Oh right, the blog

I give up. I had been counting on a new CSA subscription re-igniting my interest in cooking from the low ebb it had fallen to, but the Teena's Pride gourmet box is...um...what's the opposite of inspiring? I'm going to go with soul-crushing. Another week of squash and eggplant and herbs. And three small beets. That's great; Thanks for that. There's always either too little or too much and it's never too much of something I actually want.

Blogs always linger on too long either tapering off with apologies for lack of posts of bilious rants about what the blogger used to like. I'm cutting this off before I do any more of either. If I find I have something to share later, I'll try some new social media instead of putting it up here. Blogs are so 2008, anyway.

I'll just end by wishing you all happy holidays and that you can enjoy cooking more than I can at the moment. If you've got a blog or somesuch you'd like to send whatever readers I've got to, please post it in the comments.

CSA week 17 wrap-up, week 18 start-up

Another week of low posting, but I did do some cooking worth mentioning.

As I thought I might, I made a kale and turnip gratin. Unfortunately, there was rather more of both than I counted on, and rather less cream and swiss cheese about than I thought. The results weren't fabulous so I decided to try a fix. Digging around, I found some dried mozzarella, a bit of cheddar a fair amount of pecarino romano and, to substitute for the lack of cream, some cream cheese. I disassembled the gratin, mixed all that in and put it back in the oven for a half hour. An improvement, but still more gooey than creamy so less than entirely satisfactory. The next day I attempted to melt the cheese down and dissolve it into a cream sauce by adding a cup of chicken broth and simmering on the stovetop. Instead, the mozzerella seized up into curds the texture of ground beef. Not bad, really. The turnips had gone soft at this point so I mixed in some noodles for texture and a couple beaten eggs to thicken up the sauce and I ended up with an odd but fairly palatable concoction. Too much of a haphazard mess to be worth a post, though.

In contrast, the pork chops in fennel and caper sauce I made was not worth a post because it's already written up quite adequately on Food.com. It's a Giada de Laurentis recipe that I didn't modify in any notable way. Pretty darn good, though. I do recommend it if you've still got your fennel around.

I bailed on the dill curry I've been talking about, though. I figure that if I've got the ingredients in the house for two weeks and I still haven't made the recipe, then that's a recipe I don't really want to make. And I'm not going to cook something I'm not interested in just for a blog post. Not to please you lot anyway.

On to this week then...



That's callaloo on the right, traded in the extras box for the kale that was in the share. I don't need any more kale. I think I'd like to make mchicha with it again as it turned out quite well the first time.

The green beans I'm going to pickle as the last batch I made turned out great.

For the leeks, I want to do something with a cream sauce. I remember liking a chicken and leeks dish my mom used to make and I haven't done anything using cream with the CSA leeks I've gotten yet.

That squash is the first we've seen in quite some time, isn't it? I know saved some squash recipes for CSA season that I haven't used. I'll have to look one up. I might go with fritters. I could go for fritters.

Potatoes and parsley I'll save until I need them which just leaves the dandelion. Oh, I'll probably have them over pasta in something simple. We haven't had any turnip greens for me to do that with in a while and dandelion should work just as well after a quick blanch.

One final note: I'm going to be out of town next weekend so my half-share is up for grabs. Nobody at work ever wants it when I offer. Do any of you? I use the Coconut Grove pick-up if that makes a difference.

CSA week nine wrap-up, week ten start-up

There was supposed to be a second post this week; I made a slow-cooked kale and beans dish that look promising, but the transition from the oven to the slow cooker didn't go smoothly and, in retrospect, I don't think simmering greens for hours was ever a good idea.

Beyond that fiasco, I made a warm green bean and grape tomato salad that turned out nicely. I simmered the tomatoes in a little red wine until they collapsed and got some really intense flavor out of them. I also made a pasta topping with the dandelion greens and the turnips chopped into tiny dice. I was hoping to get some color on the turnips, but they were fine just cooked through. And I ate the canistel with a little honey. There's a brief window between under-ripe and poisonous and over-ripe and mushy where they're nice to eat without any processing.

