Scottish Cow

The Great Char Siu Bao Disaster

Yeah. I was REALLY hoping this was going to turn out well. I love Char Siu Bao and can't remember the last time I had it out at a Chinese restaurant. If you're unaware, CSB is really good Chinese barbequed pork (Char Siu) tucked into a delicious, yeasty baked* bun (Bau). Yes - so good, it deserves to be incorrectly capitalized.

Before I go any further, I'd love to hear from my cousins in Beijing about how this recipe is done in China (maybe it isn't?) and let them have a good laugh at me for putting ketchup in it. I should also mention that Anya's Chinese nickname is Bao-zi, and I believe she's as cute, if not cuter, than a pork filled bun.

Anyway, I made the Char Siu portion with a nice chunk of pork shoulder with hoisin sauce, brown sugar, soy sauce, honey, ketchup and assorted other things. It came out great. All the recipes I've seen have these basic ingredients with some added and removed. The hoisin sauce is the most important part as far as I can tell.

So I had some great pork and that's where the problems started. I didn't really plan ahead so well for the Bau portion. It's hard to pull off something that needs to rise for a few hours on a weekday, especially when it's something you want to eat right when it's ready. But there was that plate of pork sitting in the fridge.

A brilliant idea struck. I had been wanting to make arepas at some point - they had been hailed as a wonderful South American treat - hot corn cakes stuffed with all sorts of stuff. The corn cakes promised to come together quickly, cook within 30 minutes, and hey, the "stuffed with all sorts of stuff" seemed like it was just begging for some Char Siu.

The arepas sounded very straightforward (corn flour, salt, water, mix, knead, pan fry, bake, stuff, eat), so I'm not sure if I messed it up, or if my expectations were way too high.

Hockey pucks.

Bland, pale hockey pucks.

I'm planning on dropping them off at the rod and gun club that Molly and I pass every Saturday morning. They are always skeet shooting and the clay pigeons will be jealous of these arepas.

Defeated and bao-less, the cooked pork ended up with some rice and snow peas on the side, and that was really good. Just not the same. You can find plenty of Bao recipes out there (it's a just a slighty sweetened, slightly enriched dough) and you can finish off what I couldn't...

Char Siu, Hold the Bao

Cut into strips or slabs, about 1/2 inch thick:
3 LB pork shoulder

Mix all together:
3 TB hoisin sauce
1/3 C soy sauce
1/2 tsp chinese five spice
1 TB brown sugar
1 clove garlic, minced
1 TB ketchup

Add the pork slabs to the marinade, get them all into a big plastic bag and marinate overnight in the fridge. When ready to cook, preheat oven to 300. Reserve the marinade and lay the pork out on a wire rack in a sheet pan with some water in it. You can line the sheet pan with foil if you don't want your next batch of oatmeal cookies to taste like charred pork**. Cook for about an hour, until the pork is cooked and mostly tender, but still chewy. While it's cooking, make the glaze.

Mix:

A few spoons of the leftover marinade (to taste), boiled for a minute
About 1/4 C honey
About 1/4 C ketchup

When the pork is ready, take it out, turn on the broiler and take turns glazing/broiling each side until they are both sticky and crispy. Try not to eat it all before it ends up in the bao.

* There is a steamed version as well, but I like the baked.

** "Ah! You put pork on my cookie rack!" said Tina.

Beer, Wine and the Kids

So the piece in Wednesday's Times food section (Michael Ruhlman already blogged about it), about introducing your kids to wine - when I read that the first thing that came to mind was the offhand comment a couple of posts ago about Molly having a sip of beer.

I instantly thought that it probably sounded incredibly cavalier and irresponsible, and want to explain a bit. If you read the piece from the Times, a lot of the same thinking applies. As far back as I can remember in my childhood, beer or wine was usually part of dinner. I was never explicitly told, "this is part of the meal and not to be abused," but that was understood. Sometimes I got a little sip and that was it. It was for Mom and Dad, and I don't recall liking it a whole lot anyway. Do you remember when you learned that snow was cold? Probably not - you grew up with that understanding because it was all around you. At least if you grew up in the Northeast.

