Guest Blog: The Timpano

Very fortunate to be joined this week by my partner and much-more-serious cook Harry, who made a “timpano” for Christmas, as he will explain:

The timpano (Calabrian dialect) or timballo was made famous by the movie Big Night. If you saw the movie, you know the timpano is a feast for the eyes. On Christmas Day 2010 we set out to see if it tastes as good as it looks. Producing a timpano is not hard, but it is labor intensive. Many of the ingredients can be prepared ahead of time, with simple assembly on the day it is to be cooked. The only tricky part is rolling out (what was for our timpano a 30” in diameter round of) pasta dough. Ours was a three person effort with my wife preparing most of the ingredients, and my son and I rolling out the dough and performing final assembly. Think of the timpano as a luxurious, decadent lasagna-pasta dough encasing layers of pasta, tomato sauce, salami, provolone and pecorino cheeses, hard boiled eggs, and meat balls. Then baked in an oven heated to a temperature of about 120°F.

We were not disappointed, the finished product was perfect in appearance and taste.

Java, C, C++: Top Programming Languages for 2011 - Application Development - News & Reviews - eWeek.com

Java, C, C++: Top Programming Languages for 2011 - Application Development - News & Reviews - eWeek.com

Interesting stats for those who think WebApps R All. Not sure what to make of it, though. How is C still being used? C++ seems to be the "must-have-performance" language on the server side, Java is the "IT-blessed" app standard (although most of my tech friends have gone Python or Ruby by now for the business and presentation layers).

What are you seeing? Let me know.

Whole wheat penne with scallops and garlic

Rushed meal, all of us coming home from various places.  No time for anything fancy (like visit to fish market, etc.).  Crumster just took frozen scallops, sauteed with garlic and parsley, and served on whole wheat penne.  Not because whole wheat penne is so terrific; unlike many whole-grain-ish products it tastes like a bad adaptation.  But it fit the Mediterranean-diet construct that is powering (hopefully) my next phase of weight loss.

 

There it is on the plate, just before eating.  Very tasty, even though nothing special.  Served with tossed salad.

Impressions, Data, Audience, Intent

I’ve been reading through a raft of year-end predictions from the digital advertising-oisie (thanks so much AdExchanger.com for putting it all together).
I’m not an advertising “native” as you might say, but just a humble investor in advertising technologies, platforms, agencies, and next-big-things.  So the vocabulary takes some getting used to.
But something just struck me: most of the predictions are all about using “data” to gain insight into the “intent” of members of an “audience”.
I’ve got a novel idea: why not just ask them?
What made search advertising such a rock-star was that you don’t have to guess what the searcher is interested in: they’re telling you.  Not perfectly.  Not always.  But it’s a big step in the right direction.
All kinds of targeting approaches jump through hoops to try to guess a prospect’s intent.  These schemes are ingenious: if you combine context, history, behavior, offline data, and social network, you know a whale of a lot about the prospect.  But it’s still incredibly hard to know what’s on their mind.
I’m looking for advertising breakthroughs which, like search, piggyback off an obvious indication of intent.  That’s where we should be investing next.
Have you run across anything along these lines?  Let me know…

Backup is dead

Conversations with customers, analysts, and vendors in the storage industry throughout 2010 convinced me that “backup” as we have known it is going the way of CRT tube “burn-in” orarchiving to optical media.  Backup is going away, and will soon be dead.

Consider Storage Newsletter.com.  Or Backup is Broken, by Wikibon.  Or even Steven Foskett, who acknowledges what a chunk of the traditional backup use case is being taken over by “new technologies” even as he tries to carve out a continuing place for backup.

Behind all the provocative language, we are looking toward a future when a “window” of time taken up with data management to the exclusion of all else in the storage system will be a thing of the past.  Whatever forms data protection take in the future – and technologies like replication, snapshots, CDP, etc. are only the beginning – they will be increasingly transparent, seamless, and continuous.  And backup systems, shorn of the obligation to manage the lack of transparency, will increasingly become metadata catalogs with a variety of uses including backup/restore but also including the likes of discovery, content-addressability, or even semantic inference.  The backup system and the file system, in a word, will converge.

Cod, and Cod Croquettes

So, Mara’s back from Africa for the next few weeks, and this has induced a flurry of CrummyCooking.  Up from once a week more-or-less to two or three times a week.

This last week I got some cod at Black Salt (not the same without the very impressive MJ there, I must say), and got more than I needed.  Debbie baked the cod, but we had quite a bit left over.

Something inspired me to make it into cod croquettes, which are (in this case) sauteed patties of fish together with onions, spices, and “binder” (in this case, mashed potato).