That's just the mushrooms left. Usually I use those right away but I never got around to it this week. Maybe today then if they survived all right.

For this week, I should start with the emerald explosion in the middle of the picture. If that's escarole, then the curly endive from last week wasn't. Looks like I fell prey to the same sort of nomenclatural confusion I sorted through with the betel leaves. I'm not going to make Utica greens again to compare and contrast, though. Maybe I'll go the Italian wedding soup route instead.

Just about hidden under the escarole is a small bag of sunflower sprouts. They've got more bulk and more character than your average sprout. I could see using them in sandwiches like watercress or in a soup.

To the left is a big head of celery. I want to do a stir fry. A quick search turns up lots of options, but I'm having a hard time picking out what's most likely to work. Also, what's most likely to use more than just a stalk or two.

On the right is some spinach. Not quite baby spinach, but still too tender to treat too roughly. Maybe creamed?

Above the spinach is a canistel I'll worry about later and some parsley and grape tomatoes I'll worry about not at all.

The honey, on the other hand, I need to deal with. Added to the big bottles of avocado and coffee honey I've got (The first a bit nasty and probably only suited to savory applications; the second really really good and a bit surprising to find local to South Florida.) I now officially have too much honey. It doesn't go bad, of course, but I want to put it to use. An ice cream seems a good choice, but I need to find my own twist on it. Any suggestions?

CSA week nine

Why didn't anyone tell me I was off by a week? And that the week number was stated clearly on the top of the newsletter had I cared to look? I'm not going to go back and change the titles that are mislabeled, but I'm going to try to get it right from this point on.

CSA week two - Chocolate and roasted avocado ice cream

The combination of chocolate and avocado is unusual, but not entirely unheard of. I understand that chocolate-avocado milkshakes are common in Viet Nam and Indonesia. I can see how the creaminess of the avocado could work; as for the flavor, well, I've got a Monroe so it hasn't got much. Using it as is would have been the easy way out, but I decided to try to intensify the flavor and then see what I could do with it.

I chopped up the avocado, sprinkled it with brown sugar for caramelization--I considered adding a bit of butter as I would if I were caramelizing bananas, but it's got plenty of fat of its own--and baked it at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring a couple times. If you compare the before and after pictures, you can see that it's shrunk considerably. The flavor isn't, I think, a lot more intense, but it has transformed. There are a lot of warm, toasty notes now.

Still, the cup of caramelized avocado wasn't really enough to flavor a full batch of ice cream so I looked around for some additions that would pair well without overwhelming it. And also I wanted to use up some scraps left in the refrigerator. Here's what I came up with:

Ingredients:

1 cup caramelized avocado mush
1/4 cup pineapple
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 1/4 cup milk
1 cup cream
3 Tablespoons dutch process cocoa
1/3 cup light brown sugar

I blended all that together and put it in the back of the refrigerator to chill. The texture seems about right at this point so that's good, but I'm still concerned the flavor isn't bold enough to survive freezing. I may add some spices after I taste the fully chilled mixture.
...
Actually, the flavor intensified, but it did turn somewhat bitter. I added another quarter cup of sugar to compensate.

So, to churning. It froze very quickly. Look how it glommed onto the dasher. I've never seen quite the like before and I don't think that bodes well for the texture of the final result. I was hoping the fat in the avocado would help keep things creamy, but I don't see that happening. The fat's not there in the mouthfeel either. It feels like sherbet despite all the cream that went into it. Here's hoping that ripening will help.
...


And here's the final product. The fact that I didn't bother to deal with the freezer burn is probably a biasing factor, but I think despite that, you can see that that it's not terribly attractive. The texture could be creamier--it's definitely more sherbet than ice cream rich--but it melts smooth if you let it warm up out of the freezer for a while before serving. I'm going to blame the roasting here as there are plenty of avocado ice cream recipes that don't appear to turn out like this.

