Jen and Nate got married. The next week, they started their first-ever farm share. This is the nerdy story of their marriage and their vegetables. With a focus mostly on the vegetables.
When Jen and I moved in together and I moved to New York City it was a wild and wonderous adventure. New York City was a whole new world and our neighborhood was filled with wondrous things such as a duck wearing a plastic bag as a diaper, a guy who scooted around on a skateboard and had lobster claws for hands, and a magical restaurant called Alberto's Mofongo House.
This new universe left me with a lot of questions. Why have a pet duck in New York City? If you have a pet duck why make it wear a diaper? How does a man have lobster claws in place of human hands? And what the hell is mofongo?
I never got answers to any of these questions except for the last one. The answer, put simply, is that mofongo is delicious!
Wanting to rekindle our roots (the kind of roots one lays in their late twenties anyway) I picked up some pork mofongo tonight from El Malecón, an institution in our old neighborhood. I served it up on a plate with some freshly cut farm tomatoes and avocado.
Things have come a long way since we moved in together over eight years ago. This morning, for example, instead of waking up and walking to the bagel place by our house to marvel at the bagel-slinging prowess of the workers I woke up to try to soothe Martin who was freaking out. Eventually I just rested him on my pillow and we drifted off together for a few last minute winks.
Yesterday began much the same way, but with Elliott requiring the additional daddy snuggles in the morning before work.
After I left for work Jen was left alone, again, to pick up the farm share. This week we got more tomatoes, edamame, broccoli, green fall cabbage, carnival winter squash, Red Ace beets, Basil, Shallots, Gala apples, Bartlett Pears, and peaches.
Tonight I came home to a huge pile of cookies that Jen had baked. This is just about the happiest thing that can happen to me in a day.
I didn't really have any appropriate beer to serve with mofongo. This is probably good because I would wager that mofongo is generally served with low quality lagers. Instead I enjoyed this Wit Blanche Belge from Brasserie Dunham in Quebec, another gift from Jen's father.
This was an excellent beer, completely different than I'd expected. It had a fresh lemony taste from the hops and reminded me of the Sorachi Ace from Brooklyn Brewery.
After dinner I tried to get Elliott into some pyjamas but, sadly, they are both pretty much outgrown their first crop of clothing. So, instead, I like to sit them up in nothing but their diapers. Elliott, in particular, looks like a little beefcake when sporting this look. And I can't get enough of calling him a beefcake.
This blog has had a wholly inadequate number of Valentine's Day dinners. Mostly this is because we haven't really had that many Valentine's Day dinners together.
In 2008 we were just a couple of months from starting this blog. In 2009 we were traveling to Rhode Island to see my Father for his birthday. In 2010 I was working and Jen was home sick and made herself creamed salmon on toast. In 2011 we had the first time since starting this blog nearly four years ago that we had anything resembling a nice meal. I made a non standard surf and turf of lamb and sea scallops.
This got me to thinking of some Valentine's Days past. There was 2003 where I surprised Jen in New York and presented her with a menu to choose from any one of a number of dishes I couldn't actually afford to buy the ingredients for. In 2004 I made a nine course dinner in Rhode Island with expensive ingredients kindly donated by some restaurant friends of mine. In 2005 or 2006 (I can't remember which) we ordered pasta take out and watched a documentary on Russian Mail Order Brides. We remember this as both our best and worst Valentine's Day ever. The sadness has mellowed and turned into charm in the charred oak barrel of time.
As was the case last year I had about twenty-five minutes to prepare dinner. I had to do something simple for a salad while the pans heated up so I made this salad with butter lettuce, radish, dill, and some of Jen's salad dressing from the fridge.
While last year I went with a non standard surf and turf, this year I decided to go with the classic: beef and lobster. I seasoned a beef tenderloin steak with salt and pepper, seared it in a pan, then threw it in the oven for about five or six minutes. After it was cooked I let it rest then threw some butter in the pan, cooked up some green onion, tossed in some English peas, the lobster tail which I'd previously boiled, and added some seafood stock and a little extra butter at the end. I served this all on top of mashed potatoes. I was going to drizzle a little truffle oil on the top but I made an assumption that Jen would hate that idea. During dinner I confirmed this assumption when Jen wrinkled her nose at the thought of truffles.
It's unfortunate but it does save a bit of money.
Money that can be spent on Jen getting me awesome beers! She is well-tuned to my beer aesthetic which is to say any beer that I haven't had before. She even bought me a beer that the guy at the store specifically warned her against because it was "too strange."