Here are the croquettes coming out of the fridge, ready to be sauteed.

Here is Mara with the salad.

We also had Brussels Sprouts browned in butter-and-oil, but they were a bit underdone.

Croquettes were very fragile even after cooking, but tasted great.

Miso Black Cod a la Nobu

Debbie’s been hankering to have this dish at home since she had it at Nobu in New York, and doubly so since the Careful Cook Mary made it a year ago at her house.

I’ve begun to buy my fish where Josh and Mary do – Black Salt Fish Market in the Palisades – the really good guy MJ who is the manager of the market told me the other day that fresh black cod was in.  I was in!

There are a bunch of Nobu-esque recipes for this dish on the web (which is why I call it “a la Nobu” here); I used this one from foodandwine.com since it seemed to have the chef’s imprimatur on it.

What I didn’t realize before I brought the cod home is that it has to be marinated at least overnight to get the taste.  The recipe says it should even be marinated more, although Josh told me that would just make it taste salty.  So we let it sit overnight and had it last night.

Here’s the cod on the plate just before consumption.  It was really delicious.  It’s a great silky unctuous fish to begin with – basically the sable of my childhood, which, along with smoked salmon, smoked whitefish, and smoked sturgeon, were the set pieces of a visit to my grandma’s house – and the marinade hits my sweet-and-salty spot perfectly.

It was not as elegant-looking as Mary’s.   She got all the marinade off before grilling (where I just got most) and got it to look as silky and elegant as it tastes.  Anyhow, great dish.

We had broccoli with garlic-infused olive oil and salad on the side.

Salmon Slow-Poached in Olive Oil

Got intrigued this week with the idea of poaching a salmon in olive oil, which basically involves longer cooking at a pretty low temperature (as oil goes).

Here’s an Epicurious recipe to give you the idea, although it’s not the one I followed.  Mine came from a (shudder) legacy printed cookbook that my cousin Nina gave us a couple of years ago (before the CrummyCook phase began, but after I had begun to express an interest in cooking better).

The book is The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, from which Debbie had made a slow-baked salmon recipe some time ago that we had liked.

The promise of oil-poached salmon is that the fish looks very fresh, perhaps even a bit uncooked, and is not dried out, but is properly-done.  Sort of a cooked-sashimi blend.

Verdict?  Debbie and I were a bit disappointed.  It used up a boatload of oil (although, to be fair, they claimed you could reuse the oil since the cooking temperature is so low) and didn’t turn out much different from the slow-baked recipe.

I’d like to try it again, since the Web is loaded with paeans to the deliciousness of the technique.  But probably not for a while.

Greek-style dinner

My zeal for WeightWatchers has been flagging in the last few weeks, and, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I have to pick a new diet every 6-12 months.  Something about the new diet restores my obsessiveness and zeal to adhere.  Serial monogamy with diets, I guess.  In any case, it has worked so far.

So the latest thing I’m going to try is the “Mediterrean diet”.

I ordered "The Mediterrean Prescription" from Amazon using my sophisticated algorithm of picking the most popular book that meets my search criteria (“Mediterrean Diet”).

And for this week’s CrummyCook I searched for “Mediterrean Chicken” on WeightWatchers and came up with a recipe for Greek Lemon-Chicken Thighs and Potatoes.  Basically marinate chicken thighs (boneless & skinless of course) in a lemon-oregano marinade and bake with small potatoes.   I only had chicken breasts, but what the heck.

When Debbie saw the marinating chicken, she said “why not have Avgolemno soup to start"?  She’s big on starting with soup after coming back from Canyon Ranch, where soup quells the demon of gluttony in part.  So I looked up egg and lemon soup in the Joy of Cooking, and it was pretty simple.  Cook rice in chicken stock and slowly stir in an egg and lemon mixture.

Voila!  Not too shabby.  Needed salt, but tasted pretty good.

Not so much the main dish.  It tasted like diet food: light on fats and heavy on lemon and oregano.  And I overcooked the chicken breasts (which, of course, turn to sawdust at the drop of a hat).  Not terrible, but not my best effort either.

Peppers stuffed with Couscous and Feta

Home alone last night (Debbie is at a Grand Spa which she describes as an elegant 24/7 gym) and wanted to use some feta we got last weekend at the farmers’ market.  I’ve also had a yen for some time to have stuffed peppers (which Debbie hates for some reason; she is not keen on peppers except raw in salads).

