12.12.06
Posted in cooking, domesticity at 9:04 am by Hanne Blank
I am one of those weird people who really loves anchovies. I know I’m in good company, because some of my friends, and indeed my Belovedary, also adore the little furry fish (okay, they’re not actually furry, but their infinitesimally tiny bones sometimes stick out of the filets in ways that have made our household refer to them as “furry fish”).
Yesterday I scored an outrageous huge jar of primo Sicilian anchovy filets packed in beautiful olive oil. This, you may rest assured, made me very happy, and I proceeded to bring it home and open it up to make one of my very favorite salad dressings, which I will now share with you here in order to spread the furry-fish love. All quantities are approximate, and you may alter them as you please in order to get a different, or more intense, taste, as you prefer.
Hanne’s Mysteriously Good Salad Dressing
6-8 oil packed anchovy filets, mashed into paste with a fork
2 tablespoons oil from the anchovy jar
1 medium clove garlic, crushed or very finely minced
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
large pinch sugar
2/3 cup good olive oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar (your choice)
freshly ground black pepper
Mash salt and garlic together with the back of a spoon to form a paste. Add mashed anchovies and combine. Add oil from the anchovy jar and other olive oil, then vinegar, and pinch of sugar. Give it a half-dozen good turns of the pepper mill if you like, or alternately don’t add the pepper to the dressing but remember to pepper the salad itself.
Whisk together to emulsify. Let stand 15-20 minutes minimum before serving, overnight is better. Shake or whisk to re-emulsify before drizzling over your salad.
This makes about a cup. People who think they don’t like anchovies often like this salad dressing, a fact which has always amused me. Generally they can’t tell that there are anchovies in it, they just know it tastes good. I don’t warn them, unless they’re vegetarians or vegans and they might be pissed off if I didn’t. Give it a try. It’s also very nice as a dipping sauce for steamed artichokes, if you are given to committing artichokage, which really you probably ought to be.
In other kitcheny news, I have been making many batches of fleur de sel caramels these past couple of weeks, in order to give them away as holiday-season gifts. If you have not had the pleasure of a fleur de sel caramel, you’d be amazed by how good they are. If you have had the pleasure, you’re probably wondering why I don’t just shut up and get to the recipe already.
All right, all right. Sheesh.
Easy Fleur de Sel Caramels
For this recipe you need a large deep heavy-bottomed saucepan, at least 6 quarts, and a small saucepan. You also need a candy thermometer, a wire whisk, a wooden spoon, and a plastic spatula, and an 8×8 inch baking dish or something of similar size. Waxed paper, too, or, better yet, silicone coated parchment paper.
This recipe works best if you do all your mise en place before you start cooking anything. So.
1. Line the baking dish with waxed paper or parchment paper. You may use buttered parchment paper if you prefer but it’s a pain in the butt, so I don’t.
2. In the large saucepan, place 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar, 1/4 cup water, and 1/4 cup light corn syrup
3. In the small saucepan, place 1 cup heavy cream, 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, and 1 heaping teaspoon fleur de sel.
4. Arrange, on a plate adjacent to your cooker (so you don’t end up getting sugar syrup everywhere), your wire whisk, wooden spoon, plastic spatula, and candy thermometer.
Now then. Turn a medium heat on under your large saucepan and commence to whisking together the sugar, water, and corn syrup. Keep stirring with the whisk as it comes to a boil, at which point the mixture should turn from an opaque slurry to a clear thick syrup. Allow it to boil, swirling the pan occasionally to rinse any crystallizing sugar down from the sides of the pan, until it turns a nice light gold color.
While the syrup is boiling — it takes it a bit to start to turn color — turn the heat on under your cream, butter, and salt, and bring it to a boil, stirring occasionally, then turn off the heat.
Once the sugar syrup is ready, pour in the cream mixture all at once and whisk like hell. It will foam up, but don’t be afraid, just whisk it vigorously until it calms down some. Now you will have a bubbling magma of caramel. Put the candy thermometer in the pot and turn the heat down a bit so that the caramel simmers, but not so vigorously that it spits, because getting hit by droplets of boiling caramel is painful and also messy and really, you don’t need it.
Simmer, stirring occasionally (and scraping down the pan walls occasionally) until the mixture gets to 250F. Pour into your prepared pan. Sprinkle several pinches of fleur de sel over the top, it looks pretty and tastes nice.
Let cool 2-3 hours, or until the center is completely firm, before cutting into small rectangles. Serve to the deserving, or hoard it all for yourself.
There. Happy now?