That's my girl!
Speaking of beer, tonight I poured this limited release Seduction porter from Ommegang. There aren't a whole lot of Valentine's Day beers out there but this is sort of one of them. A lot of beers talk about having chocolate notes but this beer actually has chocolate in it. I was expecting something quite a bit fruitier and, dare I say, girly, from a beer called Seduction. What I got was something a bit more complicated.
It's a good thing that I asked Jen to be my Valentine and not her father. I'm pretty sure that once he reads about this beer he will start looking into ways to have our marriage annulled.
Pairing dark heavy stouts with cheesecakes is nothing new but I was recently very impressed with one take on this using Young's Double Chocolate Stout from one of my favorite food and beer blogs, The Beer Cook. (Recipe here: Young's Double Chocolate Cheesecake).
I set out to make my own version of this but I decided to use the Seduction beer. I made this last night and let Jen taste the batter which she did not like. Tonight, however, after it had baked and chilled overnight she actually went in for seconds. The beer worked quite well in the cheesecake even if it did look like an unholy mess.
There you have it: another Valentine's Day that was better than the time we watched the documentary about Russian mail order brides.
I've roasted a lot of chickens in my personal and professional life. Well, mostly in my professional life. Mostly because one of my first jobs in the culinary world was as a chicken roaster. That's right, I spent most of my 12-to-17 hour shifts cutting, seasoning, panning up, and roasting chickens for a restaurant that served predominantly roasted chicken.
Spending years with the smell of chicken grease on my hands, clothes, and hair got me to a point where I didn't like chicken any more. In fact I went at least ten years without voluntarily having chicken after that job. I just never had any sort of craving for roast chicken.
After meeting Jen and hearing her talk, for years, about how much she loved a simple roast chicken I finally gave in and decided to give the dish another go. Since then I have found it to be quite enjoyable to have a nice roast chicken from time to time.
So, tonight, I set to work to make roast chicken for dinner!
Then I saw the state of the kitchen. Jen had made a cake last night. Tornadoes are generally easier on kitchens than Jen is when she is baking. This is a mixed bag because on the one hand I have to clean up a huge mess but on the other hand there are usually delicious baked treats for me to eat.
The interesting thing is her statement this morning: "I thought I did a good job cleaning last night after I was done baking. Apparently I was wrong."
The morning sun casts its light on the truth.
I decided, after watching a recent episode of No Reservations to break with my traditional way of roasting a chicken and go with Thomas Keller's method. I figured that it just might be possible that Thomas Keller could possess a better technique than even I had for roasting chicken.
I know, this was a long shot, but life is about taking risks.
It seemed to work pretty well. The main differences from my normal technique were really that this technique requires no oil, removing the wishbone, and involves a figure eight truss around the legs. Since my trussing skills are around the level of your average third grader this didn't go particularly well but once you remove the twine no one is the wiser.
What did I pair with this dinner? Why this pale ale from Lake of Bays Brewing in Baysville, Ontario. There is a lot on the bottle boasting about how it is a northern beer. I assumed the bay it was referring to was the Hudson Bay but it's actually less than three hours north of Toronto and an impossible distance south of the Hudson Bay. According to Google Maps there is no actual way to get to the Hudson Bay from where Baysville, Ontario is. I know that this is unlikely to be true but let's just say it's not an afternoon trip.
To accompany the chicken I also made this couscous with dried fig, carrot, green onion, almond, olive oil, butter, salt, and pepper.
It was interesting to try an alien technique for roast chicken. I think next time I'm going to give Heston Blumenthal's roast chicken a go.
All I need is a chicken and six days of prep time and I'm trying this technique out!
When I was in culinary school one of my instructors was a Czechoslovakian man with a a great gray mustache. It was the kind of mustache you'd expect from a Civil War general more so than someone who has spent most of his life in the restaurant business. Perhaps in Czechoslovakia there are a lot of American Civil War themed restaurants the same way American restaurants put a lot of baskets, old barrels, and fake grapes hanging off the walls.
This man, Mr. Browchuk, would often invite me after class to participate in wine tastings. It might be because he could see, unlike many other students, that I actually had an interest in it other than a means of becoming drunk. I took him up on many an after class tasting where he introduced me to Rosé d'Anjou which taught me that there was another type of rosé other than white zinfandel.
