balmagowry

Or drink Jonestown Kool-Aid!

Isn't that kind of a classic Native American notion? Inuit too, if memory serves; a ritual that is part of the seal and whale hunts. Either you and I have read the same thing or - I seem to remember running across this sort of thing more than once. Seems only reasonable to thank the animal that's going to feed and clothe and warm your tribe through the coming season. I think in some situations you also apologize to your brother the deer/bear/seal etc. for having to kill him in order to accomplish those necessary things. Very civilized - much more so than neat little plastic packages, really. It is all too easy, in our convenience-crazed world, to confuse industrialization with civilization, without thinking about their etymology and real meaning.

I admire Wolfert, but I'm always a little suspicious, on general principle, of cautions against bacteria. I mean, why "today"? Did Adelle Davis, or the people cooking according to her recipes, experience ill effects? There has been plenty of discussion elsewhere on this board about how we've decreased our own immunity by overprotecting ourselves with things like over-prescribed antibiotics and anti-bacterial soap and generally exaggerated notions of hygiene. So when I hear something like this, I can't help wondering: was it OK 30 years ago? and have we weakened ourselves so drastically and so quickly that it's that much more dangerous now? I remember going to visit boarding schools in the early 70s; at one of them which was particularly earthy-crunchy, we were proudly shown through the school's much-vaunted Macrobiotic Kitchen, which was largely student-run. I've rarely seen anything more disgustingly filthy in my life. OTOH... while I couldn't stand to have or to work in a kitchen like that, didn't even want to set foot in that one - I have to admit that the students seemed perfectly healthy, and so far as I know there were never any problems there with food poisoning or any of the other ills you'd expect the flesh to be heir to. I did not go to that school, for several reasons. And while I've never regretted the choice I did make (on the contrary, I rank it as one of the best of my life to date), I wonder whether the standard institutional fare we got there served us any better from a nutritional standpoint than those other kids got from their grubby grains? Seems to me we're all the better for some nice healthy dirt and some good clean germs. Course, what do I know? Not a whole lot about bacteria and such, that's for sure. Maybe some of Adelle Davis's stuff really is potentially lethal and it's just the luck of the draw that in its heyday it never set off a poisoning scandal and a class action for liability. But I continue to wonder.

I have a portion of the counter that is butcher block, in the city and in Westchester. Highly recommend at least a portion of the counter be in wood. Its pretty easy to maintain, and oh, so easy to work on. Yes, I love my little bit of bb counter - only wish there were more of it. Only problem with it is that it's old and was obviously not properly maintained by the previous administration; the surface isn't quite even. One board needs to be planed, another filled, or something. Add it to the long list of things I hope to Get Around To one of these days. Hathor, your dinner last night is just beautiful (I too am tempted to play copy-cat with the pork chops), and I'm wildly jealous of your foray to the Dynasty market. I think I'll have to make an Expotition into town. (Hey, someone suggested a Dynasty-based pot luck up-thread. I wonder if that could be done in conjunction with the Recipe Smackdown thing Maggie posted last night? Any interest, New Yorkers?) I'm curious about your cioppino, which also looked lovely. We used to make a very different, more peasanty version, with a much more stewish feel to it. I think the recipe came from Sunset some 30 years ago, but I might just be misremembering, since I haven't actually used a recipe in nearly that long. I've always been amused by the derivation - or apparent lack thereof. As in the 19th century everyone disclaimed VD (the English called it the French Pox, the French called it the Spanish Pox, the Spanish called it the English Pox...), so it appears that despite the Italian name the Italians describe cioppino as Portuguese Bouillabaisse, the Portuguese describe it as San Francisco Bouillabaisse... and so on. I haven't lived in San Francisco since I was about 10, but I gather that it is something of a signature dish there now, probably in a form similar to the one we used to make (which is probably why I think it came from Sunset). Yours is a lot more elegant in look and composition. Whence cometh it?

Lucy, how do the bouchons Andrew mentions compare to M. Pierre's place?