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12.09.06
Posted in Belovedary, domesticity, geek, good things, shiny, writing at 8:35 am by Hanne Blank
By rights, this entry should probably begin “Captain’s Log, Stardate such-and-such.” Why? Well, fortunately for all of us including him, it isn’t because I am channeling William Shatner. Rather it has to do with how I am writing this entry.
With a pen. On a plastic tablet. Just like Yeoman Rand, but not with that hair. I can’t rock that complicated a wig at 8 am on a Saturday.
The tablet is something called a Wacom Graphire tablet, and the pen is an induction stylus that goes with it, and both were an early Chanukah gift from my Belovedary, who reasoned that perhaps my RSl issues might be helped by my having alternate input devices for my computer, enabling me to vary my arm and hand movements more. So far so good, although I must note in the interest of full disclosure that it is now possible, should a person get a little manic about keeping a deathgrip on one’s stylus, to get writers’ cramp from using the computer.
I rather like handwriting into my computer, though. There’s something about it that profoundly satisfies my innermost Luddite. It is much slower than typing, partly because it is, and partly because the character recognition takes time, and then going through what you’ve written to make sure the character recognition was correct (varies, depending on your handwriting and on the vocabulary you use; it tends not to recognize unfamiliar words as well as familiar ones, etc.) takes more time. But there are some nice things about having it be slower: one thinks more, or at least I find that I do, while writing. It’s one of the things I like about using manual typewriters, too. They just slow you down a little bit.
In other news-you-can’t-probably-use, the bathroom entropy situation is significantly improved although not yet completely rectified. We were able to shower yesterday, though not without the adjunct of some duct-taped plastic sheeting over critical bits that have yet to be retiled. I can’t tell you how jolly it was to be able to take a shower without worrying that I was secretly soaking the (ugly, but you know, we’re not yet in a position to replace it, so not ready to ruin it) kitchen’s drop-ceiling, or worse, shortcircuiting the kitchen ceiling lights.
Still, I am superstitious and paranoid about things for a while when my house has gone crumbly on me, even after I fix things (we replaced our roof two years ago, almost, and I still run up to check that things aren’t leaking when it rains heavily, because we spent three grand on a rubber roof with a 20 year materials warranty and I’m paranoid), so I took a short shower, did not shave my legs, and then ran downstairs to the kitchen as soon as I was dry so I could check and make sure that nothing was leaking. Because you never know, it could be leaking secretly. Just to vex me.
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12.07.06
Posted in arrrrgh, domesticity, housekeeping at 10:01 am by Hanne Blank
The trouble with the universe is basically that entropy wins. Any one of us may triumph briefly, but ultimately, entropy can count on victory. Even after all that’s left are cockroaches and gonorrhea and huge plastic highway fast-food signs looming high over the decimated landscape on their gigantic aluminum poles like meaningless flags left on the battlefield after a massacre, entropy will still be on the job, nibbling away at the aluminum and injection-molded plastics and seeing to it that eventually the cockroaches die of gonorrhea and the gonorrhea dies of not having any more cockroaches to live in.
But somehow with houses, entropy seems to happen in bursts.
I have empathy for houses falling apart. I really do. For one thing, I have lived in old houses nearly all my life, so I’m well familiar with cracks in plaster and pipes that make weird noises and floorboards that squeal. But also, I realize that houses are nothing but big boxes that stand outside in the rain and the heat and the sunlight and the snow, and on the inside, people do horrible things like let water fall out of holes in the wall, and cook things, and knock holes in the walls to let the light in from outside (when there is plenty of perfectly good light outside, too, if they’d only go there instead), and breathe, producing endless quantities of water vapor that have to go somewhere.
I mean, if you were a big box and people did all those things to you while making you stand outside with no protection from the elements, you’d get a little out of sorts, too. Maybe sometimes you would have a little tantrum.
Like mine did yesterday morning, when I noticed a small but definite quantity of water dripping from out of the light fixture in the middle of my kitchen. This is not a place from which one likes water to drip, water and electricity being a potentially nasty mixture, but it is a place from which water, if trapped in a space between a ceiling and a floor, does indeed like to drip, since the thing about light fixtures in ceilings is that they represent the presence of at least one and possibly multiple holes already made in said ceiling. Easier to flow through a hole that already exists than it is to erode one, and all that. Very Taoist.
So I turned off the light, shoved a large bowl with a dishtowel in it under the (minor) leak, began the massive freakout process, and called the plumber. The massive freakout process is a thing that goes along with water-related house entropy events, because unlike some other classes of house entropy event — a nonfunctional doorknob, for instance, or peeling paint — I know very little about how to diagnose or fix them and because they are beyond my ken they are additionally beyond my personal immediate control, and thus I become easily convinced that anything that happens may very well truly be the tip of some multi-thousand-dollar iceberg of horrible that has already affected multiple areas of my home and will render me penniless and all but homeless during the extended duration of the period required to make the situation even nominally better.
