Whose Cuisine...?

Saturday, January 19, 2002

I made some biscuits the other night that were not up to my usual standards. I'm out of practice, but to be in practice means making biscuits often. And making biscuits often means eating biscuits often, so I'm thinking that's not such a bad thing after all. Plenty of time to re-perfect my biscuit-making methods when I've taken off a few pounds. The dough for these was a bit too sticky (too much milk, probably) and I had difficulty shaping and cutting it. They had a definite drop-biscuit quality, but they still tasted pretty good.

Had dinner at the home of some friends (hi, guys). They did some garlic bread-type stuff with a round loaf, some olive oil with salt and pepper mixed in, and then threw it on the gas grill. Good stuff! Of course the lasagna was drool-worthy as well.

Theresa (and I've forgotten if it's Theresa or Teresa) made a coffee cake after reading of my own coffee cake troubles. It put my efforts to shame, but she was thoughtful enough to include the recipe. Hers includes sour cream, which gives it some extra moistness and a twang not found in cakes without it.

After the dinner party we went to the post-Christmas-season party at the home of the guy who runs the comic book shop where I indulge my more juvenile urges. You've heard of the Barbie dream house? This guy has the geek's dream house. Comic book and movie paraphernalia on every surface. Neil is a really nice guy, though, and he gave us some tips for selling our book when it finally comes out.

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Thursday, January 17, 2002

Tivo has brought a new joy into our lives: non-stop Trading Spaces episodes.

Dinner at Anna's Pasta was fabulous, as usual. Maybe it's just the aura (Christina and I first met there), but their pasta is always terrific. I haven't thought much about making my own pasta – it has always seemed like a lot of trouble – but maybe I'll try it sometime. It can't be much more difficult than pizza dough. Can it?

Introduced Lisa to Good Eats. Fortunately, we had the "Ma Mae's biscuits" episode on the Tivo (they played it for Cable in the Classroom) – that's a good starter and it always induces salivation.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2002

The Huli-Huli pork chop was even better than expected. It stands to reason that an island whose early meat diet consisted mostly of pork would concoct a sauce that compliments the other white meat perfectly. Add a little saffron rice and mmmmm... it's dinner.

Cooking plans are on hold for tomorrow night. We're meeting our friend Lisa at Anna's Pasta for dinner. I will, as per usual, order the baked ziti. After reading somewhere that the average serving of pasta alfredo contains the same amount of fat as 25 strips of bacon, I may never have the courage to order that dish again.

Most of you reading this know that my writing partner Scott and I are working on a book. I'm happy to say that the writing on the core of the book is complete. We've passed the chapters on to our proofreaders and will start work on the little details of publishing over the next few weeks. I picked up a book on self-publishing at a bookstore tonight and was a bit taken aback at all the things I don't know about the publishing industry. I knew that obtaining an ISBN number and all that was an involved process, but apparently there are industry publications (like Forthcoming Books in Print) that can really make or break the success of a book. I thought the tough part was getting the book finished, but it looks like the real work may be ahead of us.

Ah well, it will be good experience to have when I want to publish The Carnivore's Cookbook.

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Tuesday, January 15, 2002

Tonight's dinner was really nothing to write about. I split a butterfly pork chop with Christina, cooked up in the Foreman grill (handy) and served with Stove Top stuffing (yeah, I was lazy tonight). I had some broccoli steaming in the Black & Decker steamer, but it came out looking a little too brown to consume. I think it was freezer burned. I'll try again and see if I can't make enjoyable broccoli from its frozen form, since it is one of the few veggies I'll eat. (I didn't ask for this curse -- my vegetable revulsion actually makes life difficult in a number of ways. But more on that in future installments.)

Since there are always two chops in those little styrofoam packages from Publix (one of the grocery chains here), I put the other one in a zip-top bag to marinate in some Huli-Huli sauce. I have been holding on to a few bottles of the stuff for some time now, but I need to use them before they go bad. Yes, I think eventually even soy sauce mixed with ginger, sugar, and other spices will turn. When I opened one of the bottles I had left, I thought it might have turned already, but a quick taste confirmed that it just has a strong bouquet. Potent stuff!