On the contrary, I find the English very poetic. "Madnesses of Injury," "Mounts of Gold," "Marine of the Wolf"? Wonderfully evocative. Of what, I don't know, but who cares?

No way. 55.32365362 rotation is the only way to go on the presentation side. I finish by dividing the circumference of the steak by pi squared to determine the non-presentation side grill marks. That's all very well as long as you're living in three dimensions. Add another dimension or two, and poof! there is no non-presentation side. Then what do you do?

Has to be pretty fully frozen for the inside to stay cool while the outside sears. How fully? YMMV, depending on the thickness of the steak and the power of the grill. If you're looking to avoid long-term freezing, you'll probably have to experiment to determine how frozen is frozen enough per inch of thickness for your particular setup. At any rate, I don't imagine 1/2 hour will be quite enough. Myself, I stock up and keep stuff in the freezer - needs must when the devil drives and the drive is an hour round-trip to the nearest store. The great thing about it is, you get home from a long day on the water, fire up the grill, haul a steak out of the freezer and put it straight on, and still eat dinner at a reasonable hour with next to no prep time. Not a bad way to spend the summer. Scary? Only the first time. It works.

I had exactly the same problem with my last gas grill, until someone taught me a neat trick that I sometimes still use even with the new one: Freeze the steak. Get grill going full blast; put the steak on it still frozen. I haven't dared try this with anything more than 2" thick, max - but up to that thickness I have found it works perfectly. By the time the inside thaws enough to cook at all, you get a lovely crust on the outside. Can't tell you exact timings with lid up/down because I do it so much by ear and by guts and by prevailing wind, but the same sensory criteria apply as with any other method.

Latest update from the yogurt front. Yesterday I finally got around to making a batch with Brown Cow starter. Not possessing Jensen's selfless strength of character, I ate the cream top - but used the right amount of the rest of the yogurt to culture my 1/2 gallon of whole milk. 7 hours and it set like a dream. Put it away to chill. Had a couple of spoonfuls late last night and it sure tasted good. This morning I served myself a nice bowlful, and as I was doing so I noticed how thickly it flowed. Taking each spoonful, I found, was a little like doing the same from a bowl of very hot gratinee with very thoroughly-melted cheese - I won't say the yogurt actually made strings, but that's how thickly viscous it was, that the yogurt in the spoon was reluctant to leave the parent mass in the bowl, which in turn was equally reluctant to release its offspring. Thick! Rich! Almost TOO thick. I'm not entirely sure I like this new texture. It seems to have a mind of its own. It's a little like the texture you get from straining out all the whey, though not QUITE as thick - more like Greek yogurt, I guess. If that's so, then maybe Greek isn't quite what I wanted... and I don't understand how I got it. EDIT to add: the texture is almost... gummy. Can't think how else to describe it. Weird. Except for the use of a different starter - which as I think I noted upthread surprised me by containing some pectin - I haven't changed my technique at all; though I did strain the milk to prevent the accumulation of those bits of skin. It can't be that little bit of pectin making all this difference... can it? The texture is quite unlike that of Brown Cow, which actually rather reminds me of the Colombo of 20 years ago. (Yes, I know they're still around, but it's that long since I've eaten one so I don't know how much it may have changed.) I am very, very puzzled. Next strategy currently under consideration (and this may change by the time I'm ready to implement it): For next batch, use this yogurt as starter for one quart, and Dannnon to start another; that should make for an interesting comparison. It still isn't a very scientific one, because obviously there are a lot of variables I don't know about and am not taking into account. But it'll still be interesting. I guess. Of all the batches I've made, the first Erivan one was the transcendent, ambrosial one - but I haven't been able to duplicate that, and I think that on principle I'm more comfortable having all four of the standard types of bacteria working. So many options, so little certainty....

