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Heat: The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen

As the old saying goes, "If you have heat, you can cook." But it's only if you understand heat that you can cook well, and the New York Times has an in-depth cook's-eye-view article on heat and cooking:

Via: Cooking: Improve Your Cooking Chops with the Invisible Ingredient

Link: The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen - New York Times.

"We waste huge amounts of gas or electricity, not to mention money and time, trying to get heat to do things it can’t do. Aiming to cook a roast or steak until it’s pink at the center, we routinely overcook the rest of it. Instead of a gentle simmer, we boil our stews and braises until they are tough and dry. Even if we do everything else right, we can undermine our best cooking if we let food cool on the way to the table — all because most of us don’t understand heat."

Curried Pumpkin Soup

I'll skip all the cliched reasons why October is pumpkin weather, and will instead skip straight to the goods. We fancied a bit of a winter warmer bit of a Sunday back, and Jodie found some very tasty curried pumpkin soup recipes.

We used this Curry Pumpkin Soup recipe from the Seattle Times, with a nod to this Curry Pumpkin Soup recipe from Allrecipes (we liked the soy sauce in this one). Served with hot bread, it was a heart, satisfying meal for a chilly October evening.

More curried pumpkin soup recipes:

• curry pumpkin soup - Google Search
• Weekend Recipe: Coconut-Curry Pumpkin Soup - Small Farm Central
• Curry Pumpkin Soup 1 - Cooks.com
• Curried Pumpkin Soup 2 - Cooks.com
• Curried Pumpkin Soup 3 - Cooks.com

Slow Food Arabian Nights Dinner - Sunday, Sep. 28

Forget fast food. You want good eating – so you want slow food. And when it comes to slow food, it doesn't get better than what we can grow right here in Oregon. Slow Foods Eugene promotes good eating of quality food, especially food produced close to home, and on Sunday, Sept. 28, you can feast on some of the best slow food available.

Slow Foods Eugene is holding a fundraising dinner at Adam's Place in downtown Eugene, to support the School Garden Project and to send a local farmer and local chef to Slow Food's Tierre Madre event, held in Italy as a conference for slow food promotion worldwide. The price is $100 per person, which includes 7-course meal, wine, and gratuity. Of the $100 ticket, $60 is a charitable donation to Slow Food Eugene.

If good food at one of Eugene's best restaurants isn't enough for you, the Slow Foods newsletter (PDF) notes:

Executive Chef Adam Bernstein welcomes us to a wonderful evening of great food and entertainment. He promises belly dancers and, perhaps, another surprise, insurance carrier permitting.

How's that for an enticing evening?

Go there:

• DATE: Sunday, September 28, 2008
• TIME: 6 pm
• PLACE: Adam's Place Restaurant, 30 E. Broadway, Eugene, Oregon
• GET TICKETS: Long's Meat Market and Newman's Seafood

For more information, head to the Slow Foods Eugene website.

Fall Harvest

Sunday, Sept. 21 began autumn here at home. The weather took notice too, with a cloudy sky and intermittent periods of rain and sunshine. We spent the day harvesting our garden, transitioning garden and kitchen from summer to autumn fare, and even bottling some beer.

First off, we raided the garden. Last year we began a small garden, and this year Jodie expanded her efforts. We're gradually doing more and more gardening, using our first two seasons in the house to help us understand our land: where the sun shines and when, what the soil needs, which spot is best for which plants, and what we want to plant and where. Here are some of the things we harvested Sunday:

• Apples — we have a large, old apple tree, and are working on what the apples are best for. We're making (and canning) some apple butter and will see how that goes
• Green Beans (both from our garden and from a neighbor's — "We put up a hundred pints of beans and just couldn't do anymore," he told me. "Come over and take all you want." You can't say no to that.)
• Tomatoes — we planted 2 tomato plants this year with only one thing in mind: making our own sun-dried tomatoes. Or, in this case, oven-dried sun-dried tomatoes (cut in half or quarters based on size, slow-dry on a baking sheet cut-side up at 170°F, 6-10 hours). Depending on how this goes, next year we're going to look at getting a food dehydrator
• Blueberries — it's been a late season for blueberries in Oregon this year. Even in September, our two blueberry plants have been covered in berries all month. After about 20 minutes of solid picking, now they are all but bare. Some green berries may yet ripen; we shall see. I put back a cup of blueberries for us to use now, and another cup is on a baking sheet in the freezer, to be bagged up and stored later today.

This also marked the season's first hearty soup, a lentil and chard soup packed with carrots, potatoes, cumin, onions, lentils and Swiss chard.

Last but not least, we bottled a batch of homebrewed porter. With ingredients purchased from Eugene's Home Fermenter Center, this recipe was billed as a Black Butte Porter clone. After nearly a month of conditioning, we bottled this beer Sunday evening. Even without carbonation, the beer is flavorful, robust – and tastes a heckuva lot like Black Butte Porter. It's now going to be put aside for another month, not to be opened until late October or early November, once the rainy season has set in more in earnest here. I'm confident that this is going to be one of our finest batches of beer to-date.

Not a bad start to fall.

Sushi-Ya, La Perla and More

Jennifer at Culinaria Eugenius has a fair bit to say on some recent dining experiences here in town. It's sad to hear that Sushi-Ya, the replacement of the wonderful Misako's location at 8th & Willamatte, is sounding not up to snuff. She had a few more mixed experiences at La Perla than I've had, but overall Jennifer's got some good tidbits to note on dining around Eugene and Springfield:

Link: dining niblets � Culinaria Eugenius.

Grilled Pizza

Now we're talking. Want to change things up on the grill? Then grill up some fresh, homemade pizza:

Link: If you can’t stand the heat—grill pizza. | King Arthur Flour - Bakers\’ Banter.