The flavor starts with cocoa, clearly not intense or creamy enough to really feel like chocolate, with a little tropical fruitiness rounding it out and fades into bitter roasted notes not dissimilar to those you get with very dark chocolate. There's definitely a note of avocado there at the end, too, but difficult to identify if you don't know what you're looking for. It might just be an off note if you're expecting straight chocolate (upon which this is definitely no improvement). It just seems like cheap nasty chocolate ice cream. I'm going to take this back home before it ruins my reputation around the office.

Clay pot rice

OK, one last rice cooker post before I get bored with the thing and go back whatever it is I usually do around here.

This, like the clay pot pork I made a while back, is an adaption to the western kitchen, although, since I'm doing it in a rice cooker, perhaps it's better to say that it's an adaption to modern kitchen. One without a clay pot and a charcoal burner at any rate.

The version I made is something of a bastardization. It's got a pretty strict ingredient list traditionally--garlic, ginger and shiitake mushrooms mixed with the rice, Chinese sausage and chicken marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil and rice wine layered on top, maybe an egg or salted preserved fish, and a scallion garnish to finish.

I substituted some Chinese bacon for the chicken as the bacon was pre-marinated and I was feeling lazy. I used a different brand than last time and what I got was far leaner and more cured, almost jerky. Not quite what I wanted, but it turned out OK. The chicken would have been better, though.

I also layered on a bunch of different vegetables: water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and baby corn, diced carrot and shredded cabbage, plus sliced tofu. And I added a bit of soy sauce and chili oil to the pot too instead of using them as condiments afterward. And I mixed in some thinly sliced sweet pepper with the scallion and, since I was concerned about overcooking the egg, I added a sliced hard-boiled egg to the garnish instead of steaming one along with everything else.

The only thing left is a cup and three quarters of chicken stock mixed with a cup of rice and the garlic, ginger and reconstituted dried shiitake. That goes in the bottom of the rice cooker. Everything else, bar the garnishes, goes on top. Turn on the cooker and come back at dinner time.

There are a few things to note here. First is the extra liquid added to the rice creates extra steam to properly cook the ingredients on top. Second, the fact that they're on top is not just so they can steam, but so the fat and juices can drip down to flavor the rice. The sauces I added really weren't necessary.

Third is a matter of technique that I'll admit I didn't fully appreciate until after I cooked this. There's some tension between wanting to cook the rice slowly to ensure full and flavorful doneness and cooking it at a high temperature to form the crust that's an important aspect of this dish. In a clay pot, it seems, you can do both. In a rice cooker you can't, at least one not in one like mine that is smart enough to think it knows the right thing to do and insists on doing it even when you're trying to do something else. If you've used Microsoft Word, you know what I mean.

That crust is what makes this a respectable sibling of fried rice and sticky rice dishes. Without its added flavor and texture, the dish is fine but dull. And, as you can, see, my version has no crust.



So, how to fix this? Looking around after the fact I see some recipes calling for the rice to have an hour pre-soak. Other add the toppings ten minutes into the rice cooking. You might not have this problem if you try it. My old rice cooker, with its hot "keep warm" setting would have formed a crust on the rice by just waiting ten minutes before dishing it out. Possibly, the fast cycle on my cooker would have done the same thing. I'll have to try it later. I've been talking about rice crust a fair bit this last week and I'm starting to crave it pretty badly at this point. Plus, it'll make a fine blog post.

Albondigas

Sometimes when I come across an interesting recipe I decide I want to make that dish, research a bunch of variations and then come up with my own version. But sometimes I'll notice that I've got everything I need for the recipe in the house and skip all that and just make it.

I found a link to this recipe on TheKitchn.com, but it was a link to a link to a reposting of a recipe from a cookbook so all the context and explanation was missing. That should have been a warning sign, but I guess I wasn't in a mindset to be warned. I didn't look at variations and didn't even look at the context. I just thought: "I didn't know albóndigas had oatmeal in them." and went ahead with it. As you may know, they don't. This recipe is from Almost Meatless, a cookbook by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond, where they switched out bread crumbs and reduced the amount of meat. The oats add bulk and absorb flavors. If they had left it at that then I may well have tried the recipe even if I had done my due diligence; it's a clever idea. But they made a bunch of other changes that I don't get. I'll explain later, but first the recipe.

