Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution asks, what is the proper pairing with dark chocolate? He offers the following schools of thought:
1. Wine
2. Spirits
3. Strawberries
4. A pinch of red chili powder
5. A quick swig of mineral water immediately afterwards
I can get behind any of these except perhaps the mineral water (I have never heard of this school of thought and suspect it exists primarily in Cowen’s mind, not that that’s a strike against it); I am all about potentiating the chocolate effect, not washing it out. With wine I like big reds; port is frequently recommended with chocolate but I don’t find it to be a great combination, and whites seem to be either too acidic or too sweet.
Strawberries are good; raspberries are better.
It was near the end of the comment thread before anybody suggested stout; Guinness and chocolate is one of the great flavor combinations as far as I’m concerned.
Many people suggest oranges; my favorite truffle flavoring is orange, but I am not so sure about actually eating chocolate and eating oranges/drinking orange juice at the same time. I prefer having the orange essence infused into the chocolate rather than as a separate entity.
I can’t leave out my lowbrow favorite: plain potato chips. Salt plus chocolate, yum. I don’t waste very good chocolate on this combination, though.
I knew I had too many cookie recipes to bake each and every one. So like any good geek, I averaged the recipes to make the best cookie recipe ever, or what I call a Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. Get it? Mean? Ha ha ha.
It gets funnier. And I think I might actually make these cookies!
This Saturday I went to the farmers’ market to get produce for the week. I bought as much as I could carry, but couldn’t find anybody selling Thai basil, so I decided to check out Jay’s International Grocery, which is relatively close to my house. It was very exciting; there were lots of things I couldn’t name, and I got a giant bunch of basil for under $2. Also, frozen samosas, and coconut juice. I wanted coconut milk to make mango sticky rice, but I didn’t see any.
I thought coconut juice might be the same thing, but now I don’t think it is. It looks clear in the picture on the can, and according to the nutrition information it’s fat-free and fairly low in calories, which is definitely not the case with coconut milk! It does have a lot of electrolytes; I see from Wikipedia that coconut water (which I assume is essentially the same thing) has actually been used for intravenous hydration! I think I’ll consume it via the alimentary route.
Also - and I swear I am not obsessed with reading nutrition information - I think the Nutrition Facts on this can might be a little off. It claims that a serving is 1/2 cup, and that the can contains about 2 servings. It’s a 14-ounce can, which sounds to me like 3.5 servings. This makes me a little concerned that they just slapped a sticker on a package that’s not actually approved for sale in the US, but I will drink it anyway.
Hostess 100 Calorie Cupcake pack, one serving (3 mini cupcakes): 5 grams of dietary fiber (20% of the RDA).
Trader Joe’s Venezia salad mix, one serving (3.5 cups of lettuce): 1 gram of dietary fiber (4% of the RDA).
How can 3 little blobs of sugar and fat pack in more fiber than an entire bowl of salad?
[passing the cafeteria] Something smells tasty. I think it smells like Frank’s Red Hot.
Ooh, Mom’s recipe for chicken wings features a bottle of Frank’s Red Hot and is super yummy.
I should make chicken wings.
Tim and I probably can’t eat a whole batch. Maybe there’s an occasion for which I could make them.
I think the Superbowl must be coming up soon; I remember seeing that the first-year auditorium was reserved for that purpose while I was scheduling CPR training. Wings are a good Superbowl food.
But if I went to a Superbowl party, then I would have to watch the Superbowl. It’s not worth it.
Maybe I could throw a non-Superbowl party, in which we eat chicken wings and other messy and unhealthy foods but do NOT watch the Superbowl or think about football at all! This sounds awesome.
The set of my friends who like messy and unhealthy foods, and the set of my friends who would want to skip watching the Superbowl, may have an extremely small intersection. Tim and I may be back to eating chicken wings on our own.
Since I got to spend several weekends in a row at home with no visitors to entertain, I’ve been going to the farmer’s market for fresh produce most Saturdays. I’m always astonished by how cheap it is - I usually spend less than $15 and get as much as I can carry.
