The Beets

BEETS
Season: year-round
Taste: sweet
Function: heating
Weight: medium
Volume: moderate
Techniques: bake, boil, carpaccio, chips, roast, soup, steam


Beets don't exactly scream summer. Or fun, really. I was reintroduced to them recently though and I really really liked them. They were roasted in a pocket of parchment paper with hazelnuts and maybe some dill. After being taken out of the oven, the pocket is opened just enough to drop in a big dollop of creme fraiche (aka sour cream). You open up the packet and the beets are this really deep purply red and they're sweet! and the cream adds creaminess and the nuts nuttiness.

I guess when I was 5 and my grandma's presence at the table necessitated the inclusion of beets on the menu for the night, I hadn't appreciated the complex sweetness of the beet. It's a not cloying sweetness that makes the beet a natural addition to savory dishes. It can be eaten hot from the oven in the fall or winter or served chilled as something refreshing in the summer. The fact that it's a root vegetable makes it pretty much the same in terms of freshness all year round.

Pot pie with beets, apples, walnuts, tarragon, and some kind of creaminess (creme fraiche would probly be the mildest. or you could use goat cheese or sour cream or brie!)
Don't know exactly the steps to making pot pie, but I suppose we'd have to make a nice flaky pie crust first. It'd be good i think to roast the beets and nuts and apples ( i think you could use pears instead if you wanted) a little first and bake the bottom crust a bit first, then put it all together. I think this sounds pretty good as an autumn dinner.

Do you like beets?
Did/do your grandparents eat beets?
Do you think beets could be the new "it" ingredient that every cosmopolitan restaurant has to have on its menu?
Do you prefer beets in the winter or summer? Or the fall or spring?
Are you like Lillie and refuse to eat beets?
Did you watch Doug?

Saturday dinner in Lake Wobegon

Saturday nights at my house in the kitchen are when I feel most at home. We listen to A Prairie Home Companion on 91.7 WUOM, and I sit at the table while my mom cooks up the best meal of the week. She spends the most time on Saturday meals, and they're always homemade splendor. Garrison Keillor's nose-breathing soothes us, while Fred Newman's or Tom Keith's sound effects make us happy, and we always sing along to the Powder Milk Biscuits song. Especially in the winter, the radio show and dinner being cooked make the kitchen the warmest place to me.



Tonight is a cool night for August, and though we had quite a summery meal of gazpacho, peaches, and corn on the cob (the trinity of summer food, my mom said, of corn, peaches, and tomatoes), I still appreciated the way A Prairie Home Companion made me feel cozy and comfortable, and the Catchup Advisory Board reminded me that things are usually simpler than I am concerned they are.

Hope you all had a filling and comfy Saturday dinner.

Blue cheese and figs? Not in cookies.

Blue cheese sounds sophisticated and tempting and delicious, so when I saw a recipe for blue cheese shortbread cookies with fig preserves on a blog yesterday, I knew that it was the right choice for me. So today, awaking to a rainy day, I drove over to the Produce Station here in Ann Arbor (taking a brief detour to make a clutch purchase of a pair of 1990's Eddie Bauer light wash blue jeans at the good ol' SalvArm) and bought a pint of fresh figs and a little wedge of the mildest blue cheese I could find.

Now, in my defense, I knew that the recipe was somewhat strange. But what about this from a fellow blogger: "what an addictive, odd little cookie". Right? Sounds good. The pictures were enticing as well.

But no, no no no.
No, I say, NO!

Blue cheese made my house smell bad today.
My mom thinks it smells good. She's old.

On the taste, my sister agrees with me: "That's not bad..." *swallows* "Oh. Yeah it is. The aftertaste is horrible!" "Bad," she says, "Cheesy."

And the fig jam as well. I recommend not making your own fig preserves. I say this with full confidence. I followed the recipe perfectly, and it smelled like vegetables. I did everything right, and it was runny... similar to beef broth.