Albóndigas
- serves 4 to 6 -
from Almost Meatless by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond

Ingredients:
1/2 cup steel-cut oatmeal
1/2 cup loosely packed fresh cilantro leaves, chopped plus more for garnish
4 cloves garlic, minced (about 2 tablespoons), divided
1 chipotle in adobo sauce, seeded and chopped into a paste
4 teaspoons ground cumin, divided
2 teaspoons ground coriander, divided
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 pound ground lamb
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 small onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice (about 1 cup)
1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
1 cup water
Juice of 1 lime

Procedure:
1. Mix together the oatmeal, cilantro, half the garlic, the chipotle, 2 teaspoons of the cumin, 1 teaspoon of the coriander, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a bowl. Gently work the lamb into the mixture, distributing it evenly. Form balls out of tablespoon-size scoops of the mixture and set aside.

2. Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion and saute for 5 minutes. Stir in the remaining garlic, cumin, and coriander, cooking for an additional 30 seconds. Add the tomatoes and water and stir to combine.

3. Bring the sauce to a simmer and add the meatballs. Simmer partially covered for 45 minutes.

4. Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste, squeeze the lime juice over top, and serve with extra chopped cilantro.






From all the oats floating around the bowl, it appears I've suffered critical meatball failure during simmering. The meatballs that remain are crumbly which isn't too surprising considering the chunky bits they're made of and the lack of binder. Most every other albóndiga recipe has an egg in there. I think maybe the recipe was expecting little broken bits of oats instead of the big chunks in the McCann's brand oatmeal I used. I probably should have chopped my cilantro finer; that can't have helped. I suppose I could break up the rest and call this chili.

I'm a bit disappointed that I'm not getting more lamb flavor here. There's a bit of anonymous meatiness in there, but mainly it's all tomato, cumin, cilantro and less chipotle than you'd expect, but I did use a small one. Frying the meatball before simmering, which most Spanish albóndigas recipes do, would have helped. So would using more strongly flavored beef or pork which are far more common.

I wonder; what with the chipotle, cilantro and lime; if this is a take on a Mexican meatball. The cumin, coriander and lamb are typical of the Moorish origins of the tapas version (each of those isn't unheard of in Mexican cooking, but they're a very Mediterranean combination). Even if all the spices were Mexican, the tomato sauce is very much a Spanish element. It all just seems incoherent and, for me, it doesn't really work.

Incoherence aside, it's not actively unpleasant to eat. Not high praise, but that's all this dish is going to get.

A simple steak (ruined)

I don't eat a whole lot of beef, as you know if you've been reading a while and paying attention, and even less as a big slab of meat. I recently finished the last piece of the half a tenderloin I bought last November. (It froze quite well and that last piece seemed just as good as the first.) That worked out well so when I saw a good deal on sirloin yesterday I bought one to have it around just in case a good use turned up.

Meanwhile, I'm trying, only two years behind the curve, the Zuni Cafe roast chicken recipe. You probably already know about it, but it's a very simple preparation that relies on simple straightforward seasoning and careful cooking to get the most out of the meat. It's an interesting approach that I haven't often taken, but I find philosophically pleasing. So when I saw a Good Eats recipe for sirloin that is similarly humble in seasoning and complicated in technique, I thought I'd give it a try. It should be good for honing my skills at the very least.


Sirloin Steak
Recipe courtesy Alton Brown

Prep Time: 2 min
Inactive Prep Time: 5 min
Cook Time: 16 min

Level: Easy [says you]

Serves: 4 servings

Ingredients
* 1 1/2 pounds sirloin steak, 1 to 1 1/4-inches thick
* 2 teaspoons olive oil
* Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions:
Preheat oven on broiler setting. Make foil 'snake' out of aluminum foil to use to keep oven door slightly ajar so that broiler won't turn off if it gets too hot.

