When we grill steak, we usually have leftovers for the following night. One of our go-to preps is Thai Beef Salad. Put sliced beef and any stray fruit (mango, pineapple) and vegetables (cucumber, carrots, tomato) on hand atop a bed of lettuce. Make a dressing with fish sauce, lime juice, and a little water and dinner is served.
The other night I expanded beef salad into a new nationality. Julian had made chimichurri to accompany the steak on the first night. Chimichurri is a garlic, parsley, and cilantro pesto-like sauce that’s popular in South America. This time, I used kale as the green. The vegetables were tomato, cucumber, olives, and bottled piquillo peppers. The chimichurri served as a good dressing on the salad; in addition, the garlic in the sauce assured that we didn’t have to worry about vampire attacks.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/10/21/insert-ethnicity-here-beef-salad/
The padron peppers have pooped out. The basil was becoming brown, as was the red shiso. It was time for these plants to go the way of all things – the compostable can. I’m having to do the composting in installments, since our can needs to hold yard waste and kitchen scraps. One pot of basil is still on the upper deck. The rau ram is still going strong, so I’ll wait to dispose of that. That doesn’t include the calendula, cilantro, geranium, sedums, and fuchsias in front. Now I get to cogitate about next year’s crops.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/10/20/sunset-for-the-garden/
I learned a new word from a New York Times article this week. Tsundoku is a Japanese term for the stack of books that you’ve bought but have yet to read. I’m sure Julian would have a corollary term to tsundoku. So, in a pre-emptive strike, I’ll coin it for him. Tsuncooku is the shelves of cookbooks that I haven’t cracked open in years.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/10/18/words-of-the-week/
I have nothing against pumpkin in its appropriate role. We make a mean pumpkin pie. I also enjoy pumpkin bread and cookies. However, I draw the line at pumpkin spice everything else. For example, a garage on Sand Point Way in Seattle was hawking pumpkin spice oil changes. One assumes that the garage owner had tongue firmly in cheek when that sign went up, but one never knows…
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/10/15/pumpkin-spice-plague/
The mere thought of cooking and eating organ meats causes a visceral (pun intended) reaction in many people, including my sister. “EEEEUW, innards!” You may have been served a leathery piece of liver by your mother as a child. Or you may have had a traumatic experience dissecting a frog in high school. [I could rant about how kids never have fun in high school biology labs these days, but that’s a subject for another post.] However, I’d like to point out the advantages of cooking and eating organ meats. (Terry, curb your gag reflex for a few minutes.)
- They’re economical. A pound of chicken livers costs much less than a pound of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Chicken gizzards cost even less per pound than chicken livers.
- They’re nutritious. Organ meats are an excellent source of protein. Liver contains more iron than muscle meats. The iron in all meat products is more absorbable than from plant sources, so an occasional meal containing liver will be advantageous to iron stores in children and premenopausal women where iron-deficiency is common.
- They’re sustainable. (Hey, a term to which millennials can relate.) Our thrifty forebears used every part of the hog or steer they slaughtered. By eating organ meats, you’re assuring that more of the animal is being used. Chances are that you may be eating organ meats without realizing it. Take a look at the ingredient label on sausages, hot dogs, or cold cuts sometime. Pâté is just a fancy French term for chopped liver, often mixed with other meats.
- They can be quite tasty when prepared properly. Several friends anxiously await Passover and Rosh Hashanah, as that’s about the only time of the year that Whole Foods carries chopped liver. I didn’t like beef/calf liver until a former roommate made it with a tomato sauce and didn’t cook it to shoe-leather stage. Her adage was that tomatoes or egg can make anything palatable.
So what to do with these organ meats? I’m concentrating on giblets (chicken livers and gizzards) and liver, since they’re the most readily available in supermarkets. My standard prep for chicken gizzards and hearts is dirty rice. The other night I made stir-fried chicken gizzards from a recipe in Nicole Routhier’s book, The Foods of Vietnam. I should have used the food processor to cut up the gizzards into manageable pieces. Julian makes a mean pasta with chicken livers. In the 1980’s, calf’s liver with a pan sauce of red wine vinegar was a standard prep. I’ve made it several times. And there’s always old-school liver and onions; however, I advise cooking the liver briefly so it stays tender.