Anyway, if this post hasn't completely turned you off from shortbread cookies, I highly recommend you try my mom's recipe for it. You can find it here.

so...I will come to you tomorrow with a culinary victory. But I leave you with this warning: think twice before blindly devoting your day, your kitchen, and your beloved ingredients to the whimsy of a blogger.

Goodnight.
-Lillie

Older is Better

I like things that get better as they age. Case in point: George Clooney. (Perhaps I just have old taste? Case in point: Kevin Spacey?)
Not just actors, though, also food. Soup, for example. And, as I experienced today, beef burgundy (or, bouef bourguignon, as Julie and Julia would say).

I toiled all day this past Sunday, chopping and browning and simmering and reducing, all in the name of creating the perfect French bouef bourguignon. Now I know many of you have just been beaten over the head with this dish (if you've been wise/nostalgic enough to see the movie that inspired the rebirth of this blog), but I really can't go on without telling you about my day and my dish. Actually, I'll just give you some photos that I took while working:













Browned beef and butter with carrots and onions. In a sauce of potent red wine, my favorite part.


First, we brown the onions...












Then add a bouquet of herbs (or sprigs, if you're uncultured, like me) and cook until tender.















Though the lighting isn't great, the richness of the 'broth' and the tenderness of the beef is, I hope, quite evident. We served it with new potatoes and cut them up in the stew - they soaked up the juices beautifully.

To top it all off, I continue to enjoy it, four days after cooking!

I used Julia's recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and as she specifies, I didn't cut any corners, or make any substitutions (even adding more butter at times than she called for, for better browning - don't tell my parents, for whom I made the dish). Try it, when you've got a good day to enjoy cooking.


-Lillie

Summer = Corn

I'ma try to keep going with this flavor combination thing by spotlighting a specific ingredient and thinking out loud about how we can use it in fun/interesting/seasonally 'relevant' ways. Today, kiddies, we'll be talking about corn.

CORN

Season: summer

Taste: sweet

Function: heating (?)

Weight: medium

Volume: moderate

Techniques: boil, grill, roast, saute, steam

This is what The Flavor Bible has to say about corn. I don't know about corn's function being heating. Heating ingredients are things like chiles, mustard seed, horseradish, peppercorns, etc. I'm not sure corn fits in that group. But that's unimportant.

Going down the list of compatible flavors I see a lot of familiar flavor combinations - butter, bell peppers, chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, blah blah. And I just stumbled across one that is less obvious and way more fun - maple syrup! I like maple syrup on everything, a holdover from my days as a chubby youth. Most of the stuff on the list is widely available this time of year and is at the peak of its goodness, so it's really easy to create fresh combinations just by browsing around the greenmarket (if you're a 'cosmopolitan white person') or your supermarket or even your sustainable yardgarden (if you're a provincial white person).

Belgian waffles with corn, bacon (or pancetta), and real maple syrup.

Make up some homemade belgian waffles. Dice some bacon or pancetta in a pretty large dice - the closer to the size of the corn kernels, the better. Slice the kernels off some ears of sweet corn. Saute the bacon for a few minutes first on pretty high heat, then throw in the corn. You could either use the fat from the bacon as your fat for sauteing, or you could drain that and use butter. I think I'd use butter, since that is nice on waffles and with maple syrup. Either way, just saute really briefly until the corn is heated through. I like corn that's fresh and sweet to be barely cooked so that it retains a nice crunch and its natural sweetness.

Put this mixture, however much you want, on top of the waffles like you would a fruit compote. Drizzle real maple syrup over top and eat. I was thinking maybe some blueberries or some diced peaches might be good too to mix in with the corn and bacon. It all sounds kinda heavy for breakfast, but maybe a summertime breakfast for dinner, followed by a nap in some grass? What do you think, y'all?

I also saw dill on the compatible ingredients list, which sounds really nice to me. Lately I've been making this mixture of corn sliced from the cob, halved cherry tomatoes, and cut up asparagus with some salt and pepper and goat cheese for creaminess. I'll use it as kind of a side dish for fish or sometimes we just eat it alone cause it's goot. I think I'll add some dill next time.