Brush steak with oil and salt and pepper, to taste.

Place a piece of foil on the bottom rack as a drip pan. Place another rack in the position above this and put the steak directly on this rack.

Cook steak in this position for 5 minutes. Flip steak and cook for another 5 minutes.

Move rack with steak to top position in oven, moving rack with foil and drippings just underneath, and cook for 3 minutes. Flip 1 last time and cook for another 3 minutes.

Transfer steak to wire rack and rest for 3 to 5 minutes. The above times are for medium doneness. Adjust cooking times up or down as desired.


My steak was on the thin side and I wanted it medium rare so I cut a minute off of each of the first two steps and thought I did for the latter two, but I misremembered them as 4 minutes each. This is what happens when I have the recipe displayed on the computer screen in the other room when I'm trying to cook in the kitchen.



It looks passable on the outside, I guess, but it's well done--just about ruined. I don't know a lot about cooking steaks and I could use some advice here from those who do. Are those times obviously too long for 3/4" thick steak? Are there warning signs I should have been looking out for? I did notice a good bit of juices accumulating on the foil under the meat, but it was mostly grease so I figured it was OK.

It's edible in a pinch, but not presentable. Still, I can tell that the flavor would have been good if I hadn't left it in the oven too long. And that's without marination, added fat, spice rubs or the like. There's some promise here, but I may ruin a few more steaks before I get the hang of it.

As for the Zuni chicken, I'm going to start the temperature low and the cooking time short before I start checking it. Better safe than another ruined dinner.

Pop up pancakes

Just a quick post as I try out this simple but unlikely cross between popovers and pancakes. I think I saw this as a guest post on the TheKitchn blog but it comes from MakeandTakes.com originally.

Pop Up Pancake Recipe - makes 24 muffins or fills a 9×13 baking pan

* 1 cup milk
* 1 cup flour
* 6 eggs
* 1/4 cup melted butter
* dash salt

0. Preheat oven at 400*

1. Put all ingredients in a blender and blend well. Let rest for a few minutes for the flour to hydrate.

2. Grease a muffin or popover tin. Pour batter into cups.

3. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.

and that's it.

The outside looks good, but the inside is a weird rubbery flan-like texture. Something's gone horribly wrong here.

Ah, I see what happened. I halved the recipe, but didn't trust that I halved the number of pancakes made too. Because who would make 24 pancakes? (Yes, I know. A family with four kids or two teenagers.) That means I filled six indentations on the muffin tin mostly full instead of twelve shallowly. I filled it to the level I did for proper popovers which turned out fine. The recipe didn't specify any level in particular so I just assumed to do it that way.

That's why, when I'm not feeling especially lazy, I try to be explicit and precise when I write up my recipes. You have to give your readers safeguards against both your and their assumptions. I think it goes back to an exercise my class did back in sixth grade. We had to write up instructions on how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then the other kids would follow them to the letter while deliberately misinterpreting every ambiguity. While willful misinterpretation is rather perverse, if you've ever written instructions for others to follow you know that the disparate interpretations of the readers are plenty to screw things up even with everyone well-intentioned. That's a good lesson to learn early.

All that said, I can't fault Marie who wrote the original recipe. If I hadn't screwed up my halving, I would have been fine.

So back into the oven for another twenty minutes. Still not done, but getting closer. I'm going to keep cooking these things until either they become edible or the smoke alarm goes off. Another twenty minutes and now the outsides are crisp enough that the pancakes can't shrink back down. I crack one open and find that it's nicely light and airy, but still just a little too moist and eggy. Another eight minutes then.

OK, that should do it. Crisp on the outside (for the moment. This is summer in Miami so they'll be getting soggy soon enough.), airy on the inside with thin strands of soft but still kind of rubbery and eggy dough. Ah, screw it. I think this recipe may have been doomed from the start from the volume measurements. The texture seemed a little thin at the start so I should have added a bit more flour. I don't think I'm a big enough fan of either pancakes or popovers to bother trying this again, but if you do, do please let me know how it turns out.