Latest update from the yogurt front. Yesterday I finally got around to making a batch with Brown Cow starter. Not possessing Jensen's selfless strength of character, I ate the cream top - but used the right amount of the rest of the yogurt to culture my 1/2 gallon of whole milk. 7 hours and it set like a dream. Put it away to chill. Had a couple of spoonfuls late last night and it sure tasted good. This morning I served myself a nice bowlful, and as I was doing so I noticed how thickly it flowed. Taking each spoonful, I found, was a little like doing the same from a bowl of very hot gratinee with very thoroughly-melted cheese - I won't say the yogurt actually made strings, but that's how thickly viscous it was, that the yogurt in the spoon was reluctant to leave the parent mass in the bowl, which in turn was equally reluctant to release its offspring. Thick! Rich! Almost TOO thick. I'm not entirely sure I like this new texture. It seems to have a mind of its own. Except for the use of a different starter (which as I think I noted upthread surprised me by containing some pectin), I haven't changed my techniq

Wha--? OK, now I'm confused. I just looked at that recipe, and it is Ajo Blanco! "White Gazpacho"? Really? I've never heard it called that - everywhere I had it in Spain (and I was addicted to it from Day 1, so I ate it every chance I got) it was always "Ajo Blanco." The things you learn. May I suggest, though, adding "ajo blanco" to the keywords? Earlier today I was very disappointed on searching RecipeGullet for the latter and finding no match!

Good for you. City Harvest has an analogue out here, Island Harvest; and when we started testing recipes for L&SD I got in touch with them in hopes that our anticipated oversupply of, er, admittedly slightly odd but certainly highly nutritious foods might serve a useful purpose. Alas, they can only take donations from certain types of certified organizations - understandable, I guess, from a liability standpoint. Still, a pity. In the event, actually, not all that much went to waste - mostly just the really disgusting stuff that we'd have been ashamed to offer anyone....

Ajo Blanco.

Russian sorrel soup. Haven't made it from scratch in forever or so, because some of the bottled ones (found in the kosher section in most supermarkets, though they may sport fewer consonants) are surprisingly good - if you doctor 'em up right and chill 'em enough. Big bowl. Throw in scallions, cut up pretty fine (say 1/4"). Put in some salt. Mush around with spoon against sides of bowl so the salt bruises the scallions. Then stir in a good-sized dollop of sour cream. Then start stirring in the soup - only a little at first, and adding very gradually so that the sour cream blends in smoothly. When it's all put together together, you put in a few Kirby cucumbers, peeled and diced. Chill the hell out of it, maybe even put some chunks of ice in the bowl a little before serving. Have a little extra sour cream on hand for those who want it. In the summer, I could live on this stuff. BTW, sour cream & radishes starts the same way. Bowl, scallions, salt, smush, bruise. Then it's sour cream, thin slices of small red radishes, peeled/diced Kirby cucumbers. Mix well, chill thoroughly. If worried about fat, you can substitute yogurt for maybe 1/2 the sour cream. Doesn't sound like much, but it's heaven in a bowl.

Aaaaaahhhh... it's time for schtchav. Or Sour Cream and Radishes. Finally!

Wish I could.

True enough - wouldn't it be nice if they all did it.

:sigh: As Pascal's my witness, I can be succinct... it just takes so much longer! Bad enough that I'm so compulsive about copy-editing the long rambling posts; if I got serious about real editing I'd probably never get them sent at all because the topical moment would have passed and the thread dwindled away. But boy, I'd have me an archive of obsolete messages that would be marvels of eloquent brevity! :sigh: Also, while Jinmyo's summary is characteristically tight, sound, and epigrammatic, I still think it leaves a couple of loose ends unaccounted for. There's all that right-brain/left-brain garbage which may actually mean something - I mean by way of correlation between personality traits and aptitudes. And then there's bread. Bread is the thing that really scared my mother shitless. I never did understand why, and I'm afraid I never will. It shares some of the characteristics of baking and some of those of cooking, so which category does one assign it to? It's neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring. I'm lucky; within reason I can both cook and bake, though I definitely lean more to the cooking side of the equation. But I enjoy both, and neither makes me uncomfortable. Lucky lucky me. Luckier me still, I feel very much at home in the no-man's-land of bread, and the pleasure I get from it seems to me much more like that of cooking than that of baking. Feels good. Smells good. You can feel when it's kneaded enough, you can see when it's properly riz. You know it's done by sniff and by tap and by instinct. It's an earthy, deep, connected thing. Primal, almost. Staff of life, comma, sense of being at one with. And point for point it belongs at the prime-rib end of the Jinmyo Spectrum. Hell, by that standard, it is prime rib! So WHY - whywhywhywhywhywhywhy - would someone who is absolutely the walking embodiment of culinary instinct be so stymied by the very idea of bread? Will I ever understand?