What do you think?

Do you like corn?

Does your part of the world rely on corn heavily?

Is corn a part of any of your childhood memories?

Do you think it sounds bad to put corn on waffles?

Do you prefer corn that comes in the husk because it feels more authentic? I do.

Off to the greenmarket.

There's a new treat at the Birthday party.

Speaking of flavor combinations, how about cupcakes and cookies?
Generally we think of them as two separate celebratory foods (or if you're Noah (or me), you at least pretend to feel that way), and thus never a combo act. Today, however, I present them to you as exactly that: a package deal.

Cookie dough cupcakes.


No longer must we feel confined to the pesky cultural quota of one at a time.
No longer will we feel like fatties fatties no friends when we give in to the urge to take both a chocolatey cupcake and a chewy cookie.
No longer, because now we can disguise two as one. It's like Pert Plus 2 in 1 (shampoo and conditioner), but delicious, and underbaked!

Picture an uber-moist chocolate cupcake (facilitated by the pudding packet added to the dry ingredients)
filled
with
cookie dough.

The trick is to fill the pan with batter, and drop into each cupcake one frozen ball of cookie dough, then bake. It must be frozen; if not, the cookie dough will no longer be dough when the cupcakes are finished baking, and all magic will be lost. Baked away.


In fact, thinking about this, they yield great opportunity in the kitchen. I noted chocolate chip cookie dough, but why not use sugar cookie dough? Why not try it with my favorite chocolate chocolate chip cookie dough in a yellow cake cupcake? OH!

Noah creates classy and tasteful flavor combinations, but let's not forget the delectability of sweet-on-sweet action.

Cooking Music - Cass McCombs

I like to cook and eat and listen to music at the same time. Here's a song and video that I like a lot right now by a guy named Cass McCombs.



I have a stereo in the kitchen and I listen to this album loudly while I make things to eat. And to his older album, called Dropping the Writ. Anyway, the video could be considered a little slow for most of the time (his hair is sufficiently engaging for me) but the dancing comes in around 3 minutes in and it's pretty and brings a new rhythm to the music. I don't, generally, watch videos and cook at the same time.

Flavor Combinations

First, before you read any of this, you ought to open a new tab in yer browser and go to the myspace page for a musical entity called Ducktails. I'm listening to it right now and it's really soothing for me and I'd like for you all to feel this way too. They (he) are relevant because they were reviewed on peefork today, so...

A few months ago I started working at a restaurant that specializes in lobster and new england seafood in general. Everyone who works there really likes food a lot and like experiments with food and ingredients and all of that. There's a guy who waits tables there with me, we'll call him "El Flaco", who seems to be in the avante-garde of the food experimentation culture at the restaurant. He knows lots about food and can discuss in depth the definition and history of the torchon as a method of preparing foie gras or why the John Dory (a fish, for you less 'cosmopolitan' readers in our flock) is called the John Dory. He's not obnoxious about it though, and he likes that song where Paul Wall says "I got tha innanet goin' nutz," so I find his culinary elitism not just palatable but informative and quite fun.

One day El Flaco came in with a special meal for us for our staff meal. It was a lobster bread pudding that he had put together for a family gathering in New Jersey the weekend before, and had set aside a batch to bring in for his friends at the lobstah bahhhh. It was very good, the bread pudding was. Savory and moist and stuff. But the part that really stuck with me was that he had made a sauce of lobster stock, vanilla bean, and tarragon to accent it. It was a sweet sauce, and a bit savory as well, and complemented the bread pudding really well. I thought this a novel meeting of culinary strangers. But, alas,I am from the midwest. And I am vulgar and low brow and not relevant, so of course I thought that. As The Skinny One pointed out to me, lobster and vanilla are a classic flavor combination. Like blueberries and mint or tomatoes and basil or chocolate and raspberries or (as pictured) watermelon and pork belly.