Shrimp and mango curry

I was searching for "shrimp" and "curry leaves" when I came across quite a few mango curry recipes. I had no idea such a thing existed and I've got to admit to being skeptical. The shrimp and mango curries were the oddest of the lot--the others were really more glorified chutneys--so that's what I decided to try. But most of them called for ingredients I didn't have or I just didn't like the look of so I added shrimp to this vegetarian mango curry instead:


Mango curry
by Madhur Jaffrey

Serves 4-6 Vegetarian

mango
Preparation time less than 30 mins
Cooking time 30 mins to 1 hour

Ingredients

3 medium ripe mangoes, peeled pit removed and flesh cut into 1cm/½in pieces
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1-1½ tsp salt
55g/2oz jaggery or brown sugar, if needed
310g/11oz coconut, freshly grated
3-4 fresh hot green chillies, coarsely chopped
½ tbsp cumin seeds
290ml/½ pint natural yoghurt, lightly beaten
2 tbsp coconut oil or any other vegetable oil
½ tsp brown mustard seeds
3-4 dried hot red chillies, broken into halves
½ tsp fenugreek seeds [I'm all out. I need to restock.]
10-12 fresh curry leaves, if available

Method

1. Put the mangoes in a medium-sized pan. Add 250ml/9fl oz water. Cover and stew for 8-10 minutes over a medium-low heat. Stir occasionally. Add the turmeric, cayenne pepper and salt. Stir well. (If the mangoes are not sweet enough, add the jaggery or brown sugar to make the dish sweeter.)

2. Meanwhile, put the coconut, green chillies and cumin seeds in to a blender. Add 250ml/9fl oz water and blend to a fine paste.

3. When the mangoes are cooked, mash them to a pulp. Add the coconut paste. Mix. Cover and simmer over a medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture becomes thick. This should take about 10-15 minutes. Add the yoghurt and heat, stirring, until just warmed through. Do not let the mixture come to the boil. Remove from the heat and put to one side. Check for seasoning. [I didn't get the fine paste required in step two so I used a stick blender to smooth things out at this point.]

4. Heat the oil in a small pan over a medium-high heat. When hot, add the mustard seeds. When the mustard seeds begin to pop (a matter of a few seconds) add the chillies, fenugreek seeds and the curry leaves. Stir and fry for a few seconds until the chillies darken. Quickly add the contents of the small pan to the mangoes. Stir to mix.

For the shrimp, I peeled and deveined them (some of the shrimp curries left the shells on) and tossed them with the salt and spices to soak in some flavor as the mangoes cooked down. It's a good technique to bring out the shrimp's flavor and a lot faster than brining. I'll have to remember that.



And the end result is just as good as it looks: really awful. It's warm, vaguely sweet grainy gritty yogurt. You can't really taste the mango; you can't taste any coconut and there's barely a hint of spice. Strain it and cool it and you might have a decent lassi. But as dinner? Feh.

So what went wrong here? First off the mangoes. They were under-ripe and not very flavorful. That's my fault there. A lot of mango curries did call for green mango so I thought it might work, but I should have stopped the moment I cut into the first mango and found out how mild its flavor was. Also, these are probably the wrong sort of mango. From what I've been reading I gather that Indian mangoes are rather tart and even if these were ripe, they weren't tending in that direction. And third, how large are Indian mangoes? I may have used far too much or far too little fruit. I dunno.

Second, the coconut. There was way too much of it. I suspect a mistake in the original recipe. Maybe if the water to coconut ratio was higher it would have actually blended into the paste it was supposed to. Or maybe freezing does something to coconut that keeps it from doing that. And it was quite tasteless. I'll bet real freshly grated coconut would worked much better. You'd think I could get that more easily around here.

