Celebration of The Root: 2015 style…

The hits:

1. There is nae a better counterpoint to your brown sugar and cinnamon glazed spiral sliced Easter ham (Aldi special) than a large, cleansing, just ground that morning spoon of The Root.  Put that mustard away you fiend!
2. Peel and eat shrimp with cocktail sauce.  The freshly ground and prepared Root sends the workaday sauce into the stratosphere.  If you want to double down, splash in your favorite pepper sauce and dust the top with Old Bay prior to serving. Frugality, convenience and deliciousness tip 302.75: freeze your shrimp boil after it cools.  Why dump all of the good stuff down the drain eh?  A quick thaw, topped with a dose of fresh Old Bay, maybe a beer if there’s not quite enough boil left, et voila!  I’m also experimenting with freezing my corned beef boil.  Will advise…
3. Bloody Marys.  There is nothing plain or simple about a good Bloody.  It takes a good thirty minutes to assemble the ingredients (I refuse to buy a bottled Bloody mix of any sort, I mean really?) make the Bloodys and clean up the resultant mess.  I only wish Aldi had Clamato on the ever evolving shelves this morning  and not just plain old tomato juice.  I would have liked a Caesar in tribute to all of my Canadian friends.  Maybe next weekend…
4. Bloody Caesars.  Good news Canadian friends!  The local Stop and Rob had Clamato.  Over priced, but nothing in that store is under priced.  In all truth, I cannot walk in the place even with a short list of five items without walking out with two bags of groceries packed in ten plastic bags for $50 American.  I guess the extra bags are the issue.  O right…the Caesars?  Tasty!  And I believe I have converted another Gringo or two from Mary’s wiles to Caesar’s sublime charm.

The misses:

1. Adding a HUGE dollop of The Root to my homemade “clean the condiment shelf” BBQ sauce and testing out the resultant sauce on Sundays’ spare rib extravaganza.  Not so much a “miss” per se, but a, “So what’s the point?”  Cooking The Root, especially on the high heat of the grill clearly dissipates both its heat and flavor.  The Cheaters ribs were tasty enough, but I, nor more importantly Agnes (her buds are not nearly as fried as mine) could not discern any improvement through the addition of The Root.  Sadness reigned, for a minute or two because actually the ribs were good no matter the sauce.  But you’re a Cheater!  Yes, yes I know that,
2. Horseradish sauce.  Maybe it was that The Root was losing its life force.  Maybe it was the recipe.  Maybe it was just Monday and I was still broke down and ugly from our weekend soiree, but the sauce, served with broiled bone in NY strips lacked that certain JNP.  I will make another try next year.  I made a note!

And thus ends the Celebration of The Root for 2015 and what did we re-learn this year children? 

DO NOT heat The Root dumb ass! 

Ah, you were paying attention.  Nicely done!

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Weekend recap: Premier soiree 2015

Entertaining is exhausting eh.  We had M&M over on Saturday and I am still beat down and ugly on Monday morning.  Egad man!  All I can manage is a rundown of the service:

“Party like it’s 1978” apps:

-          peel and eat shrimp, cocktail sauce with house prepared horseradish,

-          Knorr spinach dip with baguette and blue tortillas,

-          the cheeses platter: Saint Agur bleu, d’Affinois brie, Vasterbotten aka “the emperor of cheeses,” dried CostCo Calimyrna figs, Castelvetrano olives,

“Spanning the globe to bring you a constant variety of aperitifs”:

-          Long Island Caesar: LIV vodka, Clamato + the standard Bloody accouterments,

-          Long Island Mule: LIV vodka, ginger beer, lime juice,

-          beer: Dortmunder Export

-          cider: Strongbow Golden Apple

-          soda: Oranzada aka Polish Pepsi

Down on Mains Street:  “Recalling Tehran”

-         fall off the bone (if there were one,) spice perfumed boneless shoulder of lamb (lamb from CostCo, recipe from Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour,) 

-          saffron buttered basmati rice,

-          Miller’s farm cucumber salad because some dumb ass mofo forgot to make the fucking Shirazi salad despite having prepared both menu and a numbered checklist of the cooking requisite steps to put dinner on the table.  Bad chef!  Good salad.  Next time, use the freaking checklist smart guy!

