jr conlin's ink stained banana

Ah St. Paddy's Day. A day when everyone is a bit Irish and tuck into a taste of the Emerald Isle.

Well, no, not really. No sane, sober person would, but let me explain a little about why i tend to enjoy Pasta or Thai instead of Corned Beef and Cabbage.

First off, let me introduce you to my Grandfather. That's him, tending the bar that he ran for a few years in Brooklyn. Sadly, the pub he ran closed, partly due to his tendency to be more generous than business savvy, but that did have one interesting side-note.

Far more often than my Grandmother appreciated, he'd come home with someone he'd met while at the pub. His arms would be filled with unusual ingredients and he'd usher his wife from the kitchen and away from the shortbreads and creamed tripe stew, and soon the apartment was filled with exotic scents and tastes from strange and wondrous lands, like Germany or Italy. My sainted Grandmother generally hated whenever he did this, but my Mom and her siblings didn't.

Irish cooking tends to "use everything but the grunt", and they pretty much mean it. Traditional Irish country food tends to use a, frankly, terrifying amount of pork, cabbage and potatoes, most of it boiled in pots above peat fires. One need remember that it was the loss of the Potato that pretty much devastated the country and lead to massive starvation. This was not a country with a wide and varied diet. Special occasions might include a bit of roasted lamb, but that tended to (literally) eat into the export business.

This might also explain why folks drank, but only a wee bit.

Mind you, modern Irish cuisine is a helluva lot better now and has even included things like fish and beef. i'll also note that Irish have taken to, ahem, "embracing the foods of other cultures" with a surprising enthusiasm to those not familiar with traditional fare.

So, aye, i'll not be partaking of the bacon knot and cabbage this year (or the next), and i prefer my corned beef peppered and sliced thin from the deli counter. i'm not exactly sure how many shepherds kept meat grinders in the dairy, either.

Still, raise a glass and a toast. To my ancestors from Roscommon, Tabhair dom ar ais ar mo dhia damanta caorach, bastaird tú!

Anne Marie is attending a Ladies Holiday Cookie Exchange. Aside from this blatant sexism and exclusion of men, (a Real Man's place is in the kitchen, with the knives and fire and meat and stuff) she's decided that she's not going to bring some of my Chocolate Chip Cookies.

This means that i she has to find another recipe for the cookies i she'll bring. She is a fan of thumbprint cookies so we figured that would be what we'd go for.

Mind you, there are many different types of thumbprint cookies. Most tend to be sugar cookies with a big dollop of jelly in the middle. Nice, but often a bit overly sweet. i prefer more of a shortbread base. Of course, if you're going to do a shortbread, you could cheat a bit and do a quickbread. And if you're familiar with all the sorts of things you can do with quickbread….

Right, so this is both easy, and kind of a pain in the ass. There aren't many ingredients and things go quickly, but preparation temperature is more important than it normally is.

Let's start with the goods:

Dry

1. 1 cup (125g) flour
2. Pinch salt
3. 1/4 tsp (~1g) Baking Powder (not Baking Soda)
4. Nutmeg to taste (i go for about a tsp/4g)

Wet

1. 1 egg yolk (Save the white, you'll need that later)
2. 1/2 cup (100g) brown sugar
3. 1 stick (4oz/118ml) butter (room temp)
4. 1 tsp (healthy splash) vanilla

Ok, so let's make cookies:

1. Sift together dry ingredients into separate bowl.
2. Cream butter and brown sugar together
   Pretty straight foward. i dice the butter into smaller chunks, but you don't have to.
3. Add yolk and vanilla
   Beat until blended and fragrent
4. Add dry to wet in batches
   You're looking for biscuit method here, so don't overmix. Things should just come together, and stop. There should even be a fine crumb at the bottom of the mixing bowl.
5. refrigerate dough for 30 minutes
   This is surprisingly important and will add to the flakiness.
6. While dough is in the fridge, heat oven to 350° on convection.
   Oven will beep that it's ready before 30 minutes. That's fine, it's lying to you anyway. You want the walls to heat up too so that things bake evenly.
7. Line (preferably ventilated) cookie sheet with parchment
8. Once dough has chilled, portion out in small balls.
   Be careful to work the dough as little as possible to keep it cold.
9. Press thumb into center of balls to make a depression, fill with jam.
   It's easier to do this if your thumb is wet. The dough won't stick to it.
10. Use remaining egg white as a wash for the top of the cookies.
    You can skip this, but the cookies will look kinda anemic.
11. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until GDB
12. Let cool for at least 10 minutes, or preferably longer.

