouldn't be made of meat.