Then I come home and use my produce to cook things I’ve always wanted to make from scratch but not been willing to spend enough money at the grocery store to buy the ingredients. (At least, that’s what I’ve been doing so far.)
The first few weeks, I turned my haul into Italian food. Everything was good, but definitely a learning experience.
First I made pesto with green beans and potatoes, according to this recipe from Radagast. It was very tasty and it smelled so good while I was making it. I have improvements in mind for next time, though. It wasn’t quite as strongly-flavored as I would like. I think this is partly because my one bunch of basil didn’t quite make three cups, so I’ll use more next time. I’ll also add an extra clove of garlic and salt it before it gets to the table.
I might not make pesto again until I get a food processor, though. I used a blender and it didn’t work that well - the very bottom ingredients got whirred to a paste, and the top 90% didn’t move at all. I tried pushing them down, but I wasn’t very coordinated and I ended up destroying my wooden spoon. (I picked all the wood shards out before continuing.) So I would not recommend using a blender.
Next I made the classic tomato sauce from Joy of Cooking. It was definitely tasty, though I think I was a little short on tomatoes. Also, I am pretty sure I got the wrong kind of tomatoes - they were juicier and not quite as red inside as romas, so the sauce was an interesting pinky-orange color and kind of thin. (This would probably also have been helped by adding tomato paste, which was optional.) But the peeling process worked exactly as the cookbook said, which was reassuring. I’ll make it again with roma tomatoes and some tomato paste.
The final Italian-food experiment was making Marcella Hazan’s tomato-butter sauce with fresh tomatoes (I got romas this time). I’d made it several times before with canned tomatoes and really liked it, and I figured this could only be better. Unfortunately I got a little impatient that it wasn’t thickening up (fresh tomatoes are way juicier than canned!) and decided to add tomato paste. I don’t know if I added too much or it was just low-quality tomato paste, but it kind of overwhelmed the other flavors. Don’t get me wrong, it was still good. I might try this with fresh tomatoes again and cook it for longer, but I might just stick to high-quality canned tomatoes and call it good. Besides, if I’m going to go through all the work of peeling tomatoes, I might as well use them in a more labor-intensive recipe.
Last week was supposed to be Thai food, but we lost power and my Thai basil, eggplant, and green beans all went bad in the fridge. Also I’m having trouble tracking down all the right ingredients; I need to find an Asian grocery. I miss living in Northern Virginia where there was a whole aisle in the Giant full of packages I couldn’t read.
Update: In addition to a food processor and a new wooden spoon, I also really want a kitchen scale. While it was fun trying to figure out how many pounds of tomatoes I had by submerging one in a measuring cup full of water, seeing how much water it displaced, and assuming that its density was similar to that of water (the tomatoes were sold by the box not by the pound), I would prefer not to have to do that every time. Also, that method doesn’t so much work for dry ingredients.
American Pie: How a Neapolitan street food became the most successful immigrant of all.
This is a really interesting look at the history of pizza in America. I had no idea that it was essentially unknown in the 40s before becoming immensely popular in the 1950s. There were some growing pains - thank goodness the Good Housekeeping version referenced didn’t become popular (though it does have its heir in the nasty Chef Boyardee pizza kits). The article talks about how pizza started here in New York City then was customized to the Midwestern palate in Chicago. It does not mention the unique abomination that is St. Louis-style pizza, which is probably a good thing.
As a side note, this bit at the ending made me smile:
Both spontaneous and economical, ordering pizza remains a signifier of carefree camaraderie; pizza seems to automatically make any event a little more fun. “We will have pizza(!),” the Carleton College history department announced last year in a memo meant to lure students to a meeting. It’s hard to imagine fried chicken or tofu having the same drawing power.
My med school comrades and I have learned that it is in fact possible to get sick of pizza, even if it’s free. Our most successful talks advertise “Free (non-pizza!) lunch!” these days. It’s true that fried chicken doesn’t go over well, though - our biggest draw is Indian food.