Huli-huli sauce (literally island-speak for "turn, turn," is an institution on the Hawaiian islands. It's similar to teriyaki sauce, but it has a very distinctive flavor and an interesting kick that you won't find in regular teriyaki. The sauce is used to marinate whole chickens, which are then cooked on a rotisserie over a fire -- hence the "turn, turn." The chickens are often made and sold as fund raisers for schools and the like, but you can buy the sauce in bottles at any grocery store on the islands. Christina and I became enamored of it while we were living there, and a local friend introduced us to huli-beer wings. (But that's another entry.) You can buy the sauce online ($6.50 a bottle is kind of a rip, since it goes for $3 at the grocery, but what can you do?), but we usually have friends and coworkers pick it up for us when they go to visit. We give them the insider info on what to see on Oahu, and ask that they bring back a couple of bottles as payment.

Guess I'll do that chop on the George grill tomorrow night with some rice. Another boring entry in the diary, but I don't seem to have any trouble coming up with things to write about, do I?

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Monday, January 14, 2002

Success on the pizza front! Mostly. I'm still using the long barbecue spatula to scooch the pizza off the peel and onto the stone, but with much less difficulty these days. Part of my problem seems to be the layout of the kitchen. It's long and narrow, with the fridge and oven facing the sink/counter. There isn't really room to maneuver with the peel without shaking the toppings off the pizza and into the back of the oven. Not wanting a repeat of the great coffee cake fire (see earlier entry on coffee cake), I go in at an angle and let gravity do the work, with some guidance from the spatula. There's no problem at all getting the pizza off the stone and back onto the peel.

As to the corn meal idea: I'm not thrilled. I used corn meal on the first pizza and discovered that (as I feared) instead of tasting the crust, I was tasting corn meal. If you've ever eaten one of Freschetta's frozen pizzas, you know the flavor I'm talking about. Not so good. So on the second I put a lot of extra bread flour on the peel and that helped the pizza slide off without tainting the crust.

Shape? Well, sort of an oblong amoeba-like shape. Definitely rounder than the previous triangle shapes. I'm not practiced enough at the dough shaping yet to get a perfect circle. I'm pretty paranoid about the dough tearing, so my pizzas are only about 10 or 11 inches in diameter and tend to be a little thicker than your standard slice of New York pizza, but they're pretty tasty. The problem is that just one pizza at this size doesn't quite feed two people, but two of them can easily lead to overeating. Must find the willpower to put the remaining slices into the fridge before they find their way onto the plates.

Fortunately, the menu plan for the rest of the week calls for decidedly leaner meals.

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Tonight I'll be trying Alton Brown's pizza recipe again. I've had a tough time of it so far. Don't get me wrong, it tastes great, and it's not too difficult to make (despite my lack of stand mixer with bread hook -- I just put the ingredients in the breadmaker on the dough cycle for about half an hour). I don't even mind the 24-hour lead time on making the dough. But my dough-shaping talents are not strong. I can make the thin, 1-foot diameter pizza crust. It's roughly circular. But rarely does it slide off the peel and onto the pizza stone like it's supposed to, especially once it's weighted down with sauce, cheese, and toppings (usually some browned turkey sausage). The two times that I have tried to do this (AB's recipe makes two crusts of this size), I have ended up with a triangular pizza with curved sides.

AB says to flour one's peel (that big paddle you see at pizza joints) so it will slide. No go, muchacho. I've ended up using a spatula to coax the pizza off the peel, which is what gives it that triangular shape. Conventional wisdom says to use corn meal instead of flour -- it's coarser and facilitates the slide of the dough off the peel surface. That's what I'll try tonight. Stay tuned.

I'm experimenting with the blogger template a bit – I want to get the archives contained to a subdirectory, but I'm not sure that feature works with all templates. Not that it matters, particularly, but I'm anal about file management on web servers. I'm also a bit early to start worrying about archives; they're supposed to happen weekly and I haven't even been doing this for a week yet. I'll put the links back into the template after a bit, once I'm sure archiving works and once I'm sure I want to use this particular template.

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