By the time I was in high school, I could have a small glass of wine with dinner if I wanted. It was part of the meal and it was also a culinary learning experience. It was also starting to taste good, and I appreciated that as well. Along with the food on the plates, it was part of our dinner together as a family.

Just to be clear - Molly is 4 and a half. She's not having alcohol with dinner. Every now and then she gets a sip (for beer she'd rather dip her finger in the foam anyway). She understands that it's something for adults. My hope is by the time she's older, and when we're comfortable letting her have a small glass of wine at dinner (way older), she'll already have some appreciation of what alcohol should be - something to compliment and enjoy with your meal, something to share with family - and what it shouldn't.

Fast, Local...An Abundance of Butts?

It's nice to see that not all "fast food" corporations are evil and not all of their food is complete crap. There's this piece in yesterday's Washington Post (thanks Mom) about Chipotle Mexican Grill and their use of Polyface Farm's pork in their carnitas (mmmm...carnitas). It's interesting to see what hurdles they had to overcome to successfully use the locally, naturally raised pork in a way that was consistent with company (and regulatory standards). The fact that it wasn't necessarily an easy switch lends some weight to the probability that it isn't just a publicity move. Good for them and for Polyface too, I guess, for not refusing to deal with someone on the other side of the fence.

Finally, I am aghast. An overabundance of shoulders and legs? C'mon. I need to talk to the people who are choosing pork chops over pork butts.

Seven Months Old, Hungry for More

Abigail is 7 months old and we really can't wait to be able to give her real food. Not to say her applesauce, pearsauce, carrotsauce, squashsauce, bananasauce and spinachsauce aren't real, but you need to see it: If you're holding her and attempt to eat something, say a forkful of pasta or a spoon of ice cream, Abby's mouth opens up and she launches her entire body in the direction of the food. She's a shark propelling herself at some helpless prey. And if it's possible for a 7 month old to look offended, man, she looks it when that bite lands in your mouth and not hers.

She gets little bits of whole bananas and sweet potatoes and pasta and bread when we're eating them, and absolutely loves it. Imagine getting to taste everything for the first time! It would be great to have those memories of what you were thinking the first time you bit into a slice of watermelon or a crispy piece of roast chicken skin.

We were very lucky with Molly...once she started eating off our plates, we let her try just about everything and she kept asking for more. For the most part she still does. I think when she rejects certain things now, it's more out of her four (she'd say four and a half) year old sense of purpose and not really an aversion to what's on the table. She's also become something of an unintentional wise-ass as she screams "LOOKS GROSS!" when you first put her plate down and then proceeds to polish it off. She requests things like "goats cheese" and "the peach beer" (uh...she might have accidentally had a sip of a Belgian lambic at some point). We can only hope Abby is the same, so the two of them can sit at the table together, belching, laughing and fighting for the last scoop of hummus.

On the other side of the world our adorable almost-year-old niece Anya is learning to eat in a totally different environment. We haven't met her yet, as she was spirited off to Beijing with her parents, but apparently she won't eat her vegetables unless they are stir fried with soy sauce.

She's going to be an awesome dinner companion in a couple years.

Overall, some common sense prevails - if you keep feeding kids PB&J, plain chicken breasts and American cheese (does that stuff ever grow mold?) because you think that's all that they'll like...guess what happens? Don't get me wrong, we're not claiming to be experts on nutrition for picky toddlers, but I've seen both sides and the effects are pretty obvious. If you're enjoying your food, they are going to enjoy your food also.

Lentils with Pita Chips

OK, so it's not the kale salad, but you can make this to eat the day after you've overdosed on Welsh Rabbit for dinner. Well, the day after the day after, cause the leftover rabbit makes an unreal breakfast as well.

We've been eating a bunch of lentils lately - I had eaten nary a lentil in my life and all of sudden there were lentils everywhere. My dad made some great lentils for a Christmas side dish. There was a Good Eats episode about them (Alton Brown made cookies out of the red ones).

We tried the Red Lentil Soup from the Times. It was tasty, but the lentils kinda fell apart and the whole thing turned grainy and a little mushy. It was still good, but you know...