Serve with tea, because you are not a barbarian. Of course, considering the amount of cholesterol in these, you may want to also serve Lipitor. i may work on a slightly more "heart friendly" version of these later.)

As always, this recipe is CC (like you could trademark a recipe anyway), so if you figure out any improvements, please share!

Oct. 31st brings two traditions to my house. Doling out lightsticks and full sized candybars to the children of the neighborhood, and chili.

A few folks have asked for the recipe, which i don't really have written down, so i'll make up for that now:

Ingredients:

• 1 lb lean stew beef
• 1 large can of stewed plum tomatoes
• 1 yellow onion
• 1 can of red beans
• Seasonings (these are mostly to taste, but i tend to use in descending amounts):
  • Chili Powder (about a tablespoon)
  • Oregano
  • Basil
  • Sage
  • Cumin
  • Salt
• Optional stuff:
  • 1/2 can Lager beer
  • Cast iron dutch oven
  • long tongs

About the ingredients:
Like with everything else you get out what you put in. If you just grab what's cheapest at Fresh & Easy, you're not going to be that happy with what you get out. Meat should be fresh (that means it's red all over the cuts), the Chili Powder should be actual dried, ground chilis. On that note:

Stew Beef
You can usually get this from the butcher counter. It's usually cubed chuck. Don't get the ground chili beef since that's full of silver skin, which gets tough. You may have to trim up the meat to get it to the right size. You want some fat, but you don't need that much. If you can't find stew beef, get 1 lb of leaner chuck and cube it yourself. Make sure to remove all the silver skin, otherwise you're going to wind up chewing some meat gum, and that's never pleasant.

Chili Powders
i like a mix of dried poblano and chipotle, but feel free to experiment. You can usually find these in cello packs hanging in good mercados or the "ethnic" food aisle. Don't use the pre-mixed "taco seasoning" McCormic crap. That's mostly salt and MSG. On the plus side, those cello packets usually sell for about a buck each, and you won't use that much of them, so you're saving a lot of money by getting the real stuff.

The Prep
Proper prep will make your life much easier. Cut and clean the meat and set it into a large bowl, Mix the seasonings well and set them into a small dish, dice the onion and set that into a small bowl. Turn on your hood fan and open a window. Open the beer (but don't start drinking yet). Have the tongs handy as well as some paper towels in case you need to clean anything up.

The Cookening
This is best done in stages, and will take time. This isn't something you dump in the crock pot. You will be rewarded.

First thing to do is sear the meat. Put the pot on the burner and turn it to high. Once the bottom of the pan reaches about 400° (way past the 'smoke point' for oil, that's why you're not using any) start placing the meat. It'll stick hard at first, and that's fine. Make sure there's space between the chunks. About when you've placed the last chunk, you should be able to turn the first. You're looking to get a good sear on most of the meat, but not cook it. In cooking terms, you're "blue"ing the meat. Once you've got a good dark sear on the chunks, get them out of the pot and replace them with whatever is not yet cooked.

When you're about half way through the last batch, turn down the heat on the pot to low. There should be a lot of burnt meat at the bottom. That's good. It's also why i recommend a cast iron pot for this. Take the last of the meat out when done. Toss the meat in the spices (or more likely, toss the spices onto the meat) and make sure the meat is coated. You're going to let the meat juices bloom the spices while you're cooking the onions.

