the SIMMER blog

the power of the dip

 You know, there's nothing else like a really good dip. It's the least fussy of appetizers. Just a bowl of something, alongside something to dip into it. Salsa or guacamole with tortilla chips. Hummus or baba ganoush with pita. Homemade dip says "I made this to share with you," the happy medium between "voila!! revere my mastery of the appetizer!!" and "OMG I totally forgot so on the way over I stopped for this can of Helluva Good French Onion and a bag of Utz."

And so, my new favorite dip: feta and roasted peppers.

I've made it three times in the past two weeks. I have heard tell that leftovers cause fistfights. If there's any trick to it at all, it's just an aesthetic one: you want a nice orange-y color, kind of brickish red, which requires mixing red peppers and yellow ones. But if you don't love how it looks, drizzle something on top. Few first impressions can't be improved by an artistic drizzle.

 

wordless wednesday vii

foodie confessions

A brief post today. All I want to tell you is: it's all right.

Every once in a while I overload on the foodie world. Nine days out of 10 I can't get enough of discussing food and looking at pictures of food and shopping for ingredients to make new food and of course, eating the food (and then savoring the food and then, often, discussing the food), and then on that tenth day I hear someone say something like "These fava beans are just out of this WORLD and they're so WORTH the WORK" or people online turn their noses up at the concept of frozen dinners and then I just go... Eh. Maybe we're going overboard.

So it's all right if you don't feel like peeling fava beans. (Personally, I've done the work, and no, I don't think they're worth it.) It's OK if you eat frozen dinners. It's OK if you don't like certain things you think "foodies" are "supposed" to like. Everyone's taste is different, and in an ideal world maybe we'd all milk our own cows and what have you, but in the un-ideal world we live in you have to make do with what you've got, and what you've got time for.

I don't actually like the taste of foie gras.

Pork belly is... just too much fat.

Sometimes I use fake almond extract and it tastes even better than real almonds.

I cannot make pizza dough that is better than what Trader Joe's sells for 99 cents.

There is a pure and wonderful joy in the consumption of a Lean Pocket.

You do what you can, and you like what you like, and don't let anyone make you feel guilty or insecure or whatever about your preferences. There is no foodie certification test wherein you can't get licensed unless you know how best to prepare cardoons. If you want to be a foodie, be a foodie. Or a gastronaut. Or a Finer Diner. Or whatever they're calling themselves these days. You don't have to be a part of any particular movement or group or board or segment of the population.

Just cook, and love it. I do.

how a recipe happens

When you first start to cook, you follow recipes like holy writ. It's only natural. They're instructions, after all. The contract you make with the recipe writer or cookbook or poster on Epicurious is that if you do what they tell you in the order they tell you, it will turn out delicious.

But the world of cooking is both bigger and smaller than that.

Bigger, because there are thousands of recipes all for the same dish, any one of which you could follow to get a pretty good result, so the recipe you follow is only one of so very many options, not a scientific formula. Smaller, because if you learn the basic techniques, all the instructions about how long to brown something or roast something or melt something will seem extraneous and unnecessarily fussy. Once you cook enough, "8 to 10 minutes" becomes superfluous. It's done when it's done, and you can tell when it's done. In its way, it's magic.

And sometimes recipes just happen. Take, for instance, this chicken salad:

 

You can follow the recipe, but there isn't anything particularly "right" about it. It happened because it happened. It looks like this:

• 1 whole roasted chicken breast  (left over from musakhan)
• 2 ribs celery, cubed (required for chicken salad, right?)
• 1 T mayonnaise (ditto)
• 1/2 yellow pepper, cubed  (because I was roasting yellow peppers for something else and they all fit on the baking sheet except one half of one pepper)
• 1 T Trader Joe's garlic mustard aioli  (bought to serve with prosciutto and cheese, but how often do we really do that?)
• 1 red chili pepper, seeded and minced (trying to get through a whole 10-pack)
• 1 t Penzey's Mural of Flavor blend (which came free with my order last month)
• 3 cornichons, diced (same excuse as the aioli... and I used three because there were three left in the jar) 
• pinch of salt

So it's a delicious chicken salad, and I would give this recipe to anyone who asks what my chicken salad recipe is, but all told? It's a loose outline filled in with improvisation. As most recipes really are.

fresh isn't just for produce

I haven't talked about A WATCHED POT for a while, but it's very much on my mind, and getting ever closer to going out on submission. Here's where we are with it. It's almost there. Almost. With all the tweaking and revising and inching and slashing and all I've been doing for the past few drafts, the book is getting better and better, but there's one thing I really can't do, no matter how hard I try: understand what it's like to read the book for the first time. It's impossible to be a first-time reader.