Red, red wine:

-          Bertani, Amarone della Valpolicella, 1999, (GS)

-          Trapiche, Finca Ambrosia, malbec, 2010,

-          Paumanok, cabernet franc, 2013.

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em:

-          Padron torpedo (GS.)

Our just desserts:

-          chocolate mini babka, Junda’s Crust and Crumb Jamesport,

-          chocolate éclairs, Blue Duck Bakery, River City,

-          café du chateau, Maxwell House.

Digestivos:

-          house made Limoncello,

-          Old Krupnik, Polish honey liqueur, via Stasia Makar Imports.

Second meal:

-          Guest supplied (GS) meat platter of the first order.  The finest selection of the smoked meats arts procured and imported from far away, can’t get there from here Brooklyn: kielbasa, prosciutto, cured pork loin, goose liver liverwurst served with sliced pickles.  Guests who supply components of a meat platter of the first order, are guests of the first order.  Kudos and thank you M&M!

If the NY Rangers had not lain a major egg in Game 2 later that same day, I could call the day perfect.  It’s good to be the king of even this minor ramshackle realm.  Ask my insurance carrier how ramshackle, they'll tell you.  There's a Europeasant stink eye curse headed your way you greedy bastards!  Peace and happiness to everyone else!

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Weekend recap: 4.11.15 thru 4.12.15

For the first time in 2015, the weather was almost cooperative, sunny, warm, but of course just when meat met heat, the breeze shifted from gentle zephyr to blowing shit across the lawn strength.  Welcome to Long Island!  So anyway, and quite obviously I was able to uncover The Sleek Aldi $99 Beauty and again unleash her fiery blue fury.

Indeed, she fired up on the first go. CLICK. WHOOOSH!  Fucking awesome gentle blog reader!  Fucking awesome! 

So, it would appear that all of the issues I had last year (very poor and quite expensive gas to food cooked ratio, difficulty starting, etc. & etc.) were due to the faulty regulator I replaced and not my occasionally careless habits with the shut off valve.

To my further smiling disbelief, after a quick cut back the half smoked cigar I had stashed in the side burner back in November (we were grilling beneath flashlight after work one night) also fired up after its long winter nap.

So while the grill burned itself clean and beyond, I had a smoke and an icy, delicious Coors Light (Cringe you snooty hops loving craft brewing snobs!  Cringe at the mere mention of mass produced beer!  I demand it!) while Agnes enjoyed a Palm. 

Thus we sat with our sun worshiping white dog Eli, took the sweet, sweet rays, listened to music and pretended that we all did not, at one time or another, go utterly bat shit insane during the course of the just passed winter.

Sorry, lost in reverie there for a moment.  The grill/dinner menu ladies and gentlemen:

1. A week’s worth of chicken sate for lunches, dinners and between meal snack-age.  Recipe courtesy of The Banh Mi Handbook, The Book that Keeps on Giving,

2. A rack of ribs with a caramelizing douse of my home assembled “clean the fridge door of anything that might be put into barbeque sauce” sauce.  In this case, leftover taco sauce, Asian sweet/sour dipping sauce, a Carolina style mustard sauce plus ketchup, honey, a splash of maple syrup and the juices from roasting the ribs in the oven the day before finishing them on the grill.  As WaLuigi says, “Cheater!”  Guilty as charged my mustachioed MarioKart frillain.  Guilty as charged,

3. The $2.50 bunch of asparagus from Aldi, The Little Store that Could,

4. The ribs and grilled ‘gus were served with warm German potato salad made from last week’s boiled potatoes, all washed down with bottles of the breakfast stout from Long Ireland Beer Company, Riverhead, NY.  Beer + coffee.  Interesting.  Buy it again interesting?  I will let you know.