There's also a recipe on 101 Cookbooks that I'm dying to try as well.

I ended up with this - wasn't soupy enough to be a soup, wasn't really a salad. So it's just lentils, and that's really all it was. The lentils themselves were the small dark, greenish grey French lentils pictured above (also called Puy lentils). They stayed much firmer during cooking, but still made it to tender - they just reserve the right to pop a little bit when you bite into them.

It turned out a very simple and satisifying dish for a solo supper (the girls were over at Tina's parents and had dinner over there) and is great for that purpose.

Lentils With Curry Yogurt and Pita Chips

In a sauce pan, saute with a pinch of salt in olive oil until soft:
1 onion, diced small
1 carrot, diced small

Add:
1 cup dark green french lentils
1 clove garlic, crushed
a bay leaf

Fill with cold water to cover the lentils by about an inch. Bring to boil, lower to a simmer and cook for 20-30 minutes until lentils are soft, but haven't disintegrated. Drain them, pluck out the garlic, save the liquid.

Separate out the portion you want to eat and depending on how moist you want them, add olive oil and cooking liquid back into them.

The topping is just some thick yogurt with a tiny bit of dad's homemade curry powder blended in.

The pita chips were tossed in a little olive oil, some za'atar and thrown in the toaster oven to crisp up.

Za'atar, if you haven't encountered it, is a Middle Eastern blend of herbs & spices and the name of an herb itself. Reading about the blend, there is definitely some variety in its composition, like every Italian grandmother's red sauce. The herb itself sounds like something between thyme, oregano and marjoram and it smells wonderful, like all three. Our blend, labeled just "Jordanian Za'atar" has za'atar (smells very much like thyme), sumac and sesame seeds. Among other things, it tastes great on chicken and hiding in our spice drawer in its little ziplock bag, it looks like something maybe we shouldn't have.

Anyway, back to the lentils - Scoop and eat.

Everything is Painted Green

The vernal equinox is here. Spring, eh? Spring evokes feelings of warmth, green-leaved trees, vegetables and baseball. Baseball, which starts up again next week, brings out the little leaguer in me every year - it's a strange thing to get excited about, but there's nothing else like it.

John Updike wrote this in a New Yorker piece about Ted Williams' last game in a Red Sox uniform:

"Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus..."

Now THAT sounds like spring. It's also an absolutely perfect description of baseball's most holy site*.

Unfortuntely, nobody informed Western New York of these seasonal milestones. We had a icy mess all over the ground and trees this morning and had to scrape off our cars for one more (last?) time.

Despite the ever present slush, our garden plans need to get moving - I'm only 6 months behind on building the 2 raised beds, so we're off to a good start!

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* Any Yankee fans reading this? C'mon, I know you're out there...

On Being a Good Carnivore

Last year we made a decision to try not to buy any more animal protein at the grocery store. That included chicken, beef, pork and lamb. We've been mostly successful.

The reasons are plentiful...You've seen the meat recalls, you've seen the footage of cows being tortured that made it up on CNN. Perhaps you've even eaten a dry, tasteless chicken breast or pork chop from the store recently. I really don't want to get into how chickens (whether for roasting or eggs), pigs and cattle are being raised, treated, kept alive with antibiotics, and slaughtered in the factory farms that supply the stores that most of us buy our food from. Read a little about it here or better yet, buy The Omnivore's Dilemma. If you haven't already thought about it or read about it, you'll be sickened and appalled and might just change the way you eat as well.

We didn't want to give up meat altogether - from my perspective, the issue isn't with eating meat, it's with what happens to that animal between its birth and its eventual destination. That includes what it ate, where it was raised (geographically and physically), who raised it, how it was processed and how it gets to our doorstep. Completely giving it up doesn't seem consistent with eating a balanced diet. And it seems too drastic, an over-reaction. Instead of complete denial, it's easier (and really, healthier and tastier) to implement a few simple rules...

1) Who was responsible for raising the animal? Do you know their name? Even better, have you met them?

2) What did the animal eat (not my phrase, but I don't think there's a better way to say it: "You are what what you eat eats"). Did it get to eat what it was born to eat or was it forced to eat something else to speed it on the path to processing?