Third, the yogurt. Is Indian yogurt thick like Greek or thin? Is it supposed to be tangy or mild? I'm guessing thick and mild since thin and tangy sure as heck didn't help. ...I've just done a little more research and confirmed that. I'll have to strain the remaining yogurt to get the right consistency for the next dish I'm using it in. But I think I'll cook something without curry leaves first. I'm getting a little sick of them at this point.

Butter poached shrimp, new potatoes and pearl onions

It should tell you how far awry my cooking went today that none of those four ingredients were in the recipe I was making. Also, that recipe was for ice cream.

The original idea here was to a) use the last of the CSA celery and b) make a new ice cream flavor since I hadn't in a while. Put those two together and you get, first, celery ice cream--which might work as a component in a savory dish--second, celery and peanut butter ice cream--a natural sweet pairing that is interesting but presents textural issues--and third, celery-infused peanut butter ice cream with raisins--an ice cream version of ants on a log (ants in a bog maybe?).

Peanut butter ice cream recipes aren't hard to find, but how to infuse the celery flavor? I don't want to cook it as I want the raw flavor so I can't use the usual infusion method. But I figure celery is mostly water; if I run it through the food processor it should break down into mush easily enough. And with supermarket celery I think it would have worked. CSA celery is different though, much more dense. I processed it with a little milk and just got a bowlful of celery shards.

Plan B: add all the milk and cream and process the celery until everything turns green and it's fairly smooth. Strain out the big chunks and there you go. I give it a few pulses and things are indeed turning green, but there's not a lot of celery flavor getting into the liquid. I figure a couple minutes processing should get everything good and combined and add in the celery leaves for good measure. But when I check the progress I find the tiny bits of celery encased in a mass of creamy gunk--I've churned the cream into butter. I thought making butter was supposed to be a lot harder than that. The cream was ultrapasturized; Isn't that supposed to stop it from separating quite so easily?

So, the ice cream is ruined. I fish the solids out of what I suppose is now celery-colored skim milk and ponder what to do with them. Nobody wants celery-flavored butter so I'm going to have to get them apart. I can do something like distilation. Just like water and alcohol boil at different temperatures allowing their separation, butter and celery melt at different temperatures and that should let me separate them.

I want to use gentle heat so I put it in a double boiler. It works, sort of, but a lot of the milk solids are stuck to the celery and aren't going anywhere. In that case, I may as well skip the gentle heat, simmer it for a while and try to clarify it. When you simmer plain butter, the milk solids turn brown and sink to the bottom leaving clarified butter on top; maybe these milk solids will be able to drag the celery down with them. I simmer for ten minutes and I can start to see some clarification around the edges, but no browning. Close enough, I scoop it into a cheesecloth-lined strainer and squeeze out the liquids.

Here's the result.

Still not quite clear, but at least it isn't green. It does taste of celery so, hey, at least I finally managed to infuse some flavor. While it hardened in the refrigerator I considered what to do with it and came up with butter poaching. Looking at what I've got around the house to poach, I first thought of salmon, which isn't bad with celery, but I only found one proper butter-poached salmon recipe on the web and lots of butter-poached shellfish, so I'm going to go with the wisdom of crowds on this one.

I melted the butter back down, added a blorp of white wine, the juice of half a lemon, salt, pepper and a good pinch of a Parisian herb blend, mixed well to emulsify and brought it to a bare simmer and backed off the heat a little to keep the cooking to a poach. In went the smallest of my CSA red potatoes, the larger ones quartered to match the smallest in size. They simmered (as the heat crept up on me) for 10 minutes before I added the still-mostly-frozen onions. Twenty more minutes of semi-simmering got them done and then I dropped the heat down a little more before adding, still in their shells, the three shrimp I had left in the house. They only needed three minutes poaching. Everyone out of the pool and kept warm while I turned up the heat and cooked down the liquid into a sauce for four more minutes. I finished off the sauce with some capers and poured it over top.


Not bad at all. A hint of celery comes through in the sauce and works with its tart and rich flavors. The potatoes are creamy, the onions squish like they should and the shrimp are done just right and, with the lemon and butter sauce, are plenty tasty. All in all, a pretty good salvage job for a failed ice cream.