Epicurious to the rescue with Couscous and Feta Stuffed Peppers, an old SELF Magazine where I jacked up the oil to some extent and used fully-leaded chicken stock (in fact I used some kind of “Chicken Garlic Soup” from Whole Foods which looked enough like stock for the Crumster’s purposes.

I’ve always been big on the idea of getting all the ingredients ready before commencing to cook.  I now know (thanks to "Cooking for Geeks") that the French call this mise en scene (as the billboard used to say in Harvard Square when I was young, “Whatever it is it sounds better in French”), so I’ve been practicing proper mise en scene for years without knowing it.

In any case, here’s the mise en scene for the stuffed peppers.  Pepper cases on the left, stuffing parts on the right.

They came out well.  Very tasty.  Although the woman who sold us the feta told us we could wash it in fresh water and make it less salty, I left it pretty salty because I love salt, and it was veggie and salty and crunchy all at once.  Great meal.

Tuscan Casserole

From WeightWatchers (For Men, for some reason) Online, I did the Tuscan Casserole recipe because I had leftover black bean soup and ricotta.  They called for canned cannellini beans, and I tried to talk myself into substituting the black bean soup, finally decided it would taste too gross, and opened a can of kidney beans (closest I had to what they asked).

A not-too-flattering photo of the innards of it (Oh, I put home-made croutons (a CrummyCook regular nowadays as the solution to Terminal Bread Syndrome) on top instead of the torn-up bread pieces they called for.  You get the idea, sort of a diet veggie casserole kind of thing.  Not bad.

Ricotta and Tomato Tart

I bought a giant tub of ricotta ten days ago, and we only used a bit of it last week, so I’ve been looking for recipes that used ricotta that weren’t

• desserts
• lasagnas
• ricotta salata dishes

Finally found one on the WeightWatchers online site (where I’ve been a relatively happy weight-loser for 4 years and 45 lbs): I don’t know if you can read it without being a member, but Ricotta and Tomato Tart takes you there.

Diet food, of course.  The recipe calls for zero-fat ricotta and fat-free egg substitute (whatever that might be).  I used my low-fat ricotta and regular eggs.

Not a flattering picture, but the result was pretty tasty.  I think well of Weight Watchers: they’re doing yeoman’s work trying to get diet food to taste good.

Again, home alone.  Debbie still out of town and Josh not yet home for the weekend.

Onward and upward.

Stuffed Squash

I don’t know why, but I have this yen to make the untasty taste good.  Earlier this year (but before Crummy Cook, I think) I tried to make a decent-tasting kasha dish.  Debbie actually succeeded with this later in the year by the time-honored expedient of using boatloads of butter.

Squash (of the non-zucchini variety) is pretty un-tasty in my book, so as the first winter squashes start to come out I’m going to try various ways to make it taste good.

Here’s the first shot.  Even Epicurious shies away from calling this stuffed squash: Orzo and Cheese baked in Acorn Squash.  I thought I had “white” orzo but only had whole wheat, and the cheddar I got was a Life’s DHA cheddar from Giant which was deeply insipid.  The net result was something pretty much like other stuffed squash I’ve had in the past: not inedible, but nothing that would redeem the stuff-ee.

Fortunately, I was alone.  Debbie was out of town and it was just me.  But I will try again: maybe I should just bite the bullet and poach it in a cup of butter.

Chiles Rellenos

Debbie had bought some poblano peppers with the idea of making chiles rellenos.  When some days (well, ok, weeks) had passed and it looked like her travel schedule was not going to “support” making them, I took over and determined to CrummyCook them last Wednesday.

We have an older Mexican cookbook from Diana Kennedy which Debbie had always “praised with faint damn” by saying it was “too complicated.”  I looked up the chiles rellenos recipe in the book and was intrigued because it stuffed the peppers with picadillo instead of the usual gooey bland cheese, but when I went over it in detail Debbie was right: you had to make the picadillo, you had to roast and peel the peppers, you had to stuff them, and you had to make a sauce for them.

Mark Bittman  to the rescue with a simpler approach.  Still plenty daunting, still roasting/peeling, stuffing, and sauce, but the stuffing itself was straightforward and Mark had a less take-no-prisoners approach to the sauce.

Unfortunately, my stuffing didn’t go much better with these chiles than my frustrating encounter with the squash blossoms in July.  I think I roasted the chiles too long, and, although they were easy to peel, the chile innards began to fall apart and they resembled Franken-chiles by the time I patched them together with toothpicks and skewers (above).

No matter, the final result was tasty enough, and I will work on less vigorous roasting next time around.

