Blogging Ennui

I have not been kidnapped by Twitter or brainwashed by FaceBook. I'm registered at both places, but they strike me as dull as blogging right now.
Could it be spring fever? Or is blogging really over?
Then let me hurry this picture in before the end of March. It's the leftovers of our corned beef (which we brined ourselves, for the second time, and it was stunningly aromatic and flavorful).
A simple corned beef hash. Probably the real reason we make corned beef every March anyway. That, and a couple of Reuben sandwiches.
OK, this was a little more than 140 characters.

¡La Salsa Es Posible!

Yes, that's the gaping maw of a burrito in close-up. No, the story is not that we eat burritos in this household often.
The story is that I made the hot salsa in the fuzzed-out bottle back there.
I made it this morning, funneled it into a clean bottle (still gotta scrape that old label off), and we used it for lunch.
It tasted "proper." Hot, vinegary, a little salt and some elusive spices. The texture is less homogeneous than I would like just now, so I'll keep experimenting. Should I have scraped out the seeds? Should I have cooked the salsa briefly so particles wouldn't separate from liquids? I don't know. I'll find out.
But you're dying to know how I did this.
Here's my standard recipe, which I invented this morning:
1. Late last summer, pickle some sliced hot green peppers in a brine of your own choosing. The (purchased) peppers were called pimientos de padrón, but they looked much more like fleshy jalapeños. Fleshy and hot is what you want. The brine was a heated mixture of vinegar and salt water, seasoned with little, teensy shakes of dried garlic, cumin and cinnamon. (Cinnamon is the sekrit ingredient; a little goes a long way.) Pop it into a jar and refrigerate.

Don't ask me for proportions; this was a long time ago!
2. Today, scoop out some pepper slices along with their brine (in a proportion that you deem perfect) and blend this thoroughly in a blender. Low speed is not enough; you want "purée" if you got it. I serendipitously scooped out and blended exactly the amount that would fill this small salsa bottle (remember, clean!). I may have been a little skimpy on brine, because the salsa is a bit sludgy; I later added some water to the bottle (after we had made room in it by having burritos).
3. Struggle with a funnel and a spoon, trying to get this brew into the bottle. Make green splashes everywhere (My sweatshirt looks like baby Shrek had a little "whoops" on my shoulder, burp).
4. Be very proud.

Reflections

It turns out fried rice really is a repository for tired old vegetables and leftover rice. At least, this version was.
The rice was tender Massa brown rice. Probably not kosher in Chinese cooking, but it's the rice of the moment at my house, and it worked perfectly.
The vegetables were a handful of leftover green peas, a small pile of chopped broccoli from the garden (the last of it!), a bit of diced onion, and some scallions pulled from the onion bed.
Seasonings: fish sauce, soy sauce, a pinch of sugar and a spritz of sesame oil.
There was a little diced ham, too. Yum.
The main attraction was a couple of beaten eggs, bright yellow and full of spring flavor.
Cranky was sorry the eggs didn't show up in the picture.
I said, "Look at the reflections in the plate!"

I Think This One's a Manbug

I can't believe how these little creatures are programmed to show up exactly on time. Schpring!

Rice Rice Baby

We found this new rice at the farmers market, Massa brown rice. It is so tender and fragrant, I think it will become the household staple, replacing white rice. (How does this hippie whole-grain mania take over at such a late age? Well, I can tell you it's because the rice is really good.)
So we made chicken-rice soup. As far as you could get from Campbell's. Serious, deep, stock, seasoned with herbs and vegetables. Barnyard-tasting bits of real roasted chicken. And that rice.
Nice.

Nuts: Ho, Ho, Ho!

Nuts, yeah. I like 'em.
I like a snack of roasted, seasoned nuts, usually walnuts or almonds. And I like eating nuts in my entrees. All those Omega 3s. Mm, mm, mm.
Here's a hippie mix of buttered brown rice, steamed broccoli and cracked toasted almonds. You're gonna say that sounds dull, but it's very vivid. We sprinkled excellent shoyu on it, and I topped my plate with a pinch of bonito flakes. Cranky skipped the bonito in favor of shichimi togarashi.
This food rests so comfortably in your stomach. It takes a while to digest, because of the nutrient density of the brown rice and almonds. But your tummy feels really happy. And you're not immediately hungry for a Ho Ho. Not that I'm ever hungry for a Ho Ho. What is a Ho Ho?

When Water Goes Wild

I keep running into references to cooking liquids all of a sudden. Obviously, recipes that use cooking liquids must mention the cooking liquids.
But no. This is more like when you're in heavy traffic on your way to a show, and you think, "Damn, everybody is going to that show!"
It's on my mind. I'm highly attuned to it. And when I see other references, I think everybody is going to that show.
OK, what do I mean by cooking liquids? Water. Stock. Wine. Sure.
Well, what about saved bean-cooking water?
What about saved pasta-cooking water?
I made a potato soup the other day with saved potato-cooking water.
I thought I was the only one who saves corned beef cooking water, but no. Ruhlman recommends it.
And on the blogs, I keep reading about the irresistible goozly liquid that accumulates at the bottom of a braised dish. The leftover nectar from, well, just about anything.
I remember accidentally throwing out the juices from the clay cooker when we roasted a chicken in it. Damn. That stuff is gold, even in very small quantities. If you can't eat it today, freeze it.
I've only been making my own meat and vegetable stocks for the past ten years or so. D'oh! All that wasted loveliness.
It has been much more recent that I'm saving bean-cooking water. Bean-cooking water! This arises from the use of fantastic beans; dried-up Safeway bean water probably would get thrown out... but I no longer use dried-up Safeway beans. It's really tasty; we save it in the freezer.
Imagine saving bean-cooking liquid in the freezer.
Are you going to that show too?