CSA week 16 - Radish pancake, first attempt

Prompted by Karen's comment on this week's start-up post, I thought I'd try making a half potato, half radish variation on a rosti-style potato pancake. Rostis (or roestis) are disks of shredded potato held together by their own starch. I should have done my research as my previous attempts at rostis have had mixed results.

Most recipes call for pre-cooking the potato, which I did, but only partially cooked is best and I cooked mine all the way through. Another recommended step is wringing some water out of the semi-cooked potato. That I didn't do.

So my rosti turned out crumbly. That's a risk even if you do everything right. With half of the potato substituted out for not-nearly-so-starchy radishes. I ended up binding it together with grated cheese which, while fine with the red radishes I used, would likely not work so well with daikon. Texturally, though, I don't think the change would make a big difference.

The dish did crisp up nicely on the outside, but some overcooked bits of potato turned to mush and some undercooked bits of radish were a little rubbery. Probably best to pre-cook the radish a little and pre-cook the potato less. A couple minutes in the microwave for both ought to do the trick. Best to poke some holes in them first to avoid any risk of explosion. That should loosen up the moisture in the radish to let it be wrung out, too, so worth the effort.


I also think adding just a little corn starch to the mix to help with the binding would be a fine idea.

With those changes, the dish should be workable. The flavors were fine, although the potato dominated over the mild radish. Daikon should be more assertive, but not so good with European flavors. Plenty of other options, just leave out the cheese.

And, speaking of not entirely successful experiments, stir fried daikon in sweet and sour sauce isn't actually bad, but it's not particularly good either.

CSA week six - Potstickers, part 1

Usually I put the non-English name in the subject line to foster a little suspense before you click through and find out what I'm talking about. Not this time, though. Potstickers are both a Japanese (gyoza) and Chinese (jiaozi) thing and my standard method of cobbling together recipe from a bunch of different ones gave me something with elements of both.

The "part 1" is because I decided to make my own wrappers and had some difficulty. It sounds easy enough: mix two cups flour with one cup boiling water (The hot water improves the dough's ductility.), knead briefly, roll out in the pasta machine that's been sitting in the back of a cabinet unused for the last five years and cut into 3" diameter circles. But that two to one flour/water ratio gave me an intractably sticky dough no matter how much more flour I added and now my pasta machine is all gunked up and it looks like it's going to be a pain in the butt to clean.

I should have known better, really. Using a new gadget never works right the first time out and that's just when a dough will decide to defy all laws of culinary science and do whatever it wants. Fine, I need to go to the Asian grocery to restock on ramen anyway; I'll pick up some ready-made gyoza wrappers (or wonton wrapper at least) and finish this up tomorrow.

But for now there's still the filling which turned out fine. I used:

3 cups cabbage, finely chopped
6 garlic chives, finely chopped
2 teaspoons ginger, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 pound shrimp
1 pound pork
6 small dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked
3 Tablespoons light soy sauce
2 Tablespoons dry rice wine
1 Tablespoon sesame oil
1 large egg
salt and pepper to taste

I sprinkled the cabbage with salt and let it sit for 20 minutes to purge a bit of water. Otherwise the dumplings get soggy I understand. But I used too much salt and had to rinse it off so it may have added all of the water back in. But it looked like substantially less volume after I wrung it out, so maybe not.

Everything but the vegetables went into the food processor and got processed to a fairly smooth paste. Then I folded in the vegetables and put it into the refrigerator to firm up and be easier to work with.

One of the recipes I found suggested boiling a spoonful of the mix to check for seasoning before starting the wrapping. Pretty good idea; the wrapper dough has no salt so it's easy to underestimate the seasoning the filling requires. I ended up adding more salt, pepper and sesame oil and I'm still not sure I'm entirely happy with it.

So, that stays in the fridge until tomorrow. The dough I'm saving too--it may not want to be noodles, but maybe it'll make a decent loaf of bread. Right now, I have to order a pizza.