Polenta and Sausage

The problem: hot turkey sausage (which Harry says shouldn’t even count as “sausage”), red peppers, and hulled corn (Debbie bought a pack of it at Whole Foods for reasons I couldn’t divine).

There were actually some interesting Epicurious recipes for sausage and corn (yes, Harry, even turkey “sausage” and corn), but for whatever reason sausage a polenta, a dish Debbie makes very well, spoke to me.

Don’t tell anyone, but we have used Barbara Kafka’s microwave recipe for polenta for some years.  Easy, tastes fine.  I’m sure my faithful readers, at least some of them, are calling foul.  But we do it anyhow because we love polenta and don’t love excess work.

So, polenta was spoken for.  The sauce was c-cook improvisation: I wilted down onions and peppers in olive oil, then added the sausage (which wasn’t going to contribute much to the fat department, else I would have had them first), then garlic for a brief fragrant moment, then deglaze with red wine, then add store-bought tomato sauce.

Not the most adventuresome recipe I’ve ever made (although I gave myself points for improvisation).  Unfortunately, it didn’t taste that great to me.  Probably cut too many corners.  The sauce wasn’t so hot.  Some gourmet stuff in a jar, but all the heartburn of tomatoes with none of the mouth feel and finish of a really great tomato sauce.  Would have been better to do my own.  I made a great Bolognese Sauce once or twice from Marcella Hazan.  These things are well within my powers.  Oh, well.

Debbie and I both thought what I made was pretty good.  But I’ll have to aim for a higher bar next week.

Southwest Turkey Burgers with Corn Salsa

I made these last night, in a nod to the classic Friday pattern of crummy cooking (Debbie and I were out on actual Friday night).

Not bad, certainly tastier than they sounded.  Maybe the secret here was that Debbie told me we had ground turkey and we really had ground chicken thigh, which has a little “nature” to it that turkey never had and never will.

Ended up making the corn salsa from scratch – tomatoes, onions, fresh corn cut off the cob, cilantro, etc. – because we didn’t have any store-bought in the house.  Have to learn how to make different kinds of salsas.

Back in the saddle: Chicken & Edamame stir fry

Vacation and other trouble completely discombobulated my cooking routine… and even more so my blogging.  Hopefully, we’re back in the saddle again.

I made this Brown Rice and Chicken Stir-Fry with Edamame and Walnuts from an Epicurious search on chicken and edamame.  It sounds kind of disgustingly healthful (my cousin Nina said, “Edamame, isn’t that like lima beans?”), but it wasn’t bad.  The generic stir fry flavors – ginger, garlic, soy, sherry, stock – overwhelmed any lima-bean aspects.  Debbie and I really liked it.  (The dark stuff in the picture, by the way, is toasted walnuts, not some Essence of Health Food.)

Here’s a pic of the swordfish dinner

Simply Grilled

On Martha’s Vineyard this week, with Liz and her boys, Josh, and Debbie.  Last night everyone had finally arrived.

Pre CrummyCook we went out a lot when we went to the Vineyard.  The kitchen environment in a by-the-week rental is often not what you would want, and things don’t work well.  Plus the whole island is really moist (what you’d expect from some land in the middle of the ocean, I guess), and things (like crackers, cereal, pasteboard boxes, etc) get so moist they’re downright flexible.

But all that has changed with the Cook’s Point of View, and so we’re making more food.

We did swordfish on the charcoal grill last night.  My Universal Grilling Method (heat to iron-melting temperature and cook really fast) works extremely well with this use case.  The fish was actually pretty good.  I thought it was a little too dry in the middle, but Liz said her piece had a part that was perfect.

That and chard and salad and corn on the cob (not Island corn, but picked the same day on the mainland) seemed to please everyone.

Adobo-rubbed Pork Tenderloin

This started out because I wanted to grill something, and I knew we had a pork tenderloin in the freezer.  But this recipe for pan-seared and then oven-roasted tenderloin spoke to me, mainly because the rub sounded exotic (and the basic theory of rubbing, as opposed to marinating, was unfamiliar to me).

It’s another Self magazine recipe, which means less tasty but more healthy than, say, Gourmet or other Conde-Nast properties.  But it was good.  There’s a pico de gallo topping built around black beans which had a pretty simlar taste to the rub.  I was worried it was going to be monotonous, and perhaps it was a bit.  But Debbie was happy, and so was I.

We had a salad on the side.

Squash Blossoms

Squash blossoms was the stretch vegetable this week.  They had them at the farmers’ market.  I’ve always wanted to think of myself as someone who knew how to prepare them.  And, with the help of Epicurious, I am.  Sort of.