3) How was it raised? Was it confined? Did it get to see the first rays of Sunlight in a field somewhere south of Lake Erie on the first 60 degree day in April? (Yeah, winter is starting to wear a little thin).

If you can find a supply of food that delivers satisfactory answers to those questions (satisfactory to you, not to me) - and I bet you can - then what's the problem?

Well, potentially the price. Good, healthy real food costs more than its mass produced counterpart. But there are ways to mitigate this, and we'll get into those...

So, where are we getting our chicken, beef, lamb and pork from now? We'll get into that too...

Hits and Misses

Some hits and misses from the previous couple weeks of life in our kitchen...

This is a basic coconut milk based curry - lots of onions and garlic with some curry powder (homemade by my dad), there wasn't any readily available (thawed) protein around, so it's got chunks of eggplant and green peppers. All over jasmine rice. Molly said "Ah! Too spicy!" - she eats and loves just about anything, but this curry had a little too much curry going on.

This was a kofta/kafta/kefta type dish (call it Lamb Balls if you want) - it was ground lamb with onions, parsley, and cumin. Tasted alright - very dry though. Next time will try some of the meatloaf moisture maximizing techniques (milk, egg, bread). Yogurty sauce on top. We love yogurt. Molly (if you haven't figured it out yet - she's the official taster), liked this one - though her positive rating is definitely due in part to the messiness factor.

This is a round pain au levain - it was an attempt at getting bigger "tunnels" in the crumb and getting some more sour flavor than previous loaves. For those goals, it rates an "eh." It had a higher hydration and spent some time overnight in the fridge, but it wasn't enough. It's still very tasty though, but definitely a work in progress. Abby (7 months old) doesn't have any teeth yet, but likes to mash up small things - especially if it's something different than pureed fruits and vegetables. It's nice to give her a little bite of our bread and we know exactly what's it in (and what's not).

Not pictured, but we also had some good fajitas (skirt steak, red/green peppers and onions), and Tina made a kick-ass fridge cleaning lasagna that had spinach, mushrooms and small chicken thigh pieces in a white sauce with tofu playing the role of ricotta. No mozzarella, but some shredded cheddar on top. Yeah, I guess after all that, the only thing lasagna-like were the lasagna noodles... but I think I would have taken it over a standard red-sauce version any day.

Welsh Rabbit

Lest there be some concern that we've fed Bugs or the oversized guy that drops off our Easter baskets to Molly for dinner, fear not. If you've never heard of welsh rabbit before, it's not really rabbit.

I do like rabbit, but don't cook it often (hmmm...can you see lightbulb over my head?). This dish, another one that's been propelled forward through the years as a childhood memory, is wonderful for 2 reasons. First, its name is totally misleading - funny now, even better when you're a kid. Second, it's major ingredients are bacon, cheese, beer and bread.

Bacon.

Cheese.

Beer.

Bread.

Yeah, I'll admit there are some tomatoes in there too (think of them as a cheese delivery system). The dish is like a big, melty, beery BLT, without any of that pesky rabbit food getting in the way (ha...rabbit food)*.

For my childhood version, I distinctly remember getting to stir up the cheese into the double broiler until it turned into a big sloppy mess, add the mustard, the beer (it was Heineken), take a sip of the beer, add some milk and keep stirring and stirring and tasting with a cheesy index finger. Cooking as a kid, the idea of anything beer related is exciting - like you're getting away with something you shouldn't be.

The following recipe stays pretty faithful to what I remember. There are recipes out there that start off with a roux, but that seems unnecessary. I like the sauce a little liquidy, so when you pour it over the other stuff it manages to find all the voids and overwhelm them with cheese. It's still thick enough to stick around and not run away when you assemble a bite on your fork.

I've also upgraded my memory and replaced the pale, minature slices of Pepperidge Farm sandwich bread that were common in our kitchen back then with toasted chunks from a big, crusty boule.

The cheese is probably the most important ingredient, so get a good sharp one. For the beer, I think that Newcastle Brown Ale is about the best all purpose cooking beer there is.