It was…a very good day.

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Book Review: The Banh Mi Handbook: Recipes for Crazy-Delicious Vietnamese Sandwiches

I finally got around to making the sardine and tomato sauce banh mi from this book after procuring the tin of sardines roughly a year ago, maybe more.  Hey, I’m pacing myself.

As Agnes and I tore through the sandwiches, four things came to mind:

1. Dude, these jalapenos are seriously HOT!  Holy shit!
2. What idiot forgot to put the pickled carrots and radishes (do chua) on these?  O…right. Me.
3. I should have made two more sandwiches,
4. I need to get that book review done at some point. 

It would appear that some point is officially now and, FYI, taking a year or so to do a book review is not necessarily a bad thing. 

It gives one time to see if the book actually benefits your skillz, if the recipes produce really great food, if it is a frequent source/resource and bottom line is the book really worth recommending or just a shiny new thing that ends up taking up valuable shelf space on your already sagging shelf of cookbooks.

This book does all of those things:

1. No joke.  The resultant sandwiches are crazy-delicious and fine representatives of the banh mi form: savory, whispery sweet, spicy and that edge of je ne sais quoi that foodies (Die Foodie!  Die!) are currently calling umami, a fine, misappropriated, overused Japanese term,
2. Short of some readily available commercial condiments (Maggi, sriracha, fish sauce, etc.)  It provides recipes for every ingredient necessary to assemble banh mi from the bread, sauces, pickled vegetables, cold cuts, pates and even head cheese for the more adventurous.  As such, you are never left standing in the middle of your white bread grocery store with half a basket of ingredients that you will not use because you cannot find one or two essential flavors,
3. These recipes ain’t just for sandwiches.  You will recall that the original sandwich was comprised of re-purposed leftovers rather than assembled from the ground up as a stand alone entity.  To that end, many of the recipes especially the chicken sate and Hanoi chicken offerings make excellent entrees.  The Hanoi chicken marinade, in fact, works wonders on left over steak, a quick saucy swim, flash grilled and served over rice (white, garlic or leftover roast pork fried from Friday night’s take out,)
4. These recipes ain’t just Vietnamese.  I bring the pickled carrots and radishes to work for lunch, the citrus pickled cabbage is an excellent side with Agnes' pork schnitzel and the flavors are absolutely trans-formative when applied to a cheese free Philly cheese steak. 

Bottom line?  I recommend this book.  Buy it, borrow it from a friend or the library, Xerox and return it, or if of morally compromised fiber, steal it.

It is not a shiny thing that will sit on your already sagging shelf of cookbooks.  Trust me.

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Weekend recap: 4.4.15 thru 4.5.15

Four things of note:

 After a 30 day suspension and rest, I finished my first ever batch of Limoncello with a dose of simple syrup and flash steep in lemon zest.  

It is literally sweet, sweet sunshine in a glass and we now have another Easter ritual: a toast to the resurrection of spring with a shot of sweet, sweet sunshine before we grind The Root and maybe one during and definitely one after the grinding has concluded.  

In the name of the long awaited resurrection of spring of course!

Cheers to another successful year grinding The Root!  As indicated, the Limoncello ritual is a (weather permitting) keeper and this was the first year we moved the grinding set up outside.  A general pain the ass, but after I drove Agnes and the dogs from the house and nearly destroyed my nasal passages last year, it was a sound move.  

We put up five jars, one for keeping, four for passing along.  I am of the opinion that like spring, The Root’s bite is harsh, but fleeting and should be consumed in a couple of weeks.

  

They say this year’s crop is hotter than usual owing to the frigid, awful winter.  Hotter?  Perhaps.  I will say it definitely clears the sinuses.  At least something good came out of that mess of cabin fever and near insanity!  