Speaking of which toss the onions into the pot. You don't want these to burn (that's why you lowered the heat), if you think the pot is still to hot, use some of the beer to deglaze and cool the bottom. Plus, beer simmered onions are amazing. Onions take time to cook, so don't rush this. Plus the longer the meat blooms the spices, the better. Depending on how much you like raw onion, you can either just sweat them or caramelize them. i go for more caramelized, which takes longer, but really brings out the flavors.

Once the onions are done, turn the heat up to medium and add the meat back to the pot (may want to use a spatula to scrape out the juices from the bowl). If you still have beer left, you may want to deglaze the bottom of the pot now and get up all those delicious burnt bits, don't spend too long doing that you don't want all the liquid to boil away or the meat to cook. If you don't have beer, no worries just pour in some of the liquid from the tomatoes.

When you feel like you've gotten as much up as you'd like, carefully add the tomatoes and beans, and any extra beer. Bring the pot to a medium boil, then drop the temperature to a simmer. Let lightly simmer for about 3-4 hours or until the meat falls apart. If you don't want to leave this thing on the stove that long, you can also park the pot in the oven at 250° for that long.

Serve with cornbread, cheese, hot sauce, more beer, and anything else you'd like.

Recently, the topic of cook books came up. Truth be told, i kind of miss them.

i don't mean recipe books. There are plenty of those, full of lush pictures of carefully crafted cuisine staged under perfect lighting and designed to be the dining equivalent of women's magazine covers. Beautiful, but you know damn well that whatever you try just ain't gonna look like that. We have some of those too, and as reference books, they're useful, but i'd hardly describe them as real cook books.

My mom gave me a set of books fairly early on that had some of her favorite recipes. One of my personal favorites is Beard on Bread, a tome authored by James Beard. Good Mr. Beard was a contemporary of Julia Child, an avid researcher, writer and food critic, and because of that wrote chapters that informed, instructed, and enticed you to try something different. Because of that, his books are still legendary. Think Harold McGee, with examples.

Honestly, the only thing that comes close to that now are the publications from America's Test Kitchen, and to a somewhat lesser extent some books by Alton Brown, although neither of which are the kind you'd want to just pick up and start reading.

About the only books that come close to real cook books as far as i'm concerned are ones by Anthony Bourdain, but even those are less about how to prepare the dish than everything around it.

i guess it comes down to the simple fact that once you master the fact that you don't need to have your stove up to max heat to make tomato sauce and that roasting spices before you use them is actually a pretty good idea, you're less interested in finding yet another variation for fried pork chops with grilled onion dip. (Yeah, i thought it was gross when i heard it too.)

Sadly, i'm betting those just don't sell that well.

i must be weird.

Tonight, Anne Marie and i went to Andy's Barbecue. Long hailed as "the best barbecue in the South Bay". i'm a good deal more depressed about finding good barbecue now.

Understand that i grew up on Carolina barbecue, which is mostly pork, and mostly consists of taking said pig and spit cooking it for anywhere from eight hours to several days. It's served with a vinegar sauce and slaw with peanuts.

Thing is, there's not a lot of fat.

i hate fat.

If you watch all the cooking shows or other foodie kinda things, they always go on and on about their love of "rich marbled meat". Sorry, no thanks. You can keep your super fatty Kobe, for me the best cuts are from an Angus flank, grilled, with a good char on the outside. Gimme thin cut, bone in pork chops seared on the stove, then finished in a 350° oven 'til they're the consistency of lean bacon. Extra points if you trim the outside fat off. Sausage just ain't right 'til it cracks and is crunchy on the outside, tender on the inside.

To me, fat waters down the taste of what you're eating. Get rid of the grease and you really taste the flavors and seasonings.

That's kinda why i wasn't that into Andy's. i ordered the brisket and got through maybe two slices of the small mountain of meat in front of me. The rest? Well, i'm thinking that if i fire up the grill and cook it at 300° for another 3 hours, it'll be worth dabbing with a bit of sauce, but for now? i think there was less fat in the golfball sized wad of butter they dumped on the baked potato.

Oh well, next time i want barbecue, i guess i'll have to do it myself.