07.11.07
Posted in arrrrgh, cats, cooking, domesticity, food, housekeeping, humor, original recipes at 9:43 am by Hanne Blank
First, buy a hunk of beef. A piece of round roast, eye in this case rather than bottom, because it was super-duper cheap because its sell-by date was today and I bought it yesterday when they were doing their darndest to clear it out and I knew I’d be cooking it today.
Next, put the hunk of beef in the freezer. It’s a lot easier to cut meat into small uniform pieces if it’s partially frozen, so leave it in there for an hour and a half or so. Not long enough to freeze all the way hard, but definitely long enough to firm it up thoroughly.
Remove the beef from the freezer. Unwrap, and place on cutting board. Get out your favorite butcher’s knife or cleaver and slice meat across the grain into finger-thick slices. Then take each slice and cut into four or five crosswise strips, and then cut the strips into 1/2-inch dice.
Pile the chopped meat at one end of the cutting board while you get out a large heavy cast-iron pan and put a small but workable quantity of oil in the bottom, and put it on a highish heat.
Turn around to find that your kitten has soundlessly levitated up onto the cutting board and is standing with one paw half on the blade of the knife, half off — the sharp side, too — and the other paw smack in the middle of your pile of meat while he does his level best to eat as much as he possibly can. Realize that shouting may result in a cat with a sliced paw due to cat’s foot placement.
Carefully, use right hand to grasp knife handle and press sharp edge of blade firmly against cutting board while grasping scruff of cat’s neck with left hand. Lift cat from cutting board, ignoring the chunk of meat dangling from his claw and the one hanging out of his mouth. Deposit cat on kitchen floor, where he will look offended and continue to eat the beef he managed to take with him.
Ponder what to do now that a cat has been dancing in your raw meat. Cat will now look up at you with wide pitiable eyes and meow at you in as plaintive a starving-orphan-kittycat fashion as he can manage. Vent frustration with cat by stomping, hissing, yelling, waving arms, and flapping your skirts at him until he runs and hides in the basement.
Return to kitchen, asking self the question “WWJD?” In this case that means “What Would Julia Do?” (Despite the fact that Julia Child never actually <i>did</i> drop a roast on the air (see Snopes for details), nor yet had a cat marching about in her ingredients, I feel sanguine that she would’ve figured out a good solution if she had.)
Resolve that
a) this meat will be first seared at a high heat, then boiled in and subsequently simmered all day in an acidic (tomato) liquid, so
b) it is unlikely to successfully breed any nasty bacteria despite having been partially trodden by my horrible kitten.
Wash the meat in plenty of cold running water anyhow, for the purpose of rinsing off any yuk or cat hairs introduced in the feline snacking process. Be sure to turn down the heat under your pan, or the oil will start to smoke. Note that at this point, your ankles are being made ardent love to, and that an insistent chorus of chirps and trills is emanating from under your skirt. (Yes, I have a singing pussy. He’s quiet when he wants to be, though, quod erat very much previously demonstrandum.)
Ignore Feline Aria of Loving Adoration And Hopeful Petition For More Beefy Goodness. Similarly ignore equally loving and similarly hopeful looks from the dog, who has come to see what’s going on because if the kitten is getting some of that meat, he wants a cut of the action.
Sear beef cubes heavily on all sides, then remove them to the stockpot.
Roughly dice four onions and saute until transparent in the oil and rendered fat from the beef, in the same pan.
While onions are cooking, open one large can crushed tomatoes and one large can diced tomatoes. Go to dump can of diced tomatoes into stockpot. Stumble badly due to treading on the tail of the aforementioned kitten, who until that instant had been operating on the assumption that if singing to me didn’t get me to give him anything, the least he could do was sprawl across the middle of the kitchen floor to keep an eye on things in case some meat magically flew out of the pot and landed on the floorboards. In attempt to not fall, lose grip on open can of tomatoes.
Chase tomato-splashed kitten in an attempt to grab him before he can get tomato on the couch (cream-coloured), upstairs carpet (light tan), or bedspread (light blue). Get an escort from the dog, who wants to know what’s going on, but really doesn’t care because he thinks this thing where we both chase the kitten up the stairs is a fantastic game.
Catch tomato-splashed kitten despite canine assistance. Without heed to how much tomato gets all over one’s own person, deposit kitten in bathtub and rinse clean, ignoring heart-rending yowls and pleas for someone, anyone, for the love of God, to contact Kitty Amnesty International.
Towel-dry and release kitten, who jets off into the bedroom to lick himself the rest of the way dry. Wonder why you didn’t think of just dousing him with water earlier, as the task of licking himself dry seems likely to keep him occupied for some time.