Agnes and I have agreed to a Celebration of The Root over the course of the next couple of weeks and we will be passing along details, photos and maybe a recipe or two.  So you have that to look forward to gentle reader.  Try to contain your excitement please!

I made spiral ham, asparagus and whipped potatoes for Easter dinner.  

The ham, from Aldi, the little store that could, was a serious improvement over the regular hams they inventory.  

I picked up the asparagus at Bayview Farms when I stopped to get our supply of The Root.  Nothing local yet, but it was fresh and very good.  A step above what I have seen in the other grocery stores around town where I wondered if we were going to even have asparagus with the ham.  

CostCo supplied the red potatoes which are some of the best longest lasting tubers we have recently procured.  Yes Virginia, Big Box stores are good for something!

Happy Dyngus Day everyone!

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Buy local: an awesome idea in theory…

I love our Chicago Cutlery walnut handle paring knife.  My Mom gifted it to me as part of the kitchen portion of my severance package (one kitchen set up, toilet paper and a 1983 maroon Ford Escort,) when I was moved into my own place in 1991 and it has served me exceedingly well for the last 24, yes 2-4 years.

Besides the obviously nostalgic and maudlin/melodramatic (poet over here if you remember, no doubt there will be a Paring Knife poem one day. ugh!) the reasons are many: it fits my hand, it has great balance, its blade holds an edge with very minimal effort because *gasp* I rarely sharpen my knives and what it does well is only limited by its size.

When it grows up, it says it wants to be a chef’s knife.  It’s so cute!

And though its blade is battle scarred and bent from a misbegotten effort to employ it as a pry bar/screwdriver (My mind is an unrelenting scold: a paring knife is not a pry bar or a screwdriver Steve, every task has a commensurate tool, employ the correct tool for the task.  Yes, that has now been empirically verified.  Thank you.) I was not seeking to replace the knife, but augment it. 

That way I would not have to bring it to work to core and slice fruit and freak out when I could not locate it in my lunch bag/box/cooler contraption and send Agnes SOS/911 e-mails asking that she check if I had left the knife at home.  Or, freaking out when the knife was not in my lunch bag/box/cooler contraption when I got home and worrying until the next morning where it was always revealed that I had left the knife somewhere on the desk.

So…accounting for my neurosis about the knife and this scolding mind of mine that would never allow me to forget losing it (You should have bought a cheap paring knife to keep at your desk.  Yes I know.  You would not have lost Mom’s paring knife if.  Yes I know can you shut up now I am trying to drive through rush hour LIE traffic?  OK fine, but we will talk later.  I look forward to it,)   I needed to buy a paring knife to keep at my desk and maybe a second knife for home so I could start breaking it in just in case the old knife finally surrendered or I broke it trying to use it as a pry bar/screwdriver.

I apologize, for the long fucking walk to a very short pier:

1. I needed two new paring knives,

2. I went to Bar Boy in Hampton Bays, my local restaurant supply place where I usually buy the most central tools of the trade (pans, knives, heat resistant silicone spatulas, knife sharpening tools, yes I own one.  I am quite fond of irony,)

3. They had exactly ONE paring knife in stock that clearly would not fit the bill since it did not fit in my hand or have great balance and I was pretty sure given the cost that it was not going to hold an edge for longer than it takes to look away and look back,

4. Even then, I might have bought it if they had TWO of them I mean it’s only for fruit at work or as a backup at home.  I could MAKE DO, I am pretty good at that, but dammit not if I have to go somewhere else to buy the second knife I mean come on people!

5. So trying my best to be a good citizen of the East End and keep my business local, I asked the clerk how long before your next shipment arrives?  Two weeks.  OK thank you.  See you in two weeks then!  Happy Easter!

6. Or not…over lunch at Cliff’s Rendezvous in fabulous River City (they make a more than acceptable cheeseburger,) Agnes ordered me two Chicago Cutlery walnut handled paring knives over the Internets.  We will have them on Tuesday.

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