There was an incredible man behind that incredible mustache. On the first day of class he asked us all to tell him his name. Then he taught an entire class (a six hour class) and at the end of the class went through the room telling us all our names without getting a single one wrong. This didn't have anything to do with our culinary education but it sure was impressive.
At the time I attended these wine-tastings I was nineteen. The University had some sort of special license where it was allowed to serve alcohol to underage students for educational purposes. I'm not sure if this is actually legal but it's what they did. It could have been that Providence was ruled at the time by corrupt mayor Buddy Cianci who had pulled some strings to make this "legal." It's worth noting that he also had the license plate "1" which was actually illegal since the governor also had the same license plate. The only difference is that the governor was supposed to have that plate number. Mayor Cianci seemed to get around it by claiming that he was the most important person in Rhode Island.
He may have been right about that.
During one of these tastings Mr. Browchuk told me that he enjoyed a beer called Budweiser. Before I could allow this to tarnish my image of him he explained to me that in Czechoslovakia they brewed the original beer called Budweiser. He said it was a Czech lager whose name was stolen by the American beer. I could hardly believe it. I held that fact in the back of my mind for years imagining what this beer could be like and, more importantly, how Anheuser-Busch could get away with it.
As you can see from this video clip above from one of my favorite shows, Michael Jackson's The Beer Hunter, the town of Budweis has been brewing beer since the 1200s. In fact, Adolphus Busch began brewing Budweiser in America as an homage to the Bohemian lagers he'd had while traveling Europe. He was particularly fond of the lager brewed in Budweis which had been the beer consumed by many of the kings of Europe for hundreds of years.
Actual real Budweiser (from Budweis) wasn't sold in America until recently and even now is only allowed to be sold under the name Czechvar. It's sort of like the Busch/Bush beer fiasco I talked about last month.
Anheuseur-Busch, in order to protect its brand, has employed its arsenal of lawyers to do everything possible to make sure that the beer that inspired its success was marginalized in the United States. The original Budweiser from Bohemia had been called "The Beer of Kings" for centuries. Anheuseur-Busch played off that slogan by calling its beer "The King of Beers." How did they pay the original Budweiser back for all this inspiration? They prevented the use of the word 'Budweiser' (the actual name of the beer), 'Bud' (another Anheuseur-Busch trademark), and any use of the centuries-old slogan "The Beer of Kings."
Ain't that America?
I had a lot of time to think about this today, on my back, lying around and thinking about things. Truth be told, I'd been thinking about this for some time. I'd never had the original Budweiser, and I hadn't had American Budweiser in well over a decade. So that got me to thinking that I would like to do a blind taste test of the two.
Now I'm fully aware of my bias against the American lager. That's why this would have to be a completely blind tasting. How could I accomplish this fairly given that I am only one man, alone, at home, experiencing lower back pain?
First I would need two, identical, opaque service glasses or cups. While I wasn't 100% certain I was still pretty sure that Czechvar would end up being a little darker than the American lager. I marked the bottoms of the cups with the names of the beer they were about to receive.
To be fair I made sure to check and get the freshest possible version of each beer. The American Budweiser had a Born On Date™ of December 6, 2012 while its Czech counterpart had a Best Before date of October 10, 2012. Different dating systems but both were about as fresh as I could hope for.
Then I poured the two beers into their respective cups.
After that I needed some sort of rotational device so I could spin the beers around while closing my eyes. I was at a loss for a moment until I decided to take the turntable out of my microwave, set it up on my table, and use it as a makeshift Lazy Susan.
After they were sufficiently mixed up I had to mark the cups again, this time on the front with a 1 and a 2. This time not knowing which beer is which.
I made sure to hold the beer up at eye level so I could not be influenced by the look of the beer. I didn't know for a fact but I didn't want my taste buds to be influenced by what I expected to be the darker Czechvar.
Then I took notes, sitting on the floor as not to be able to peer into the tops of the cups. It also helped to relieve my back pain to sit on the hard wood. Score!
I skipped over the visual element as I would have to get to that later as I didn't want it to cloud my judgment. And now onto the beer judgment!
Beer 1 On the nose I picked up a very faint and light hop aroma. There were notes of grass or hay and something slightly acidic like a very faint citrus. The malt and yeast gave off a smell of fresh dough and a soft-ripened cheese like brie. It tasted a little reminiscent of Corona but, unlike last night's beer, without the lime. The body was very light and thin with an average carbonation. The flavor did not linger for very long but there was a slight sweetness to it and it had a creamy finish with absolutely no bitterness to speak of. It had a watery quality one would associate with most lagers.