Return to kitchen. Open reserve can of diced tomatoes, add to stockpot, along with can of crushed tomatoes. Fill both cans with water and add that to the stockpot, too. Turn heat on under stock pot to a medium flame.
Clean tomato and/or tomato juice off of more kitchen surfaces than you thought possible. Scoop up as much from the floor as you can, and discard. Sop up the liquid with sponge and paper towel. Then mop the floor, which has now been mopped twice in two days, thank you very much.
Add chili powder, oregano, a handful of peeled garlic cloves (whole), and some epazote to the stockpot and stir. Notice as you are doing this that you missed several little spots of tomato juice on the cupboard-fronts.
Sponge clean the affected cupboard-fronts.
Look despondently at the other ingredients you’ve set out in order to do the other cooking you planned to do this morning, and instead of embarking immediately upon making tabbouleh or cha siu, go sit down with the computer for a bit instead while the meat and onions have a chance to simmer. You’ll put beans in later, as per usual. Do not under any circumstances think about the fact that eating raw meat tends to give the kitten an upset stomach.
No, really. Do not think about it. It’s not going to help, anyway. That train has left the station. There is nothing in the world you can do.
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02.01.07
Posted in Breath of a Wok, Chinese cookbooks, cooking, culture, domesticity, geek, housekeeping, kitchen learning at 8:54 pm by Hanne Blank
Recently, my Belovedary and I acquired a raft of new Chinese cookbooks. While we cook Chinese — well, Cantonese anyway — at home pretty frequently and I am proud of the fact that I managed to unravel a lot of the basic mysteries of Cantonese cooking on my own by reverse-engineering things I ate in restaurants, talking to my father-in-law (who is Cantonese-American), and reading a few books, I have been feeling like my Chinese cooking skills wanted polish and virtuosity.
Moreover they wanted variety. China is, as you probably know, an awfully big place, and referring to “Chinese” cooking is a little like referring to “American” cooking: there’s an awful lot of regional variety that gets elided that way. Since the Chinese part of my extended family is Cantonese, that was where I started, and, in all honesty, is where I began tonight too, but more about that in a minute.
This is all by way of preamble to say that we’ve begun a new project here at the Little Purple Rowhouse That Could, namely, teaching ourselves some of the elements of Sichuan and Hunan cooking, as well as learning Cantonese and Shanghai dim sum cooking, and also learning more about wok technique, by cooking our way through a handful of very good Chinese cookbooks… and blogging about it as we go.
We’ve seen an awful lot of Chinese cookbooks in our time and bought only a few, because a lot of them are very dumbed-down and Americanized, which has never pleased us much (although Americanizing things is not always bad, pace the late, great, much-missed Barbara Tropp, who had a knack for “fusioning” around the edges of Chinese cooking so that it was still very Chinese in addition to being more accessible).
So, having sifted through any number of Chinese cookbooks in bookstores, and read bunches of reviews, we finally settled on a clutch of new books to add to our collection and from which to do this round of learning. Fuschia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty (Sichuan) and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (Hunan), and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s Dim Sum Dumpling Book. To round it out, we got another wonderful one from our wonderful friends Leigh Ann and Joe, Grace Young’s The Breath of a Wok.
I chose The Breath of a Wok (hereafter BoaW) for planning my first few outings. Like a large proportion of Chinese-Americans, indeed like my partner and his family, Young is of Cantonese origins. I’m already pretty familiar with the essential tastes and techniques of Cantonese cooking, particularly the passionate love of ginger (with and without its bosom buddy, garlic) and the emphasis on clean, fresh tastes and an abundance of green and especially leafy vegetables. So this seemed like a good place to start.
Tonight’s dinner was Ray Lee’s Chicken and Choy Sum (BoaW pps. 76-77) and Walter Kei’s Roasted Sesame Spinach (BoaW p. 196). I chose two dishes in keeping with the principle that one should serve as many dishes as there are eaters, plus rice and a light soup, although we did not end up having soup because we pigged out on the other dishes. Both are intended to serve 4 as part of a multicourse meal, but we barely had enough of the chicken dish left over to bother saving, and we ate the entire batch of spinach! (Of course, we are both serious spinach lovers, so the fact that we plowed through the entire pound worth of spinach should come as no surprise to anybody. It wasn’t to us.)
Walter Kei’s Roasted Sesame Spinach is a very simple and lovely preparation. The grammar of the name is a little deceptive: the spinach is blanched, then thoroughly drained/dried, but not roasted. It is the sesame seeds that are dry-roasted in a wok (or small frying pan, your choice), and sprinkled over the spinach along with a very simple sauce of Shao Hsing wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil. It is slightly edgy with Shao Hsing wine, I find, and I think next time I make it I will probably try it with dry sherry instead (a common substitution for Cantonese cooks, and one that is in fact suggested in the recipe itself). I think I might also use black sesame seeds the next time I make it, since I think their depth of flavor would be a nice thing to try, to see which I prefer.