Here they are.  It’s a delicious recipe, and not too hard (by Epicurious standards).  It took me about the 40 min they mention in the recipe.

The hard thing is actually getting the stuffing into the darn squash blossoms.  They’re fragile.  They’re floppy.  They lack structural integrity.  I would get one open and the leaves would flop back into place while I was pushing the stuffing in.  Or I would push too vigorously the leaves would tear.  And nothing I could do seemed to be able to get the stuffing into the very bottom of the flower.

In any case, Debbie thought they tasted great.  I could have used more stuffing.  Next time I’ll get a pastry bag or a big plastic syringe and do it right.

The Crummy Cook’s first improv!

Mara taxes me regularly with being too hung-up on following recipes.  She would have been proud of me tonight!

I had a yen for meatballs, and we had a bag of frozen turkey meatballs from Whole Foods sitting around, calling to me.  I looked up “turkey meatballs” in Epicurious, and the few recipes that came back were tough and demanding.  The last thing you want on Sunday night.

Well, I saw a number of recipes pairing meatballs with tomato sauce, and I looked in the fridge and saw leftover Harissa dressing from a previous Crummy-Cook exploit.  I thought, “let’s put the Harissa dressing on the meatballs”.  Then I thought, “that’s a bit intense, let’s cut them with something.”  Inside the fridge, the Greek yogurt spoke to me.  I mixed the yogurt with the Harissa and cooked it with the meatballs: a star is born!

Do I have to log each meal I cook?

Not sure of the conventions here, but I’ll err on the side of punctilio until I figure out the lay of the land.

Last night (still alone :-() I got hung up on tofu, but also sick of the usual stuff.  One of the few areas of cooking I knew something about pre-Crummy-Cook-vow was Chinese stir-fry cooking, and I just wasn’t in the mood last night.

A recipe for Spinach and Tofu from Deborah Madison (famous, in our household at least, for the her connection with Moosewood Cookbook and its progeny) caught my fancy.

I’m one of the few people in my zip code who has actually made paneer from scratch, so Saag Paneer, the ur-dish on which this is based, is a household favorite.

I cheated.  I made it with frozen chopped spinach.  It still tasted great.

Barefoot Contessa couscous… alone

Mara is off to Africa for six months, Debbie is in CA, I’m home alone with the animals.

Prior to the Crummy Cook Resolution, I would have gone out last night, might well have overeaten.  But, even by myself, the Cook calls, and I put together something simple which hit the spot.

Mary had originally directed me to Ina Garten (also at her own site), whose dishes are generally tasty and simple.

Curried Couscous (that’s Ina’s version in the picture; I’m still routinely forgetting to take pictures of my food) is fabulous, and completely simple, great features for a cook-at-home-alone dish.  When Mary told me about this dish, she said that y0u could make any amount of it for a party and it would all be gone by the end.  I guess that was true of my one-person party last night. 

Spinach Salad with Grilled Eggplant and Feta

From Epicurious.  Pretty darn simple, really tasty.

 

The problem of making perfect grilled eggplant remains, but I got a little better at it this time.

Josh (my non-crummy cook friend, not my son) says you should salt the eggplant first (removing the salt before action, of course).  Salted eggplant is to oil as toast is to butter.  It absorbs the oil but doesn’t get all soggy.

I don’t hate garlic anymore

Garlic problem solved.  This garlic peeler, from Sur La Table, eliminates the garlic-peeling problem  You put a clove inside, roll the tube around until the garlic clove crackles, and, voila, the peel comes off.

Another two-dish meal

Mara, Debbie, and I ate at home on Friday, with Ellie as a guest.  Two dishes – both from Epicurious, need I say?

The Grilled Summer Vegetables with Harissa Dressing could be made in advance, so I grilled them in the midst of a Djibouti-like Washington DC summer day.  One goofup, which worked out okay: the “Harissa Dressing” is harissa powder whisked into oil and lemon juice basically.  I thought that some stuff called “Harissa” at Whole Foods was just the powder in oil.  Turns out – and, dummy me, I didn’t see it until after I had mixed it with lemon juice – that the major ingredient in the Whole Foods stuff is tomato.  Mara tasted it, however, and said it tasted like sun-ripened tomato and would be OK as a dressing.  So it was.

So I really only had to assemble the grilled veggies at meal time.  I guess this is my first experience plating.

The other dish, Shrimp and Pancetta on Polenta, was pretty tasty for how easy it was.  Just make some quick polenta (we do it in the microwave, per Debbie, with one part polenta to 4 parts water) and cook the other stuff in a pan.