Funny - wouldn't you think that eventually people in a service business would catch on to the general idea? Catching more flies with honey than with vinegar is not just virtuous and golden rule-ish; it's sound business sense. Of course courtesy is and ought to be a two-way street - admittedly ought to be so much more often than it actually is. But I think the days are gone (if they ever existed outside the minds of satirists and New Yorker cartoonists) wherein people going out to dine got a thrill from being treated with contempt by a snooty waiter. No matter what the nature of the complaint, how will the situation be made any worse by gracious behavior? or any better by arguing and sulking? Unfortunately for the two-way-ness of the courtesy street, there is an extra onus on the restaurant staff to treat the customer well, for the simple reason that the customer constitutes the livelihood; perhaps the balance is redressed somewhat by the consideration that a customer who is impossible to please or appease is a customer nobody wants. Anyway, no matter how I twist and turn the transaction between staff and customer, no matter how many angles I look at it from, I simply can't see any advantage to either party in behaving rudely to the other. As for comping where a customer had reason to be dissatisfied with something, in the big picture is that not good policy? Excluding ex hypothesi the extreme cases and basing the principle on generally reasonable behavior (the steak really WAS overcooked, say, or the sauce really DID contain something that triggered an allergy etc.), seems to me that what you lose by comping you gain back several times over in increased good-will for the business. I don't know anything about the actual day-to-day mechanics of running a restaurant - I'm just thinking about the broader business model and assuming that a good restaurant budgets for that sort of loss and chalks it up to PR. And on the other side of the coin maintains a carefully-considered and well-enforced policy regarding interactions with customers. Damn, don't you wish someone would train the customers to treat the waiters decently too?

Hey, I've got a great method for flash-freezing fruit too! It's called, lay it out on a tray and shove it in the freezer. Sheesh - fancy-schmancy exotic ice for freezing fruit? Isn't that a leetle over the top? No, but seriously, does it really make any difference? I suppose it must, but I have a really hard time imagining it. And vice versa. A really good question, and one that can only be answered by generalizing in an unacceptable way - but if you can bear with that for a moment, my best guess is that they are two different types of competence and confidence. My mother, one of the best and most comfortable natural cooks I have ever known, was made nervous by the whole idea of baking. With no good reason, because whenever she did attempt something it came out well, and there were certain things even she felt confident about: a small repertoire of cookies, cakes and pies that she was comfortable with and that were consistently delicious. (Killer shortbread!) But the general idea of baking made her nervous because she felt it required a degree of precision that was alien to her. Overall, I think there's probably some truth to that, insofar as baking can be a lot more precise and a lot less forgiving than cooking. There are areas, of course - some types of country breads, for instance - that allow for some experimentation, but overall it's probably a lot easier to screw up baking than cooking. And I think baking anxiety may be akin to math anxiety - which my mother had in spades. The funny thing is, it really was about the anxiety, not the aptitude: if she'd been able to relax into it, she had the kind of mind that would have been nimble at all these things. She never believed me when I told her she had more natural aptitude for the computer than a lot of people I knew who were professionals - it was true, though. Then again, nothing on earth could have made her want to be good at it, and there was no reason she should be. I'm sorry, this sounds like a digression from a digression, but I really do think these things are related. Anyway, the thing about baking is that it requires not only precision and deftness and attention to detail but also instinct and confidence, not only in and of themselves but in one's possession of those first three qualities. Oh yes, and knowledge and experience, too, which of course present the same catch-22 as they do when you're trying to get your first job. You gotta have some chutzpah to try your hand at baking! And some people don't have it, or at least not the right kind. To approach baking without that is to approach it without joy or desire, in which case where's the point? Why is cooking different? Is it just a different flavor of chutzpah? Might be. But it's also more flexible, more elastic, more open to total spur-of-the-moment improvisation. That is its joy for some and its curse for others: where some people feel liberated by that sense of possibility, others need the crutch of strict rules and are terrified and bewildered the lack of them. These are the people who can often cook very well indeed as long as they have the recipe close at hand and can follow it to the letter; such people may be able to approach baking in the same way and do well at it, but they will never be able to make Cream of Refrigerator Soup, for instance, nor will they be able to stand in the middle of a market and feel the inspirations for tonight's meal wafting toward them from the sale shelves! Boy, that was a lot of yak by way of saying that it's probably just one of them right-brain/left-brain dichotomies at bottom. (Sorry....