Yesterday I took my car to the shop for some minor service. The TV was on in the waiting room, and much to my dismay, my attention kept being caught by the morning show instead of my immunology notes. I saw two things that appalled me, though for very different reasons.
First, they showed part of the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest. The winning entry was baked chicken with spinach stuffing. It sounded pretty good, until they described the recipe: it was based on a frozen waffle kit. The glaze for the chicken is based on the “maple” syrup, and the bread in the stuffing is chopped-up frozen waffles! I can’t imagine how anyone could have ever thought of doing that (though I suspect this abomination might have been the inspiration), and I flat-out refuse to believe that it tastes good.
After that, a commercial came on for Healthy Choice frozen dinners. The commercial shows a dad and his two kids. The little girl keeps saying “That’s not how Mom does it” as Dad vacuums the baby and clears clutter with a leaf blower. Finally he serves them all Healthy Choice dinners, and the girl thinks Mom would approve of that.
I really hate commercials that trade on the stereotype that dads are incompetent buffoons who babysit their kids, while moms are loving caretakers who always know best. Not so much because it’s offensive to men (though it certainly is offensive to imply that a large group of people are morons), but because it reinforces the ridiculous idea that women are caretakers whose job it is to take care of the house and kids, while men can’t be expected to take any responsibility for their own children. Sexism is still with us, folks.
(Of course, the idea that a frozen dinner would be the highlight of someone’s day is pretty goofy too.)
No wonder I never watch TV.
Today the Washington Post has an article about how people are culinary illiterates.
At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like “dredge” and “sauté.” Betty Crocker recipes avoid “braise” and “truss.” Land O’ Lakes has all but banned “fold” and “cream” from its cooking instructions. And Pillsbury carefully sidesteps “simmer” and “sear.”
I’m all about mocking stupidity, but really, is it a surprise that people who get their recipes from the side of the biscuit package are having trouble with technical cooking terms?
It does seem that there has been a decline in cooking knowledge - the article mentions that The Joy of Cooking has trouble figuring out what level to write at - and there’s no doubt what the reason is supposed to be:
For many people, cooking classes like his compensate for what they did not learn at home. “Food companies have to acknowledge that there used to be a level of teaching in the home by moms and grandmas that is not as evident today,” said Janet Myers, senior director of global kitchens for Kraft Foods who has been creating and testing recipes for the company for 30 years.A survey of women in their twenties and forties for Betty Crocker showed that 64 percent of women in their twenties had mothers who worked full time, outside the home, during their childhood, compared with 38 percent of those in their forties. The group in their forties primarily learned to cook from their mothers and at school; the younger women also learned from their mothers, but more of them learned from their fathers, television chefs, or on their own.
No wonder people are ignorant today! They learned to cook from their fathers and everyone knows men can’t cook!
Then there’s this, which I’m still puzzled about:
A survey conducted by Betty Crocker Kitchens in 2004 showed adults don’t even realize how cooking-challenged they’ve become. The national survey of 1,500 adults found that 70 percent rated themselves “above average” in cooking knowledge, even though only 38 percent scored above average on a 20-question cooking-skills quiz. [emphasis added]
I guess a whole bunch of people must have scored exactly at whatever the average was, which doesn’t imply that the quiz was very well written.
The NYT profiles my favorite store.
“We decided to go in the other direction — to appeal to people who are well-educated, well-traveled and underpaid.”
Hey, that’s me!
Interesting stuff about how they select what products to carry. The tiramisu and chocolate-covered espresso beans mentioned are excellent. I haven’t gotten around to trying the chili-lime peanuts yet (I’d prefer cashews) but now I’ll have to. Also great: the nonfat yogurt (no, really) and triple ginger snaps.
What I really want to know, though, is how they manage to be so cheap! I can buy a bunch of things - including milk - at Trader Joe’s for cheaper than Walmart. And yet the people working there are clearly intelligent and educated; how much do you have to pay that class of worker to get them to stay in retail?