So I got one.

I talked to several readers, actually, and they're each bringing an incredibly valuable and unique perspective. Some have heard me talk about different twists and turns the MS has taken. Some have helped me puzzle through issues, or read previous drafts. And some know absolutely nothing about the book beyond the briefest form of its pitch: "A woman finds she can invoke ghosts by cooking from dead people's recipes."

The feedback is starting to roll in, and it's great. Spectacular. By that I don't mean they love it. "I love it" is not a critique. I mean that I'm getting everything from nitpicks about punctuation, to honest feedback about where my character development has fallen short, to the kind of reactions and what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it answers only a first-time reader can give.

Fresh eyes are SO valuable. But so are the experienced eyes. I need to know what questions will crop up in the mind of a first-time reader (why is the cat named Midnight?) and what a re-reader will wonder about (is that line really earned?)

So I love my readers, and I'm over-the-moon that they're giving me such valuable feedback. Writing is a solitary pursuit. You're the only one who knows your world backward and forward. But sharing a glimpse into that world, and having someone else describe to you what it looks like through their eyes... that's amazing. And I am amazed.

from the front

Public service announcement! Any time you're dealing with really hot things and really sharp things, you need to watch out. I tend to injure myself once a month or so. Often it's a cut of some kind. Just as often, it's a burn. Like this!

Take care when cooking, kids. It's hot/sharp/dangerous out there.

wordless Wednesday vi

gone crackers

I will start with this: there is no reason in the wide world to make your own crackers. Reasonable people don't. Reasonable people survey the extensive cracker aisle at the supermarket and avail themselves of sales on Big Wheat Thins, or Rye Triscuits, or other salty crackery deliciousness.

Other people look into a cookbook that they won on a food chat and say Ooh! I've never made these before!

 

The other thing that moved me to experiment with cracker-making was the economic factor. I'd try it out, and if it worked, great. If not, what was I out? 50 cents of pantry supplies (flour, salt, baking powder, olive oil) and an hour of my time? Pfft. This is how we roll.

 

ah yes, the guinness bonus

Welcome to a new week at the SIMMER blog! What do we have for you today? Bone-in joints of meat? Deep delicious cakery? Elegantly plated pastry extravaganzas?

Well, no. It's cheese and crackers. But: cheese and crackers the likes of which you have not previously seen.

 

This is a cheese made with Guinness (ha! snuck it in there yet again!), basically a cheddar. Very cool visually, though a pain in the you-know-what to cut in any way that even vaguely approximates a square. This turned out very different from how I pictured it in my head, and yet... it was pretty much perfect, so who could get fussy about that?

 

Cheddar atop caramelized onions atop homemade crackers. And for the extra bonus round points, there was just a wee smidge of Guinness in the onions too.

More about the crackers tomorrow. In the meantime, if you ever buy this cheese and want to cut it in square-ish shapes, here's what you need to know that I didn't initially: you will have FAR more success cutting against the grain. So, if you buy a triangle-shaped wedge, don't try to cut from one of the long sides. Tip it on its side and cut off an entire triangle, then square that off, and use the scraps for something else. Like, say, a fondue?

Guinness week: the ice cream

Ahh, saving the best for last, Guinness-week-wise.

As a cook I have a couple of secret weapons. One: the willingness to fail. Two: certain cookbooks that I rely on heavily for recipes that turn out right the first time, making me less likely to need to call on One.

One of those books that I rely on: The Perfect Scoop.

Now, don't get married JUST for the ice cream maker, but that's how I got mine, and boy does it ever get a workout. Ice cream, like the willingness to fail and the foolproof cookbooks, is a great secret. It can be done way ahead of time and people are nearly always impressed by it: "You MADE ice cream?"

Shh, don't tell them how easy it is.

Now, I'm going to contradict myself a little here. One of the things that's so great about The Perfect Scoop is that it has a lot of delicious ice cream recipes that don't require making a custard. Making a custard is, yes, fairly exacting, and there are more ways to screw it up than to get it right. So I generally avoid making custard-based ice creams unless I have to.

Needless to say, for Guinness-Milk Chocolate Ice Cream, I had to.

(I'll do a longer post sometime on the joy of custard-making, but that can wait for another day; here's the short version: use the instructions in the front of A Perfect Scoop; and also a Thermapen)

This ice cream is... weird. The Guinness provides a dark, nutty-bitter-almost-earthy note that only hits you after the upfront WHAM of the milk chocolate is gone. I couldn't decide whether I liked it or whether it was just too earthy to enjoy.

But I did notice that at least one of our guests had thirds.