Murder, She Ate

This soup murdered me. I am so full and logy.
I am highly nutritioned, I believe, but I'm just dead. It was that good. (And I'm still here to blog about it, so I'm not that dead.)
The soup came about through a confluence of influences. Con-influence.
A few weeks ago, Amy had posted a recipe for a twice-baked stuffed potato that is filled with cheese and spinach. The picture was so funny-looking, kind of like a big, goofy mudpie made by a kid. I had to give it a try. And I really liked it. What a great way to get your vegetables.
Then the other day, Ilva wrote about a soup she made with leeks, cream, shrimp and spinach. It hardly resembles what I came up with today, but I couldn't get the picture out of my mind: a smooth white bath with paisleys of dark green leaves floating in it.
So I put a pot of potato chunks to boil, with chopped onion and a bay leaf plus a tiny sprig of oregano in the water too; salt and pepper, of course. My plan was to drain the potatoes when they were tender, and then decide how much of the reserved cooking liquid I might need to get a smooth puree in the blender. I ended up using all the cooking water, and added a little more fresh water as well. I wanted silky, not sludgy. (The herbs were removed and discarded before blending.)
Oh. I also poured in a few spoonfuls of warm bacon fat.
The blended soup went back into the pot to reheat. I dumped in quite a lot of spinach leaves and let them cook into submission, right in the creamy soup.
This beautiful hot mess went into soup bowls, where it was topped with crisp diced bacon. Not too much, but... Man. That might have been what murdered me.

Oh Noes!

Don't eat there.
Well, actually, you can't.
It's been closed.
Due to an apparent food-related illness that has sickened 400 people.
Damn you, Heston Blumenthal!
Or maybe it's Damn your fried mealworms!
Shut the Fat Duck up!

Honest Indian

This meal took a long time to make. It was supposed to be lunch, but Stoopie McStoopio forgot how long beans take to cook. It ended up being supper.
The recipe popped up in Wednesday's New York Times food section. And since the SF Chronicle has abandoned its Wednesday food section, I was highly interested in the NYT.
It's simple Indian food; chickpeas in tomato sauce with all the correct seasonings. Ahh, the correct seasonings. When you're a locavore, you mostly eschew imported spices. But then once in a while you cheat, and you go "ahh."
I was expecting big "ahh." We halved the recipe, but sort of over-winged the amount of chickpeas (we used dried rather than canned), and added sprigs of cauliflower from the soon-to-finish plants. Apparently this diluted the impact of the spice mixture.
I wanted more pizzazz.
Next time, no problem.
You know what, though? It was good.

Fertility Symbols in My Mouth

Cranky blurted out: "When did 'crumby' get to be a negative word?"
We've been recycling bread into crumbs a lot, and saving them in the freezer. It's pourable toast. You can just grab a little containerful, let it thaw, and you've got a super substitute for toasted slices of day-old bread. You don't have to work your knife and fork through a tough slab.
And when you're eating something as tender as eggs and asparagus, you want the pourable toast.
We're pushing spring here by a couple of weeks, but the eggs and asparagus couldn't wait.
I like to cook asparagus like this. In a buttered pan, slowly, until brown spots appear. Judging from the comments on that post, everyone has his own favorite way, but couldn't you at least try mine?
The egg is over-easy. Poached would be nice if it weren't all drippy with water. Don't want to get the crumbs soggy.
Finally, what is it with the ineffable affinity between eggs and asparagus? I know. The return of the growing season is here, and we want to celebrate by eating fertility symbols, heavy on the graphic imagery, with pourable toast on top.

Me Make Ugly Eggs

This photo just makes me want to scratch my EYES out, it's so poorly lit. (It's winter. That's my excuse.)
But I wanted to share the idea for this meal, because it's so satisfying.
Sometime back, Catherine blogged about an egg dish she loved, at a restaurant. It was a ramekin of tomato sauce, topped with an egg which cooks in the sauce, in the oven.
She and I went to this restaurant recently, and I tried the egg dish (uovo al forno, or something like that). It was pretty good, but I thought I could improve on it.
I wasn't even going to write about it, because the pictures came out so bad. But yesterday my cyberpal Ilva honored me by mentioning my blog, along with several others she likes. Many were new to me. I visited Buff Chickpea, and look at this recipe she posted a couple of weeks ago! (Much better pictures, too.) Hers is more vegetabley, and mine is more saucy, but, eggs, baby!
So, in essence, I prepared a tomato sauce, chunky with chopped black and green olives, onions, and flavored the way you like it: garlic, oregano, a splash of wine. I made sure the sauce was nice and hot, then spooned some into individual ramekins. I tried to hollow out a hole in the center for the egg, but it might have been too shallow. Nevertheless, crack an egg into the hole. Then I sprinkled grated cheese on top, and I know now that's partly where the photo went so very wrong.
Pop them into a preheated oven (350, always) in a bain marie. Wait six to eight minutes, and jiggle the ramekins. When the white is not disgustingly gooey anymore, pull them out of the oven; the eggs will continue to cook in the hot sauce. I got it just right; the yolk was still runny.
This is simple bistro cooking. Homey and comforting. Easy, if you're careful with the timing in the oven. The recipe is flexible; flavor it the way you like.
Glass of wine, chunk of bread. Good.