My experience with other organ meats is limited. We did try sweetbreads once in a foods lab. (A classmate actually discarded the package, thinking it was trimmings.) I tried chitlins (or chitterlings, alias hog intestine) once at a Black History Month event at the Dallas VA Medical Center. My preceptor at the VA had pulled an all-nighter to clean and prep them, so I felt obliged to give them a try. If you venture into Hispanic or Asian groceries, you may see kidneys, blood, or other organ meats. (Q: How do they keep the blood from coagulating? A: Probably the same way that hospital labs do for some blood samples, a whopping dose of citric acid.) Blood cake, clotted blood, is sometimes used in Vietnamese cuisine. The one organ meat I do not plan to consume is brain. The mad cow disease episode that occurred 15 years ago hereabouts dissuaded me from ever eating it, along with gross-out scenes from horror movies.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/10/13/now-thats-offal/
The oak tree doesn’t fall far from the acorn. Several years ago my mother started collecting cookbooks “with the names in them”, i.e., fundraising cookbooks. Most of them are from churches, Junior Leagues, or ladies’ auxiliaries. However, one of them completely caught me off guard. It was from a group of British women in East Bengal, now the nation of Bangladesh.
“Mom, do you know where this cookbook is from?” I asked. She replied that she’d just gotten it with a bunch of others at a thrift store. Sometimes treasures can be found amidst the regular stuff.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/10/06/another-collector/
Finding, buying, and taking delivery of our new bookcases were easy. The next tasks were as follows:
- Empty the old bookcases;
- Move said old bookcases to the upstairs storage room;
- Assemble the new bookcases;
- Move the new bookcases into place;
- Anchor both old and new bookcases against the walls (we do live in earthquake country);
- Put the books in the new bookcases (and maybe a few in the old ones).
Both of us have gotten our strength training this week. Monday I cleared out the bookcases and stacked books on living room, bedroom, and upstairs landing floors. The upstairs looked like an explosion in Kitchen Arts & Letters. We made room in the storage room for the old bookcases and hauled them upstairs. Once Julian finished constructing and anchoring the bookcases, I started loading the books. We wound up with extra shelves because we needed room for tall books. We’ll see how long it takes for me to fill up these. (That sound you just heard was Julian screaming.)
Before.
After.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/10/04/the-bookcase-build/
Let’s hijack the Wayback Machine from Mr. Peabody and travel back to 1998. Impeachment was in the air. Congressional Republicans seized on the report by Kenneth Starr’s team and impeached President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about an extramarital affair. The trial failed to convict Clinton, but there was collateral damage. Three Republicans who were the most zealous about prosecuting the case wound up resigning their posts, including two Speakers of the House of Representatives. Their sins? Adultery. And the latest member of the pro-impeachment group to find himself ensnared by allegations of sexual misconduct? Brett Kavanaugh, who worked on the Starr investigation. Karma works in interesting ways.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/09/26/it-all-goes-back-to-this/
I’m notorious for gemisching things together. However, Julian took this to a whole new level for this afternoon’s lunch. He had herring in mustard sauce that he’d bought at Ikea yesterday, along with bacon and eggs with zhug (Yemeni herb sauce). I think he does this to rile me.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/09/23/confusion-cuisine/
One of the biggest advantages of the house we rented in Seattle was the built-in bookcases in the living room that helped accommodate the cookbook collection. There are no built-ins here at Casa Sammamish, and I’ve run out of room. Thus, it was time to get more bookshelves.
My current bookshelves were purchased when I was in grad school. Somehow they survived three cross-country and two local moves, despite being made of the flimsiest particleboard. I saw my dream bookcase at the Restoration Hardware Outlet earlier in the month. It even had a sliding ladder. Unfortunately, it had a heart-stopping price. Julian chatted up a contractor working on our next door neighbor’s unit about adding built-ins. The contractor said the cost of the lumber alone would be prohibitive. So off we went to Ikea.
For those of you unfamiliar with Ikea, it specializes in reasonably priced, assemble it yourself furniture. We have a collection of Allen wrenches from our previous purchases. We found a set of three bookcases that would hold more than our current bookcases. One problem: The boxes wouldn’t fit in Gretta; therefore, they were be delivered.
It seemed as if everyone and their monkey were at Ikea. The demographic skewed young. One reason: Students setting up their dorm rooms and apartments. The checkout lines were extremely long. We made jokes about living in the old Soviet Union and standing on line for hours for bread, then standing on line for hours to pay for said bread.
Now we have new issues:
- What to do with the old bookcases? Julian suggested putting them in our upstairs storage room.
- How to reorganize the books in the new shelves? I’ll probably keep a similar configuration, such as keeping the grilling books at eye level next to the espresso machine.
Stay tuned for the before and after photos.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/09/23/housing-the-collection/
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