So I've gotten real interested in this whole idea of classic flavor combinations. I think it will allow me to take my cooking, and my general food snobbery, to a whole new level. I got this book called The Flavor Bible that is basically a huge index of most every ingredient you can think of, and for each one a comprehensive list of ingredients and flavors that it pairs well with. Pretty cool. Very exciting for someone who always messes up set recipes. I'm looking forward to experimenting with it and bringing up what I learn from it in conversations to make people think I'm cultured.

Off to eat.

RIP KRIS

Y'all. Feelin' kinda hopeless tonight. Feel like I might be the next Chris Farley.

I remember where I was when I found out Chris Farley died. I was frenziedly binge eating sugar cookie dough against my mom's wishes while she was in the other room, and against my best interest as a chubby thirteen year old boy striving for social status and relevance in my junior high. I heard it on the kitchen radio. The result, they said, of an overdose of cocaine and morphine. They could have left it there, but they did not. They said his death was the unglamorous end of a long downward spiral that included a serious cocaine addiction, naturally, but that also involved a lifelong battle with a food addiction.

A food addiction? "Doesn't everyone really really love to eat as much as possible all the time of everything ever?" i thought to myself. I'd never heard of such a thing and it seemed absurd to me that it had been given what seemed like a semi-scientific title. This was just human nature. And then my chubby little brain made one more unconscious turn of thought and I realized it. This was not normal. I was a compulsive overeater. I ate uncontrollably on a more-than-daily basis. I was Chris Farley and Chris Farley was me, more or less except for a few differences.

This realization would have ruined me and what little self-confidence I had left after middle school if I had allowed it to. Instead, I did what I do with all memories and realizations that make me uncomfortable with myself - I put it really very far back away in my head and never thought about it ever. And I joined a football team, the one group of people among which fatness can be a virtue.

Lately, though, I been feelin' like a lil' fatty. There are these chocolate chips that I can't stop eating until I'm completely asleep. I will, seriously, get out of bed when I'm teetering on the edge of a good sleep so that I can go to the freezer and eat yet another handful of Ghirardelli milk chococheeps. (Full disclosure: these are best chocolate chips evahhhhhhhhhh! Cook's Illustrated says so too.) Sometimes i'll eat a whole box of cereal in one sitting, simultaneously reading recipes and taste tests in cooking magazines and, when I'm being particularly weird, pretending I'm the host of a cooking show and that the cereal is the sophisticated yet simple fusion dish I'm preparing for that day's show. I graze a lot. Usually by the time I finish cooking dinner I'm completely full already from eating tub upon tub of hummus. I eat off of people's plates at work when they don't finish everything. To sum it up, the fact that I'm always full or overfull or really uncomfortably way full is troubling to me, and has brought back memories of Chris and his bloated end.

WEEEEKEEEE entree:
"An individual suffering from compulsive overeating disorder engages in frequent episodes of uncontrolled eating, or bingeing, during which they may feel frenzied or out of control, often consuming food past the point of being comfortably full."
"In addition to binge eating, compulsive overeaters can also engage in grazing behavior, during which they return to pick at food throughout the day."
"Eating much more rapidly than normal."

Now that I've advanced in the world and become a food runner at a relevant seafood restaurant in the SoHo/NoLita restaurant scene, I make vast quantities of money. This makes me want to go out to restaurants that make 'Best of' lists and other restaurants that are more authentic because they're only known to be special by 'foodies' who 'live in the city' and are rated 'elite 09' on yelp.com. Then I go to these restaurants and I order as much food as I think I can possibly eat And then I look for somewhere to sit or lie down because I like to digest horizontally when I'm that full. Ohhhhhhhhhhh the duality of man. This makes me happy. This makes me miserable. I want to write the fat version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

RIP Chris. (wouldn't him dying from a mix of coke and morphine on the 60-somethingeth floor of the John Hancock building at a young age have been way more glamorous had he not been obese?) I will not graze. I will ride my bike on my way to binge eating at 'bloggable' restaurants in a dual effort to preemptively burn calories and to better my personal brand. Can I beat this disease? Is this just another term for the age-old "fatty fatty no friends?" Do I want to beat this? Am I making all of this up because I like self-deprecating humor? Even I don't know.

