20 posts tagged “comments”
The results were great. Incredibly crispy things. I took the recipe for the (very liquid-y) dipping sauce, and created that white sour cream-and-yogurt sauce you see there, along with some chopped salad mix, thinly sliced red onions, and some thinly sliced apple. That last bit was pretty inspired, I don't mind saying. The freshness of the apple created a really wonderful, fresh, sweet contrast to the spicy, fishy taste of the fish cakes.
I was very happy with this.
And yeah, I carved a pumpkin, too:
Happiness is a warm puppy, I agree. You just can't beat that. But a real, live kaffir lime tree is pretty nice also — if you cook South-East Asian foods, that is... I noticed this odd "double-leaf" configuration when cooking with kaffir lime leaves before, but I never really thought much about it. Seeing those peculiar leaves on an actual plant somehow seems different. Oh boy oh boy, I can see some Thai grub coming up soon...
Oh, and I can't wait to see the limes on this tree. I believe they have a really uneven, gnarly skin. But I have no idea how they might taste. For all the recipes I've seen that calls for kaffir lime leaves, I've never ever seen anything that called for the actual limes from this plant. Perhaps they taste really horrible, who knows? Well, I will, one day. Mind you, there's no indication of fruit on this little thing yet. But there are leaves, though.
So when I told him about this Korean soup made from dog meat, called Boshingtang, he was pretty conflicted. I would talk to this guy about food whenever I saw him (mind you, I talk to everybody about food), and he'd always be fascinated by it although he never cooks, himself. He just loved the idea that I'd eaten things like snails, pickled eggs and whale meat. The fact that he lives in a trailor park and is unemployed (and that the local vet apparently charges $50 for that sort of things, while I offered to compensate him $20 for the same service) probably affected his decision more than me talking about the food, mind you...
It's a pretty simple recipe, but some of the items aren't easily available in the US. Hell, I tried asking for some of them in various Asian markets, and was met with nothing but cold stares -- some of them even cussed at me.
But this is the recipe I ended up with:
Prep:
2 lb dog meat
2 quarts of water
3 lemongrass stalks
1/2 cup soy sauce
Soup:
1 quart of water
2 lb sliced onions
10 cloves
3" cinnamon stick
16 cloves of garlic
4" stick of ginger
4 sliced Serrano chilies
1 lb. small red potatoes
4 tbsp coarsley ground black pepper
2 tbsp salt
2. Bring a saucepan with water to a simmer, and add the dog carcass, lemongrass stalks and soy sauce, for 3 hours.
3. Remove meat from carcass (it's no different from a chicken) and set aside.
4. Combine the ingredients from the soup in another saucepan and simmer, while skimming, for 1 hour.
5. Add the dog meat to the soup saucepan, let simmer for 1/2 hours. Serve.
Just caught another installment of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (the British version). It was a "revisited" episode, which sounds like a good idea, in principle, but the way they carry it out seems just lazy... The episode is basically a slightly compacted version of the original episode (which takes up about 80% of the show), with a small bit of fresh material thrown in at the end. Basically, they're milking it. They're milking it, and propping up Ramsay's ego -- while pissing all over the seemingly hapless fools who dared ask the great guru for help in the first place.
The restaurant was "La Parra de Burriana," created by a young Englishman, in Spain -- catering to British tourists. Now, American McDonald's-gobbling, "Aw, look hon, ain't that quaint?"-tourists are bad, but they're just the slightly less unabashed colonial cousins of the Brits. These guys want mushy peas and chips. And that crowd is who the Costa del Sol restaurateurs caters to. This guy wanted to try provide something slightly more authentic and local for his visiting countrymen -- a noble cause, but one which he was losing.
The hypocrisy of it is that if you put Gordon Ramsay and a TV crew in front of a bunch of British tourists, they'll instantly start proclaiming their profound and delightful epicurean appreciation of authentic, locally sourced paella, or escargot, or whatever is propped up in front of them. Couple of bottles of locally sourced plonk later, they get distraught because they are unable to procure a locally sourced vindaloo -- fookin' dago poofs ain't got no chippies, innit?
This was a really sad episode. The restaurateur admitted that he DID overcook his pasta, but had a perfectly acceptable explanation for it: when he cooked it al dente, it tended to get sent back. Ramsay absolutely refused to accept this, which initially seemed quite bizarre to me -- until I realized the obvious: this show isn't so much about how to make a restaurant a success, as it is about how to make Gordon Ramsay seem like a god. I mean, I don't like the expression, "The customer is always right" -- it is completely false. Customers ARE wrong. This notion is misleading, demoralizing and just idiotic. I like the French expression far more: "Le client est roi" -- the customer is king. Ie., the customer CAN be wrong -- but that is irrelevant: it doesn't matter if a king is wrong -- he can still throw you in jail, if you displease him.
But the worst part about this episode was definitely the beach scene. Ramsay "challenged" the poor guy to cook his pasta dish on the beach, while the great Ramsay prepared a fancy paella (all locally sourced, of course) -- as if there'd be any competition between a world famous celebrity chef with umpteen TV series, books, restaurants and who the fuck knows what -- and some complete unknown...
It was pathetic. I'm surprised they didn't follow it up with Ramsay stomping down the beach, kicking over kids' sand castles and screaming "I'm fucking great! I'm fucking fantastic! I'm so much fucking better than you!"
So of course, everyone proclaimed their love of Ramsay's locally procured paella, and the chef agreed to ditch his pasta dish and serve only what Ramsay felt he should serve, and then the great Ramsay drove off into the sunset in his BMW convertible.
Damn. I was kinda hoping to learn something about cooking. Sometimes, these shows have more in common with fashion, or make-over, or big brother type reality show, than cooking...
I guess this makes AA Gill Gordon's Spiny Norman...
Hey, Alton? You're not a geek -- you're a nerd. Geeks bites the heads off of bats -- freakshow stuff. Nerds are intellectually focused individuals, that might, or might not be as skilled in social interaction as average people. I'm a nerd.
Hm, still -- perhaps the best caption I could have come up with, was my initial reaction. A Chris Tucker line:
You KNOW this, man!
Just caught the second episode in the third season of Bravo's "Top Chef" show. Their main challenge was to create an upscale barbecue dish... Now, there are of course the "purists" (or fanatics, if you like) who insists that unless it's low and slow -- like a 16 hour brisket or something -- then it ain't barbecuing; it's just grilling. There was no time for that, of course, but that aside, there was some kinda shocking stuff going on there.
One of the contestants insisted that she had grilled before, but just had never started the coals -- which is kinda like saying you've boiled an egg before, but always had someone else put the water in the saucepan, and turned the stovetop on for you. I guess charcoal grilling isn't exactly the forte of a professional chef -- an amateur home cook is probably more likely to be versed in that area, but still... It was kinda fun to watch them struggle with culinary decisions like "how much coal do I put in this thing?"
Now, when they showed a contestant squirting lighter fluid (or whatever it was) all over the charcoal, I was dumbfounded... Can't remember if Alton Brown was a judge in that episode, but man -- where the hell were the chimney starters? I didn't see a single one... Using that fluid (or pre-soaked briquettes) really does affect the flavor of the food -- maybe you won't notice it too much if you're doing hotdogs, but if you're doing "upscale" food -- c'mon...
This is completely silly, but damned funny...
This series has almost nothing to do with Anthony Bourdain's autobiography. It doesn't attempt to recreate the characters, or the circumstances of the book -- it creates different, and damn interesting characters... It is almost entirely unrelated, unless you're an obsessive nerd like me -- in which case you might take delight in seeing how the circumstances map back to the book.
Check it out!