Ray Lee’s Chicken and Choy Sum is likewise pretty simple, although the choy sum is twice-cooked in a manner that may be unfamiliar to Western cooks, briefly blanch/steamed in a small quantity of stock, drained, then briefly stirfried. This is how Cantonese cooks often get vegetables like choi sum, bok choi, and similarly crunchy cabbage-family vegetables cooked well without being overcooked, the intense moist heat of the stock allowing you to avoid the unpleasant stringiness that would ensue if the vegetables had been cooked only in the wok. When done well, it is a technique that gives even the surliest cabbage a sweet and satisfying tenderness without making it the slightest bit mushy. If you’re not familiar with the technique this would be a nice recipe from which to learn it.
I also have to give major thumbs up to the seasoning and sauce. Ray Lee, the chef who came up with the recipe, is absolutely right about this being a place where you want black soy sauce, a sweeter, thicker sauce than the one most Westerners are used to. It has a lingering molasses note that is fantastic here. I’m sure you can make it without the black soy, but frankly, I wouldn’t want to, it elevates this dish in a way that is a little surprising for such a humble ingredient. It made the rice in the bottom of the bowl a real treat, too, even after the chicken and choy sum were gone. My Belovedary and I both polished off all our rice very happily with that lovely sauce on it, I can tell you.
In the future when I make this, however, I will be quadrupling the quantity of choi sum. One of the failings, to me, of many Chinese cookbooks intended for American audiences is that they skew the ratio of meat to vegetables so that the American palate, accustomed to a Big Lump Of Meat on the dinner plate, will feel that it has gotten enough of whatever animal protein is in the offing. Chinese home cooks have rarely had this luxury! Meat is more often used to flavor a dish, in China, and provide protein in small amounts, than it is to actually fill people up — filling people up is what rice and veggies are for.
I tend to prefer this over the more meat-centric mode, and so when I cooked this dish tonight I intentionally doubled the amount of choy sum from 6 ounces to 12 (one entire modest head of choy sum). Even so, it was pretty meaty. The meat was delicious, so this wasn’t a problem. But I did find myself wishing there were some more of that yummy choi sum in the serving bowl when I went back for seconds, and there were only a few lonely pieces left. So for those of you who side with me on the veg-to-meat ratio issue, allow me to recommend two modest heads of choy sum, more on the order of 24 ounces, along with the 12 ounces (I mean, c’mon, almost a pound?!?) of chicken.
Minor quibbles, really, and excellent recipes. The sauce of the chicken dish alone was worth the price of admission. I look forward to cooking from Breath of a Wok again tomorrow night!
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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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11.04.06
Posted in domesticity, good things, housekeeping, how to at 8:40 pm by Hanne Blank
One of the reasons I am passionately fond of Cheryl Mendelson’s encyclopedic housekeeping tome Home Comforts is that she understands the importance of airing out a house. It sounds old-fashioned to “air out” anything, and I suppose it is a bit, in this era of hermetically-sealed buildings where air only comes in through an ophidian orgy of ducts and tubes connected, in some diabolical manner, to a huge jet engine sort of thing mounted on the roof.
But truth be told, I deeply dislike buildings that do not have any congress with the outside world. From hotels where the room windows don’t open to big-box stores whose only windows are the panes of glass in the automatic doors, I find the whole American phenomenon of the impermeable structure very unsettling and offputting and frankly inhuman. Human beings and other living things need sunlight and fresh air. We know scientifically that human beings need sunlight, and that the lack of it depresses and disorients. I am convinced that there is some atavistic part of us that withers and dies if we don’t feel breezes and winds, smell and feel the changes in the air when there is rain or snow, and some weird little mechanism in our brains that requires some sense of when it is naturally daytime or nighttime or else it goes haywire and our bodily cycles become unmoored and chaotic. At least there is for me, and I suspect strongly that I am not alone.