Note that this is true even when the quantity of water is very small, as in this case, where there was a steady drip for about 3 minutes and a few intermittent kerplops for about five minutes after that and then nothing further.
At my plumber’s advice I tested to see whether it was really a pipe issue (filling the tub partway and letting it drain out, flushing the toilet a few times, running water in the sink). It was not. It was, as my plumber, Karnak the Great, successfully diagnosed over the telephone, a problem of caulk and grout.
So, armed with a charming houseguest who read to me from zir new book whilst I labored, I pulled out some really revolting old caulk, which proved to me that indeed it probably was a caulk issue, since a good foot and a half long section of caulk was not exactly adhered to anything, and was just kind of lying there in the gap between the top rim of the tub and the bottom edge of the tiles on the wall growing interesting slimy molds on it.
In my inspections, however, I also realized that there was an area of tile on the lower wall at the far end of the tub where the grout was cracked.
Well. Grout and tile I know from. I did not catastrophize one bit when it came to the grout and the tile. I went and got my utility knife to scrape out the cracked grout with, so that I could get rid of the bad grout and regrout it. Heck, I even have two different colors of polymerized sanded grout in my basement and a big old jug of acrylic admix. At last, something I could handle on my own! With some luck I could get the rest of the caulk out, recaulk, and fix the grouting all before lunchtime.
I was going to be the Home Repair Messiah. I was going to Save the Day. I was going to be the illicit love child of MacGyver and Bob Vila and get up in there and Fix Stuff. Best of all I was going to do it in front of a hot butch who digs capable femmes with tools.
So I went up to scrape out cracked grout. The grout came out easily, as cracked grout tends to do.
Then a 3×3 inch tile fell out of the wall entirely, into my hand. A cascade of crumbled drywall — not greenboard, not tile backer board, and certainly not concrete sheeting like Durock, which is what you ideally want to have behind wall tiles in any wetroom application — fell out after it. I tugged gently on the tile next to the open hole. It came out too. And the one next to that, and the one next to that, with more crumbled drywall falling out into the tub as I went.
I sighed and prodded the gap in the wall. There was some ugly old mildewy plywood. There was some foil insulation backing visible. There was some non-crumbled drywall if I reached up far enough behind the next course of tiles up. It was, in short, precisely the kind of completely shoddy, corners-cut, miserably patched-together home “improvement” job I have come to expect and despise from the people who previously owned this house.
Clearly the day still needed to be saved, but it was not going to be saved by me. Not when the question had now gone from “can I remove and replace the caulk throughout the tub/shower aread, and the grout around a handful of tiles,” to “I wonder how much of this wall needs to be torn out and rebuilt and retiled?” I lack the experience to know how to assess the level of damage to drywall (see above about having lived mostly in old houses), as well as not knowing how to adequately patch a hole of this kind where it had in the past been filled with a mixture of materials.
So I called one of our neighbors, who conveniently happens to be a shaman in the discipline of combatting house-related entropy, or, as they are also known, an experienced interior contractor. His name amongst his people, I believe, is Dances With Drywall. He is a terrifically sweet and kind guy. He has come to look at it. He was suitably chagrinned at the level of crap construction I unearthed, and happy to do the work for us, whatever it ends up taking to fix it. He will come back and work on fixing it later today.
So. No MacGyver points for me. Minus several million Bob Vila points for the jackasses who did the home “improvement” the last time. But three cheers, and more, for Mr. Nels “Dances With Drywall” Shumacher. And, it must be said, for my psychic plumber.
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12.02.06
Posted in cooking, domesticity, how to at 10:56 pm by Hanne Blank
Cassoulet can, of course, be made in ways that do not turn it into a multi-day process. But if you have the time, it seems it is always best when you do it over at least two days. Or so think I.
I have no time or patience for picky-eater French foodie wars over what exactly ought or ought not go into a cassoulet. Like most dishes I cook, it’s peasant food. What goes into cassoulet? Whatever you have that seems like it will work. Why? Because peasants don’t have huge wodges of spare cash sitting around so they can go to some gourmet grocery store and buy exactly the correct sort of saucisson or tinned duck confit. Anyone who says you have to do that is full of it, and won’t be getting any of my cassoulet, that’s for damn sure.
So what is a cassoulet? It’s a long-cooking savory casserole based on some sort of white beans and various sorts of meat, usually duck, pork, and lamb, but sometimes other things. My favorite cassoulets have duck, garlicky sausage of some sort, and some kind of smoked meat, either smoked turkey or pork usually. The one I am making right now will have faux-confit of duck, garlic turkey kielbasa, and smoked pork shank.
