The Food Thread

It's another hold over from childhood, but yeah I like pasta with butter and cheddar cheese. I am not from Ohio. I'll pretty much do anything to spaghetti that you would do to a baked potato and I'll probably like it.

I'm also against cheddar on pizza. Maybe it tastes good? Don't care - it's just not right!

I don't even care much for cheddar on my burgers, so no on the pasta. But, was it standard orange Tillamook style cheddar or some local variant (here in Seattle, Beecher's cheese is so popular, you might even find it in your ice cream, if you're not careful)?

I think pizzas need a creamer cheese over a sharp one, and that's why cheddar doesn't work.

We have a whole tofu thread going, if you haven't seen it already!

Last night I made ramen for one of my daughter's birthday request meals, using the absurdly complicated process in the Momofuku cookbook. That said the resulting broth is a lip-smacking umami bomb. This was my best batch yet.

Saturday I jury-rigged my weber gas grill to be a smoker (placed a tray of stone briquettes over the burners, cranked that bastard on high for nearly an hour, then covered the briquettes with wood chips and chunks and turned all burners except one off, then left that one on low). It coughed up an enormous amount of smoke for two hours and I smoked some ribs, sausage, and pork shoulder for another requested meal. I was very pleased with the results. I think, good idea or not, a real smoker is in my future this summer.

It's just alot of prep and sub-recipes. So it's not just stock, which has repeated steps of adding this, simmering it for a long period, then straining it out and using the strained stock to simmer something else for a bit and strain out again, it's that then you add something like tare to it. And what's tare? Oh, it's this completely separate sauce you need to make involving yet more simmering, reducing and straining. And every component that goes into the final soup needs its own sometimes lengthy prep: pork belly to be seasoned and sit a day or two, then slow roasted, pork shoulder to do the same, eggs to be slow poached, two veg components with their own prep. And then of course there's the noodles which he repeatedly says you really don't have to make, but how can you not with the recipe RIGHT THERE. I take several shortcuts, and happen to be enough of food geek that I actually have suitable replacement ingredients on hand to use, but it's not something to be attempted on a weeknight evening, that's for sure.
But it's oddly rewarding and soothing. It's exhausting, and hectic to assemble it all at the last minute, but man is it good. I don't know why this doesn't trip my annoyance meter, but something like mexican cooking, with its homemade tortillas and salsas, or even other japanese food, does.

Edit: None of which is to say that it can't be easier: I got Ivan Orkin's Ramen cookbook at Christmas and while it's still prep intensive, it's not nearly as in depth as David Chang's process is, and he freely advocates things like going and buying roast pork from a local Chinese market if you have one.

Yeah, it's a long prep for ramen, but alot of that is simmering overnight or several hours. The most hectic part is assembly, probably. But it can, and has to be, broken out several days in advance. But, again, you're gelatinzing broths and doing molecular stuff with your food; I'm sure you can do it.


Like I said, I don't know what it is about Mexican food in particular that grates on me, but it wipes me out. Probably because so much of it does have to be done the day of (it's not like tortillas improve on sitting). I have made mole, and that was a two-day process, and it was ALOT of work.

Speaking of Mexican, I spent all day Sunday making pozole (which shouldn't take that long, but I used the slow cooker), then yesterday my mom gave half of it to one of her coworkers. I was not happy.

I'm getting too old for this shit.

(Not ragging on you at all; I just love that line. And am way too old for Pokemon.)

I was seventeen almost twenty years ago! Still too old for it. 

I've been through this before, when I discovered that some of my younger friends had owned American Girl dolls, which I always thought were a new thing for little kids, since the first I heard of them was from girls I babysat. (Turns out AG dolls came out in '86, but I was always a Cabbage Patch Kid... kid.)

I'm wearying of these incessant reminders that it is not, in fact, all about me.

Tray of pecan bars, right out of the oven

Random food thought of the day: fuck muscovado sugar!

I'm making a coffee cake for Easter brunch tomorrow, and the recipe calls for muscovado sugar. It's like $6 for a little bag at Central Market. I still bought it, special occasion and all, but god damn.

I'd not heard of that, while it sounds really good, I would've probably just stuck with dark brown sugar or turbinado sugar, which I buy anyway (I put turbinado sugar in my coffee).