Hotdogs, hamburgers, chops, chicken, steak, fish… pizza? Believe it or not, pizza is one of the easier, quicker supper dishes you can make out on the deck. You literally just slap the dough onto the grill, cook one side, flip it over, add the toppings, and wait about 5 minutes for everything to warm up. And while dinner’s cooking, you’re sitting in a deck chair, cold glass of (fill in the blank) in hand, enjoying whatever faint breezes happen to be stirring in the trees arching overhead

Preserving the Summer - Canning 101

Enjoying all that summer harvest goodness? What's that? So much produce you can't eat it all? Time to start canning. Here are some basics:

Link: Canning 101: The Basics | Lehman's Country Life.

"What do you plan to do with the extra that you can’t eat or enjoy at the moment? Preserve your extra produce for use in the fall and winter! Whether you freeze, can or dry your food depends upon the space and equipment you have available and what your personal preferences happen to be. This article will focus on the safety issues and canning basics."

Meat as Accent, Not as Main

With the exception of a steak on the grill, our focus in cooking is to have meat be part of the dish, not the entirely of the dish. I got this in large part from my love of Asian cooking. Foods such as Thai food focus on a combination of ingredients and flavors. Meat is part of that combination, not the sole focus of the dish. Same for us. The textures and flavors of meat work in tandem with the rest of the dish, so we can use less meat (and therefore save a bit more dosh).

Link: The Minimalist - The Minimalist - Putting Meat in Its Place - NYTimes.com.

The arguments for eating less meat are myriad and well-publicized, but at the moment they’re irrelevant, because what I want to address here is (almost) purely pragmatic: How do you do it?

Via Lifehacker's Food: Change your Cooking Style to Cut Back on Meat

By the way, before it's mentioned, we also don't eat meat every meal or every day. We vary our diet with meats, eggs, beans, tofu, nuts and other protein sources. It keeps our food more interesting, and it's better for our budget too.

Growing Strawberries

Jodie and I – well, really more Jodie – have begun this adventure as well. We have a long, narrow south-facing bed that runs along our outside bedroom wall, and Jodie has packed it out with strawberry plants. So far, they are growing and happy and looking like we can look forward to many years of strawberry goodness.

Link: In My Kitchen Garden - Growing Strawberries.

in January of 2007 I ordered 30 Cavendish strawberry plants (which are actually more like little bundles of roots with a crown and maybe a leaf or two than actual plants) for $9.95 from my beloved Pinetree Garden Seeds, tucked them in the ground (not too deep, not too shallow) on May 7th (they don't ship you your plants until after the danger of frost), watered them regularly, and snipped off every single blossom that dared to make an appearance. That's right - no berries the first year means much bigger and healthier plants the next. It isn't easy, but it's worth it, trust me

Potstickers Inspire Spring Rolls

Jennifer at Culinaria Eugenius had a great post recently about doing up some  little green potstickers. I couldn't have come across it at a better time. With a fridge full of yummy CSA produce, I was nonetheless feeling a bit of a cooking doldrum.

Then I remembered that we had a bunch of spring roll wrappers in the freezer. Left over from a "roll your own" egg roll party we did for my birthday, I snagged a pack out of the freezer for about an hour's thawing.

From there, dinner was easy. I whipped up enough spring roll filling to do up rolls for 3 people, with leftovers.

Ingredients

All ingredients should be chopped small. Not minced, just small.

• Oil for stir frying and frying
• 1 chicken breast
• Couple of cups of greens (spinach, joi choi, bok choi, whatever)
• 1 carrot
• 5 mushrooms
• 1 spring onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 Tbsp. soy sauce
• 1-1/2 tsp. brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp. oyster sauce
• Cumin
• Lemon pepper
• Black pepper
• Chile flakes
• 2 eggs, whisked
• A wee bit of water, say about 1 tsp.

Cooking

1. Heat the oil in a wok over medium-high heat. As oil heats, add a few dashes of cumin to flavor the oil. Add onion and garlic and stir-fry for about 30 seconds.
2. Add chicken and cook until no more pink is visible. Season liberally with lemon pepper and black pepper, and maybe a bit more cumin. Add all vegetables except the greens. If the greens have an edible stem that needs more time to cook, go ahead and add the stems too. Stir fry for a couple of minutes. Add sugar, soy sauce and oyster sauce.
3. Add chile flakes and greens. Cook for about 3 minutes or so, stirring regularly to mix all ingredients and blend flavors. Add about half the egg and kill heat. Stir to scramble and cook egg. Remove wok from stove.
4. Now the really fun part.
5. Mix the bit of water with the remainder of the egg and stir. You'll fill the spring rolls with about a tablespoon of filling each. Plop a spoonful of goodness in not quite the middle of an eggroll wrapper. Fold part of the wrapper over the filling. Brush egg mixture over the edge of the wrapper. Fold in sides, then roll the whole shebang up. Repeat.
6. Clean out and dry your now-empty wok. Heat over medium to medium-high, and add enough frying oil to cover at least half the spring rolls. When the oil is hot — either when a thermometer hits 375°F or a bit of wrapper chucked in the oil fries — start frying.
7. Lay in 2-3 spring rolls at a time. They will not need much time! The filling is already cooked and ready to eat. You are only getting the fried goodness part now. You'll need to fry only about 30 seconds to a minute per side. When side of roll in oil looks like it's browning, flip it. When other side looks like it's browning, remove roll. Lay it on a plate covered in paper towels to blot oil. Repeat, repeat, repeat until are fried a lovely golden brown, and your local Chinese restaurant delivery guy is asking if he can stay for dinner.
8. Enjoy with your choice of dipping sauces. Soy sauce and rice vinegar, red chile sauce, hot mustard, whatever. And a beer.