Well, at least I'm harmless - I hope. As for balmagowry, you can learn more about that here, and if you need background to the background you will find it here.

I'll fifth or sixth the double boiler - I especially love my Pyrex one, which allows me to see exactly how hard the water is going underneath. I'll also second the cream - I generally do my anglaise with half-milk/half-cream or two-milk/one-cream. I just like the extra richness and body. Also (ptui ptui ptui I spit between my fingers not to jinx it) - mine has never actually curdled or failed to "cust," but I do find that it never thickens until a few minutes after I've started to kvetch and moan and mutter, "I just know it, this stuff is NEVER going to thicken." (Unberufen!) I'll also tenth chefpeon's remarks about eggs and men. Is there one among us who hasn't learned this the hard way?

:gasp: :gug: OMG, that image will haunt my dreams tonight. Hey - great head-shot, K!

It's a hell of a stretch. In my experience frozen blueberries tend to look like... blueberries. Go figure. I thought I was absent-minded, but I'm impressed by this. BTW, returning to the frozen blueberries for a moment - they are in fact worth looking at. Even the store-bought kind, these days, is not beneath contempt for cooking purposes - any long-simmered thing like a slump or grunt where the flavor is going to be altered anyway. I hasten to add that by "these days" I mean the pleasing tendency toward fruits being individually flash-frozen plain; no syrup or gunk or chemicals to preserve them. Good to have in the freezer for emergency last-minute concocting, especially if like me you spend a lot of your time in a remote area where trotting to the corner grocer is an hour's round-trip at best. But there's another world of frozen blueberries, a lovelier one, and that's the blueberries you freeze yourself, on purpose. Buy or pick in season, when they're big and beautiful and perfectly ripe. Flash-freeze on a tray. Eat, frozen, on a hot hot summer evening - they are the perfect dessert, needing no enhancement whatsoever; each of them a tiny sorbet in itself. Or put a lot of them into a glass of freshly-pressed lemonade. You can do this with several types of berries - frozen strawberries in champagne or Maiwein, anyone? - raspberries also work well in lemonade. And frozen green grapes are also very refreshing. But for my money there's nothing like a frozen blueberry bursting in the mouth. (Hmmm... almost time to make Maiwein. Didn't bother, last year. Pity.) Sorry to get so OT here, especially after the gasping pleasures of the horror stories up-thread. But if anyone in my family were a terrible cook I wouldn't dare to say so on a public forum! Fortunately... except for some long-dead in-laws-in-law on my father's side... it happens not to be the case. Sometimes you get lucky with the genetic strain, and the culinary gene runs true in the family. There are a couple of non-cooks, but they know it, and very sensibly yield the cooking gig to those of us who know how - and then of course they reap the benefits.