I also dislike closed-up buildings because they tend to stink. The smell is not always overpowering or distinctive in any particular direction, but at the very least buildings that are often or always sealed up tend to smell stale and flat, as if myriad manila folders, hair nets, and pots of paste had crawled into the air ducts to die. Other smells linger for a long time, too, when a building is not aired. The scents of cooking, cleaning compounds, perfumes, shampoos and conditioners, laundry products, and clothing items (plastic, vinyl, and leather particularly) hang around for a long time. So do the smells of unclean kitty litter boxes, dogs that need baths, mildew and mold, dead mice that expired in the walls or behind the fridge, and numerous other unpleasant things. The ammonia of a kitty litter box that has gone several days longer than it should’ve between cleanings can linger in the air of a house for quite a while after the litter box has finally been cleaned. Many smells will permeate fabrics and carpets even in well-ventilated places, and in poorly-ventilated ones they soak in that much more deeply. My nose is not half so exquisitely sensitive as those of some people I know, but I can often tell when I’m in a place inhabited by a long-time alcoholic, a smoker (even one who does not smoke indoors), someone whose diabetes is not well-managed, and quite a number of other things that you might not think could be smelled, but can if you’ve the nose for it and an awareness of what you’re smelling.
Many people, encouraged heavily by advertising, believe that the cure is an “air freshener” of some sort. Sprays, sticks, things you plug into the wall or pour on your carpet before you vacuum it so that your rugs smell like grilled cheese sandwiches or Evening in Paris, whatever, they come in a double dozen formats. It’s all the same basic crap. This “air freshener” thing is a masterful bit of doubletalk and doublethink, because what “air fresheners” really are is perfume. They’re air stinkifiers, or aromafiers if you prefer. They “freshen” only in the sense that one “freshens up” one’s makeup by putting another dab of powder on one’s nose and another bit of lipstick on over the older, worn coat. What air “fresheners” really do is mask and distract. (They do not always do this successfully, though. I cannot be the only person who has ever walked into a truck stop bathroom, inhaled the pungent combo of other people’s excreta combined with industrial-strength air freshner and thought “Jesus Christ, it smells like someone took a shit on a Christmas tree in here.”)
The real cure, whether for a house that smells bad, a house that is full of smells that you wish it weren’t quite so full of, or for a house that is just plain stuffy and stale, is to air the place out. You want to give the fabrics and carpets and upholstery a chance to breathe, give the various odoriferous compounds a chance to volatilize and disperse, dry any damp places or things so that they won’t mildew or molder, and to help kill off any mildew that is already hanging around. Read the rest of this entry »
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10.25.06
Posted in domesticity, good things, housekeeping at 8:02 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve been writing a lot here about housekeeping, lately, and I imagine I will be writing about it a lot more, because I still have things to say about it.
What I have to say about it today is that there is something I never knew about housekeeping until I experienced it and it dawned on me what was happening, and that is that if your house is well-kept when you are healthy and well, it will keep you for quite some time when you are ill.
I’m thinking about this right now because I have been having a rough go of it lately, and some superficial physical unwellness I was dealing with has been revealed as merely the crust over a veritable caldera of larger and smaller and more systemic unpleasantness. (The details are tedious and would make boring reading. Suffice to say that several years running of continuous significant life stress from multiple quarters is enough to wear out a girl’s batteries, and then you fall over, and then you have to figure out how to refill your reserves so that you can soldier on. Which I am doing.) But yea, though I slump through the valley of the shadow of the kinds of things that used to send Victorians to spas for “rest cures,” I shall fear no grotty towels or depressing heaps of insalubrious clutter and filth in my home, for lo, my house has been kept reasonably well.
Houses that are kept reasonably well will coast on their own well-kept inertia for some time. They won’t do so indefinitely, obviously. Entropy creeps in around the edges no matter what you do, and even if it didn’t you’d eventually run out of chicken soup and toilet paper.
But it is nice to know that you can be out of it for a while, not keeping up with much or anything, and not have the place plummet immediately into a horrifying squalor that only makes you feel sicker and more despondent than you already do. And it is nicer still, when you feel awful and fragile and exhausted, to know that there is soup in the freezer or the cupboard, and that the bathtub is clean if you want to take a long hot soak, and that the sheets were changed recently so the bed still feels nice and cool and fresh against your feverish skin, and so on. One is reassured to know that the bathroom cabinet contains the means for taking one’s temperature, or treating incipient bronchitis, and there is at least one backup box of tissues before you’re reduced to blowing your nose into a wad of Charmin, or worse, paper towels.
When you can rest your unhappy head on a couch that is clean and comfortable and does not smell of dog, when you can stagger into the kitchen for a glass of juice and know that there will be clean glasses to use even if you haven’t been up to doing the dishes for a day or three, when you can pad about the house barefoot in your bathrobe and never feel the worse for having trodden on something nasty: that’s when the house is keeping you.
It helps you feel a bit better, reminds you that you can be prudent and competent and effective, even though you are not well and probably feeling rather demoralized. It’s not a huge thing. Probably it matters only to you. But sometimes it counts for an awful lot nonetheless.
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