Here’s what Ellie wrote the next day:

Thanks for the dinner.  I loved the shrimp, polenta dish.  I came home and read the crummy blog.  I gather that pancetta can be tricky.  Nice to visit . ellie

I guess that’ll do in lieu of criticism/self-criticism.

Caramel Fish Filets and Peas w Pancetta & Garlic

Back in form this week, I made two simultaneous involved dishes.  Well, maybe not that involved.  But involved enough.

Main dish was Caramel Fish Filets, from Mark Bittman.  Since he doesn’t publish his own recipes online, see fellow blogger Boots in the Oven for the recipe.

Basically you melt sugar until it caramelizes, put in a bunch of other stuff, and cook the fish in it.

The other dish was from my partner Harry, who is a serious Italian-authentic cook.  He recommended rendering some pancetta, browning garlic in it, and tossing it over peas.

OK.  Neither of these is daunting to our halfway-through-the-year Crummy Cook.  But together, they presented some complications.

I put in the pancetta first.  I was going to get it crispy, take it out, cook the garlic, toss it with the peas, and then reheat the peas right before Debbie and I ate.

But I got so bogged down with melting the sugar (sugar as in caramelizing scares the bejeezus out of me) that the pancetta burned.  I had these four disks of completely blackened pancetta, and not much time to decide what to do.  Fortunately I had more dry powder, so I put in four more disks and ate the evidence (the blackened ones, not too bad by my standards).

Everything settled down.  The fish turned out well – it’s sweet, sour, and fish-saucy, a even spicy (although next time I’ll use chili pepper instead of black pepper) – and the peas were decent (although I want to work next time on getting the pancetta more tender; it still didn’t work out completely right).

Debbie was pleased, and I let deeper criticism/self-criticism slide for the night.

No crum(b)s this weekend

Well, one thing followed another, and there’s no suitable meal for the Crummy Cook this weekend.

Friday I was coming back from a one-day trip to Atlanta, Debbie offered to cook and I didn’t say no.

Saturday we decided to try a hip Japanese in the “new” K St (I put “new” in quotes because it may only be new to the New York Times and us).  Great food, but not produced by me.

And tonight we’re going over to friends’.

Almost-Ratatouille

Debbie and I cooked together Friday night, she just back from10 days on the road.

We had a boatload of veggies of different kinds, including the “stretch” eggplant, old cauliflower, a big zucchini (supposed to be less tender, per Debbie and others), a package of pre-sliced mushrooms.

So Debbie suggests we make ratatouille, which I look up in Mark Bittman.  He says it’s a pretty loosey-goosey dish, very tolerant of variations.  Debbie agrees.  This only redoubles my Monk-ish wish to exactly follow orders, so I follow Mark as closely as I can.  Unfortunately, I forget to put in tomatoes which, Debbie tells me afterward during criticism-and-self-criticism, is one of the anchor tenants of the dish’s flavor.  Oh well.  It was kind of bland, although the textures were pretty good.

She put in some crushed tomatoes from a open box, and we’ll try them this morning with scrambled eggs.

I Hate Garlic

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the taste of garlic.  But garlic as a food to be prepared?  Fugettaaboutdit.  The husk around the garlic cloves is gnarly and refractory.  I hit it and hit it with the heel of the knife, and it’s still hard to peel.  And then the garlic sticks to your fingers and your knife as you cut it.

I would take pre-minced garlic any day of the week.  But Debbie forbids it in our house.  Maybe she’s right.  But can someone please intervene with The Management to make garlic easier to work with?

All this because I had to chop up a couple of cloves of garlic for the Eggplant and garlic lettuce cups recipe I made from Epicurious.  (Our “stretch vegetable” for the week was an eggplant, and I bought a tub of pre-cut mushroom on an impulse in the Whole Foods.)

Solo Dinner

Mara’s back at school, at least for another month.  Debbie’s in New Orleans (where we had a very good but not great meal at Cuvee, a hotel-based restaurant in the Central Business District.

So last night I had no one to share my Crummy-ness with, and I cooked solo.  (Prior to this year I would have eaten leftovers, frozen food, or gone out.)

Mark Bitman has a good recipe-template for grilled shrimp, and I had some pesto sauce left over, so I just slathered some frozen shrimp in pesto sauce and grilled it under the broiler for 10 minutes (longer because it was frozen).

Mark called for peeled shrimp, but the frozen shrimp I had were unpeeled, so I cooked them unpeeled.  when it came time to peel them, I got the Cajun-style effect of getting the sauce all over my fingers as I peeled and thence over the shrimp.

A Caesar salad-style dish (+ almonds and red onion) on the side.