"Better than Cheddar": Goat Cheese

Above is a delicious lunch that Noah and I dined on early this July. The dish in the front was mine: potatoes, sausage and an egg, with goat cheese and pickled red onion on the top, baked until the potatoes were tender and the cheese had melted and shmoozed throughout the dish.

The egg was a delicate over medium, the sausage was sausagy, the potatoes were nice, but really, really, what made the dish was the goat cheese.
Goat cheese?
Goat cheese.


Prior to this summer, my summer of goat cheese (I'm willing to label it as such), I believed goat cheese was a boring cheese, with a taste similar to the blandness of ricotta - only useful as a filler - and with a texture creamy but not the same as, and therefore inferior to, brie.
But I have learned:

• Goat cheese is creamy, not smushy, and spreads beautifully.
• Goat cheese is not oddly grainy and incredibly unappetizing (like ricotta).
• Goat cheese has a flavor - ! - that is refined and versatile.
• Goat cheese's tartness is due to more saturated fatty acids (all with the same root, "capr-", which comes from the Latin for goat) than we find in cow's milk cheeses, with their gentler flavors.
  

In essence, I have learned the unsurpassed functional richness of the cheese of the goat.


My taste buds having been opened to the new genre of dairy, I began exploring the many applications of goat cheese, both sweet and savory:

1. On pizza: Goat cheese with pancetta and eggs, on a crust? Why, yes! In fact, the creamy tenderness of the goat cheese was a welcome change from the normal pizza cheese (whether it be mozzarella or the usual melted mixture), as it didn't come off with one bite, but covered evenly the whole pizza.
2. With fruit: The tartness of goat cheese contrasts with the juiciness of fruit (oranges, for example), extending the taste experience by adding tart to sweet. And when you add basil to the orange slice topped with a dollop of goat cheese, and drizzle the morsel with rosemary and garlic infused olive oil (as Noah did in a sparkling original creation), well then you've got many flavors jovially packed into one texture-frenzy of a bite!
3. With vegetables: Raw sweet corn cut from the ear, chopped asparagus, and halved cherry tomatoes, warmed slightly in a skillet, topped with goat cheese, drizzled with a balsamic reduction, and left to melt into a creamy, crunchy, fresh salad.

The cheese works with textures similar (eggs) and opposing (raw asparagus), and it's tartness complements sweet, sour, and savory beautifully.

Falling quickly for the cheese, I ate it as much as possible. I searched for it on menus, breakfast lunch and dinner. I stealthily kept a bag of milk chocolate chips in the freezer while in New York, pairing a chip with a bit of goat cheese when no one was looking, savoring the simultaneous melting and melding of the flavors. I began recommending unwise pairings: goat cheese with leftover filling from chicken dumplings? not so much...

Regardless of my novice flavor faux pas, I write today to extol the virtues of the adaptable, dependable, charming goat.
The goat, though strange and stinky, creates adorable babies and unbeatable cheese. I lift my glass and cheer, "To the Goat!"


-Lillie

Renewed hope for the food blog

Today, after watching "Julie and Julia" for the second time, I realized that The Plate Lickers cannot lie dormant any longer. It is time to revive the finger-lickin, plate-loadin, drip-droolin, tummy-achin fun of this blog.

Now, having just spent seven weeks in the gustatory heaven of New York City, and emptying both mine and Noah's bank accounts on delicious food, perhaps then was the time to start writing again...now it'll all be catch-up. Well, I'm willing to play a little catch-up. I'm not going to just forget about all the wonderful things that I ate (and prepared, oh yes, I baked) there. No, no, I'm going to tell you all ALL about it.

I'm not embarking upon some great journey like Julie did, taking on the cookbook of cookbooks, but I am taking on my laziness and inability to stick with something, especially something as truly enjoyable and rewarding as writing about food and eating.

I hope you all enjoy reading and learning about and exploring the world of food with me. Take Two.


Noah, where you at?



-Lillie