Welsh Rabbit

10 oz sharp cheddar cheese
1 TB butter
3/4 C of beer/milk combined - pick your own ratio, more or less for soupier or thicker sauce
1 egg
Worcestershire sauce (squirt)
Dry mustard (pinch)
Salt/pepper (pinches)
Cayenne/Hot sauce (pinch/squirt)

Bacon, cooked and crumbled
Grape tomatoes, halved or quartered
1 LB loaf of crusty bread, cut in 1" cubes

Shred the cheese and add the butter, salt and mustard/cayenne to taste (a big pinch of each usually). Melt in a double boiler (or bowl set over boiling water) until the cheese has turned into a melted blob. Mix the beer/milk, egg and a few dashes of the worcestershire sauce together until the egg is beaten and add to the cheese. Stir it well until most of the lumps are gone - this will never be a truly smooth sauce.

As the sauce is finishing up, spread the bread cubes out on a baking sheet and put under the broiler until toasted.

To assemble - put a handful of the toasted bread in a bowl, sprinkle on tomatoes and bacon, and spoon the cheese sauce over the top. Add some more bacon on top if desired...and really, it should be desired

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* I swear, we're having kale salad for dinner tonight to make up for it.

Homemade is Better

Talking about our food-philosophy a little bit today - I think the first, if not golden, rule is:

Homemade is better.

This isn't just true in the culinary world. My friend Paul is in the process of renovating his entire house, one piece of dusty lathe at a time. He could be buying his window and door molding at Home Depot, but he's not. He's out in his barn with his tools (in this case a router and a planer), making the molding himself. Each piece is composed of 3 separate cuts of wood, assembled for a totally custom and unique finished product. Why, when he doesn't have a shower yet (it's been over a year), does he insist on making his own molding?

Why, at this moment, at midnight, is Tina fighting with her sewing machine?

I think some of the answers are the same, whether it's bread or wood or cloth...

1) You have full control over what goes into it.

Crap in, crap out. Same as in the software industry, where I spend my days. If you're making something, you know what the ingredients are, and where they came from. A box... a can... a farm in California... a guy down the street with a chicken coop... your own yard... Whatever your definition of crap is, you can make sure it doesn't end up in the food on your table.

2) You alone are responsible for what comes out.

By that I don't mean that it will always come out well... but when it doesn't come out well you only have yourself to blame and you can bury the bodies where no one will find them. And when it does come out well, no one else has a claim to the credit.

It's like the cliche, "with great risk, comes great reward." There may not be great risk with making a nice mac-and-cheese from scratch, but it's certainly more rewarding then tearing open the box of Stouffer's*.

3) It's more than fun

We like to cook because it's fun. I'm writing this blog because I like to cook. You're reading it (is anyone reading it?) because you like to cook, so you understand what I'm saying. If we didn't have a good time, we wouldn't do it. Making dinner from scratch and sitting down to eat it is fun. But making a loaf of bread or a slab of bacon or a case of beer from scratch - that ain't just fun, it's intense.

The first time I had a slip of a homemade brown ale, it was an incredible feeling (no, not getting tanked), and once I finished off the bottle, there was some time to ponder. Being involved in a creative process that has been mostly lost to individuals and handed over to industry and mass production... well that's just awesome. It's also addictive. Once you've made one good loaf of bread, it's very hard to stop. You dream of impossibly chewy sourdough and baguettes that will spray crusty shards across your kitchen. Once you've made a great beer, it's up to you to drink the bottles as fast as possible so they can be refilled with the next batch.**

Along with the bread and beer, we've made some basic bacon, sausage, cheese, pickles, jams, and confits. Some alright, some terrific. There's more to come...

The photo at the top is a dwarf meyer lemon tree. Despite our freezing, drafty house and my shoddy tending to, this tree has been alive and thriving in Buffalo for over 2 years - this winter delivering its first fruit. It's not homemade, but homegrown, and that's just as good.

For homemade, try out this ridiculously good Meyer Lemon Marmalade recipe from Simply Recipes.

About to receive a lid...

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* Stouffer's mac and cheese was an absolute favorite childhood treat.

** The second batch, an attempt at a Belgian-style ale, was almost undrinkable. See rule #2.