Cooking with Mara 2

It was just the two of us last night.  Debbie had to go to California for a death in the family, but Mara and I didn’t take the easy way out (go out to dinner).  We crummy-cooked.

I’ve been longing to find out a good recipe for grilled vegetables, or, more correctly, a theory of grilled vegetables that would allow me to generate a number of good recipes.

As usual, I went to epicurious first, and came up with Grilled Vegetables with Mint Raita.  We’re big raita fans in our house, so it looked great.  You basically toss the vegetable chunks in oil and curry powder (well, garam masala, but I’ll be damned if I know the difference between those two), grill on skewers, and serve with mint raita.

We went out to the get the vegetables, and ended up getting some halibut as well (it looked the shiniest in the fish case).  There was a recipe in How to Cook Everything for “garlicky-lime fish filets” that sounded great and looked appropriate for the Crumster, so we made that as well.  We didn’t have any limes, and I wanted to go out and get some but Mara said lemons were fine and I shouldn’t be so obsessional about following the recipe.

It turned out pretty good, both dishes, although the raita tasted a bit metallic to me.  My analysis: I used fat-free Greek yogurt instead of fully-leaded whole milk yogurt like the recipe called for, so it ended up not being a great vehicle for the mint and curry powder (yes, curry powder in the raita too).  Kind of like putting skim milk in your coffee.  Doesn’t quite cut it.

Cooking with Mara

Mara came home for a few days.  She has transitioned from someone who vowed a few years ago that she would never cook into an accomplished cook with a variety of dishes.

What amazes Crummy Cook is that, unlike her dad, she doesn’t depend on recipes.  Or maybe she had made enough cousins of what we made last night – shrimp and vegetables in pasta – that she knew the ropes.

(I don’t use recipes for stir-fried dishes much; I’ve made a lot of them and know how the basic theory works.)

She had it so firmly in hand that I just made the salad, until I saw she was going to put the pasta into water that was not vigorously boiling.  Debbie and I jumped right on her case and insisted she get it to a rolling boil, and she wanted to know why.

Fortunately we were able to trot out our McGee and read her what the Maestro had to say: moisture needs to penetrate the outer part of the pasta but not the core…

Mara’s a skeptic: her response was, “How does he know that?”

The Grill

I spent Saturday cleaning the grill and then inaugurated to cook a favorite of every crummy cook: boneless chicken breasts.

I would like to think that, having cooked on grills for years, that I’ve mastered all kinds of techniques.  In fact I mainly do what my California friend Rob called “building the fire high enough to smelt iron” and then rapidly cooking the crap out of whatever goes on the grill.

Works well with fish and burgers, not so much with chicken breasts.  One ameliorating things was marinating the things first (basically a vinaigrette).  But they tasted like chicken breasts that had been smelted.

Next time, I promise, I’ll do something more nuanced on the grill.

Very crummy cook last night – but Blue Cheese Cole Slaw is a winner

So Debbie and I got home from work late, and she assumed I was going to crummy-cook and I forgot basically.

I put together Blue Cheese Cole Slaw from Ina Garten (the Barefoot Contessa owner-chef), thinking that because there was a container of blue cheese crumble in the back of the fridge that it was full of blue cheese, or at least enough for the recipe.

Wrong.  It was almost empty, so it was blue-cheese-less Blue Cheese Cole Slaw, leftover rigatoni and meatballs, and a Jamaican Beef Patty for Debbie, whose secret guilty pleasure they are.

I’ve got to say that the dressing for her cole slaw is pretty good even without the blue cheese (and I cut it 50% in terms of mayonnaise, using fat-free Greek yogurt instead), but I’m worried I’m just rationalizing what was basically a very crummy episode of Crummy Cook.

Curried Lentil and Spinach Soup

Once, again, Epicurious to the rescue.  Recipe here.

I’ve decided to take pictures of my food and post together with the glossy photos from the recipe (if available) so I can graphically depict my progress as a Crummy Cook (and hopefully force myself to pay more attention to appearance if it’s going to actually appear before my vast Internet audience).

For this recipe, Bon Appetit online didn’t have a pic, so it’s just mine.

Oddly tasteless, this soup.  I was expecting a big surge of curry flavor.  I didn’t salt it much, and I used water (as they said) instead of stock (which I probably should have).  I love beans, but they can get pretty drab if you don’t dress them up with something.

Thinking like a Cook

I’m starting to think more like a cook.

In the supermarket, I look at things and I think, “boy, I had something good with that pancetta, I should buy some and figure out something to make with it.”  Or, “didn’t I read about some jicama salad somewhere, maybe I should buy one of those tumor-looking things and do something with it.”