The thing this doesn’t tell you is that cassoulets are alchemical and magically wonderful. Somehow, in long slow cooking, all the various things you’ve put in the dish turn into something that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. It is worth making a cassoulet at least once, just to know that you, all by yourself, can turn some fairly humble ingredients into something that utterly delicious.
So here’s how you do it.
Soak a pound of dry white beans of your choice. I’m using cannellini because they’re what I’ve got in the house. These’ll soak overnight, so just get them soaking and set them aside and forget about them.
Faux Confit:
This is not a real confit because a real confit requires long salting/brining followed by a whole bunch of other mishegoss. Confits of poultry are a method of preserving the poultry. You can look it up if you’re curious. Since you do not need to preserve the poultry you can simply make a fake confit, which will taste amazing and add its wonderfulness to your cassoulet the next day.
Take a medium-sized clean duck and joint it (remove wings and legs). Set the legs aside. Trim the end joint off of the wings and put wingtips in your stockpot with some water, a couple of onions, a few ribs of celery, a couple of carrots, a bayleaf or two, and put it on a very low simmer. You can toss the neck in there too. Set the rest of the wings aside. Cover the legs and wings and refrigerate them for now.
Skin the remainder of the duck carcass, being careful to remove all of the fatty layer beneath the skin. Be sure to get the extra skin at the neck, but avoid the glands, ditto the fatty deposits near the tail. Dice the skin and fat and place in a large heavy deep frying pan (I use my 18-inch cast iron skillet for this) and place over medium heat to render the fat. Dice an onion, too, and toss that in to the rendering fat, along with a healthy handful of peeled whole garlic cloves. Render until the skin has given up all its fat and all the garlic cloves and onion bits are a beautiful even dark brown (but not burned!). Remove the skin bits and onions and garlic with a slotted spoon and drain them on a thick layer of paper toweling. (Incidentally, the skin bits are crunchy and delicious with some coarse salt, if you are so inclined, and you really should try them at least once. Some people find them addictive. The ghost of my gall bladder weeps bitter tears if I eat more than about 2 of the delectable crispy little things, but it’s great while it lasts.)
While the duck fat is rendering, remove the breast meat and tenderloins from the duck carcass. It is possible to remove breast and tenderloin in one piece, but I rarely bother — I cook up the tenderloins as a snack, saving the breasts for the faux-confit. Place the breasts (and tenderloins, if not immediately cooking them) in with the legs and wings and salt generously with some kosher salt, then wrap up and put back in the fridge to keep them from getting to salmonella-friendly temperatures.
As for the carcass, which you have now successfully denuded of skin and useful chunks of meat, toss it in the stock pot. Do not let the stock boil — nothing higher than a low simmer — or it will become cloudy.
Once you have strained the solids out of the rendered duck fat, heat it over a low medium flame, then add the duck meat. Legs go in the center of the pan, wings and breasts around the outsides. Reduce the flame to low, just enough to make the fat simmer lightly, and cook the meat slowly in the fat, turning after 15 minutes, then waiting 15 more. Then braise the meat in the hot fat further for about 30 minutes on a side. It should develop a delightful crust.
Remove the meat from the fat when it is done and allow to cool somewhat, then refrigerate. You may, if you wish, strain the fat and refrigerate it so you can use it later to fry potatoes in (they sound more highfalutin’ if you call them pommes sarlandaises but by any other name, good stout russet potatoes sliced into pinkie-thick discs and fried until nutty brown in duck fat, then salted and served alongside a roast meat and a green salad are a fabulous thing).
As for the stock, let it simmer for an hour or two, then strain out the solids. Let it cool, then pour into suitable containers and refrigerate or freeze (depending on whether or not you plan to use it for the cassoulet — I find that cassoulet made with duck stock is too rich for me, I prefer it made with a thoroughly defatted chicken stock).
So. That’s Day 1.
And yes, I presume you already know how to butcher and skin poultry. If you don’t know, I believe The Joy of Cooking still has instructions. It’s not hard. And since you’re going to dice the skin up anyway it doesn’t matter much if you do a hatchet job. Use sharp knives, they’re safer than dull ones. Be brave. It’s worth it.
More tomorrow.
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11.23.06
Posted in Belovedary, domesticity, good things, relationships at 10:39 pm by Hanne Blank
My Belovedary and I had a wonderful Goofy Hats Thanksgiving. Hope that yours was similarly grand, whether it involved Goofy Hats or not. And if it was merely another Thursday where you live, let it simply be noted that Goofy Hats can brighten pretty much any day you like.
Love,
Hanne
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