Beer 2 Yup, this one was the American Budweiser. The blind test was over the second I had a sip of this one. There is something so distinct about the taste of this beer, a flavor I recognized from long ago at functions held at establishments with poor beer selections.
Beer #2 had a lot of the same tasting notes. Present was the soft-ripened cheese smell, the dough scent from the yeast, and the smell of straw and hay from the malt. It was slightly less acidic than Beer #1 but with a similar sweetness. The main difference was that Beer #2 had a slight sake taste to it. After researching this a little I found that American Budweiser is made with about 30% rice so that would explain the sake flavor.
Just to be sure I checked under my cup at this point to see if I was right.
Yup. I was. It's amazing how ingrained in me the flavor of American Budweiser was even after not having it for at least a decade.
So what was the verdict? Which one was better? Well, I think I will say that the findings of this test were largely inconclusive. The fact is I didn't really care for either. American Budweiser was more familiar but both were pretty flavorless. I had been hoping I could review them both, make a decision then look under the cup and be surprised. Unfortunately one of the beers had unknowingly imprinted itself on my brain so I was unable to have the result I wanted.
I really had no need for either of these beers so I dumped them and settled back with something a little more enjoyable.
Since I'm a light weight and can only really drink one beer in an evening I poured the remainder of last night's Pearl Jam beer from Dogfish Head into a glass. While this beer had measured as a disappointment to some I must say it was like a special treat after drinking lackluster versions of a lackluster beer style.
My grandmother didn't cook all that much. She was not really known for her cooking. I should correct that. She was known for her cooking, just not in the way one would hope. It's strange, actually. Directly descended from my grandmother are a a number of really good cooks.
As a child I heard stories of her cooking. She was fond of any vegetable as long as it came in a can. Like most cooks in the 1950's she took an overly cautious approach to cooking pork, charring it to a burnt cinder. I don't think she was alone in this approach. It makes me wonder why anyone even bothered with pork if they were so terrified of trichinosis in the first place.
About ten or fifteen years ago she started to take a real interest in cooking which shocked everyone. She would cook large quantities of food then give it away just for fun. She's ask me for pointers when I saw her and was always trying new things.
She got really good.
I remember going to visit her at what was one of the lower parts of my extremely lucky and privileged life. I struggled with running a business, was dirt poor, and lived in a beat up old apartment that was cheaper than just about anywhere else in America but I could still barely afford it. Gram was really excited about a turkey chili she'd made and, to my delight, she gave me a giant container to take home.
I ate the hell out of that turkey chili.
If you've ever been truly broke, truly in financial hardship then you know how amazing it is to get free food. Even someone giving you a loaf of Wonderbread makes you think, Thank God I can use this to eat and that is $1.99 less I have to put on my credit card.
Gram's turkey chili was really good. For some reason I always remembered that moment, that time where Gram was interested in cooking and she made this turkey chili that was really good. The fact that it was made my my grandmother (and in no small measure that it was free) made it all that more special.
Tonight I decided to make turkey chili. I don't really think I've ever made it before. I had a ton of leftover turkey but I didn't really have a lot of the other ingredients. I wasn't about to go out on this rainy late night so I simply browned some garlic and onion then finely chopped the cooked turkey, and added black beans, tomato paste, part of a leftover Triple Bag beer, oregano, thyme, smoked paprika, chili powder, salt, pepper, and a few dashes of hot sauce.
I served it over white rice with a dollop of sour cream and some shredded cheddar.
To go with the chili I had this St. Bernardus Prior 8. My grandmother didn't serve beer with her chili. In fact, I don't know if she ever had a beer to my knowledge. However, she was quite religious so I figured she'd approve of the good saint.
Gram passed away last weekend. Jen and I went to see her the previous weekend. She hadn't been doing well for a while but she was happy to see us. My beard was quite a surprise to her even though I've had it for the majority of my life. She also took particular note of Jen's scarf, pointing at it. When Jen handed her the scarf she threw it onto the floor. Jen was very happy about this. Her greatest wish in life is that when she's an old lady like grandma she'll be able to do anything she wants and no one will be able to say anything to her.
My grandma was always a very sweet natured and kind woman. I don't really think she shared Jen's philosophy on what license an old lady has. I don't think that's the reason my grandma threw her scarf on the ground but I'd sure like to think it was.