It’s a big shift in my attitude, and relatively quick (just since New Year’s).

Accountability

I think the only way I’m going to get better at this is to evaluate the results and figure out how to improve. I’ve got a multi-step approach here:

1. Ask whoever eats the food what was good and what was bad
2. Admit what was good and what was bad to myself
3. Figure out why the bad was bad and why the good was good
4. Make some hypothesis about how to fix the bad and clone the good
5. Resolve to do them

Both Debbie and Val liked the pasta.  I thought it came out pretty well.  So there wasn’t really much bad at the end.  But a few observations:

• I cooked the whole recipe, which was humongous.  Because it wouldn’t fit in any of our pans, I used an old stainless steel Dutch oven we’ve had for years, which was graduate-student stuff when we bought it.  It doesn’t handle heat well, so there are hot spots all over the bottom which burned during cooking (the recipe involved sauteeing all kinds of stuff).  Note to self: get a better pot
• I was scrambling at the end to coordinate the stuff sauteeing in the pot and the pasta cooking in boiling water.  I miscalculated when the water would boil and had some (mildly) heart-stopping moments at the end when I was worried the sauteeing stuff was going to burn before the pasta would be ready.  It worked out, but the takeaway is: Never underestimate how long it takes a mass of water to come to a boil.

I guess that’s it for this week.

Orecchiette with Cauliflower, Anchovies, and Fried Croutons

I didn’t cook Friday this week because Debbie had some colleagues over for a work thing and I’m not ready.  Not so much not ready for cooking for others, but not ready for cooking for a big bunch.

(Tami, an old video partner of mine, had a gig for a while as head cook at a hospital.  She said you shouldn’t put a gallon of chili powder into a big batch of chili; it doesn’t scale up like the other ingredients.)

So I’m cooking tonight for Debbie and my cousin Val, who is visiting from out of town.

I couldn’t sleep this morning, picked up the new Bon Appetit that came in the mail and found this recipe for pasta with veggies.  It looked do-able, it looked not too heavy for nicer weather, it looked fail-safe.  I went for it.

Debbie sneered at it.  “Well, it looks kind of non-standard.”  She meant the croutons, which I explained to her – quoting from the article copy – was part of the rustic Puglian charm reflected in the dish.  She said, “well, I suppose you can make whatever you want.”

My writing buddy and dedicated foodie Josh came over later that morning.  I showed him the ingredients on the counter, and he said, “Oh, pretty good,” but then he picked up the one non-ingredient from this dish – a sack of red Bhutanese rice – and said, “this stuff is great.”  When I said it wasn’t part of what I was making, he sneered, too, although for different reasons than Debbie.  “It’s just throwing together some pasta,” he said.  “Why don’t you cook something that takes most of the day, that teaches you something?”

Why not, indeed.  I’ll work my way up to it.  The first element of success is showing up regularly; the rest follows in time.

The tomato and onion tart

First of all, thank God for Epicurious.  Mary – one of my scarily un-crummy cook friends – told me about them while teaching me how to make a souffle.  They are a searchable database for Gourmet and Bon Appetit recipes, where you can type in your ingredients-on-hand and see what they’ve got.  In this case, I had too much Gruyere cheese (from the souffle) and a tub of pitted olives I’d bought on a whim the previous week at Whole Foods.  I typed in “gruyere” and “olives” and, voila: the Tomato and Onion Tart.

Easy recipe, once I made the crucial simplifying assumption that I would buy rather than build the crust.  (Using pre-made stuff is no shame in the tech business: it’s called “buy vs. build” and it’s even a bit more chic to buy than to do it yourself”.)  Whole Food’s whole-wheat frozen pie crust was probably easier on my constitution than the Butter Pastry Dough they were going to have me prepare.  I can always make a dough in Year 2.

It went well.  Debbie – who had just come home off the road – liked it (and even ate a smidgen of seconds, a surer proof of approval than mere words).  For the first time since New Years, no criticism and self-criticism afterwards.  Life is sweet.

Why the Crummy Cook?

So, at age 59 I’ve decided to learn how to cook.

Not from scratch.  I’ve never been like my poor dad, who couldn’t even make a hamburger or boil an egg.  I know the basics.  I know a few dishes.

I decided as a New Year’s resolution to do it regularly, once a week at least.

And, since we live in the age where everyone wants to write and no one wants to read, I’ve got to blog about it, too.

Hopefully my accounts of flailing around with recipes, cutting boards, and flame will amuse some readership.  If so, please let me know.