Hungry In Hogtown

Béa-tified: El Bulli's white chocolate and fennel leaf with pink peppercorns

I have many wonderful friends in Toronto, and I love sharing my table with them, but very of few them are as passionate about eating and cooking as I.  Some of them think I'm nuts, I know, and even Rachel grows weary of my obsession from time to time, especially when it creates three loads of dishes.  No problem, really, because Hungry In Hogtown has plugged me into a world of people who are crazy about food too.

Béa, from La Tartine Gourmande, is one of those people.  Having viewed the creativity of her dishes, not to mention her prodigious output, I've come to two conclusions:

1. She may be more obsessed with food than yours truly;
2. She must not sleep, because I know of no other way to produce a post each day for twelve consecutive days (which she somehow did from March 12 to March 23, inclusive).

Two of those posts were devoted to pink peppercorns, and one of them really got my attention.  Béa hinted at the possibility of using the pink peppercorns in a dessert, which led her to make the following comment:

I however truly look forward to trying the seeds in sweet preparations. As a matter of fact, I have an idea. What about asking Rob? He surely would have great ideas for this kind of chemistry since he is so magnificently experimental with alternative flavors in his kitchen laboratory! Let’s ask him what he thinks!

"Magnificently experimental," moi?  You're obviously not familiar with my vanilla mucus, or you might think otherwise.  As for my "kitchen laboratory," well, it's actually an apartment kitchen with only a few feet of available counter space.

Flattery will get you everywhere with me, however, so off I went looking for ways to justify Béa's praise.

Finger-bleeding good: fried chicken and biscuits

At Hungry In Hogtown, we pride ourselves on being fair and balanced.  That's why we're pleased to bring you this special report on the chilling events of this past weekend.  Did the Cuisinart attack Rob?  Was it provoked?  We report, you decide.

Cuisinart:
"Whirrrrrrrrr. Whirrrr.  Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr."

Rob:
"Okay, Cuisinart, we're even.  But frankly, I'm not impressed.

"Yes, yes, I did inflict irreparable harm to your chopping blade while making nori croquant, but it was an accident.  Besides, didn't I make it up to you by buying a shiny new chopping blade?  Apparently not, because your unprovoked retaliation with said blade the other night can mean only one thing: war.

"It was a quiet Saturday night.  I was innocently preparing a delicious dinner for myself and my love. I sorted through many cookbooks and researched online to find the perfect fried chicken and biscuit recipes.  I went with Alton Brown, figuring that as a Southerner, he must know the secrets of fried chicken (be sure to use enough shortening to come 1/3 inch up the side of the pan, not 1/8) and biscuits.  I even took the time to break down my free range, organic chicken and soak it overnight in buttermilk.

IMBB #24: Nigella's lemon linguine, apple tarts, and the happy food dance

I have a "thing" for Nigella Lawson.  I know that sounds clichéd, and, for what it's worth, it is, but let me try to explain.  It all boils down to this: there's something magnetic about a woman who takes profound delight in the act of eating.  I don't mean this specifically about her, either.  It applies equally to all women, really.

My wife Rachel delights in good food.  Whenever she enjoys her first bite of something exceptional, she invariably does the "Happy Food Dance."  I believe it's a relic of her genetic heritage, because I've seen her mother perform the same seated hip wiggle.  If she especially loves what she's eating, Rachel has even been known to swing her shoulders a little, too.  The Happy Food Dance is so reliable I now use it as a barometer to measure the quality of any dish I prepare.

The flip side to my attraction to women who are passionate about food and cooking is a mistrust for people who don't enjoy or don't care about what they eat.  You know the type.  They view food as "fuel," or they refuse to try anything outside their comfort zone.  If a person can't open themselves up to the simple pleasures of a good meal, what else are they hiding?

The entrée and dessert we're presenting for the "Make it in 30 minutes" edition of Is My Blog Burning are not only quick and easy to prepare, they have both induced full body Happy Food Dances from Rachel.  That means quality, people.

El Bulli's vanilla transparent fruit pâté is neither transparent nor fruit... discuss!

If you were going to make "vanilla transparent fruit pâté" and were handed the following list of ingredients, what would you think?

1000 g water
5 vanilla pods
100 g sugar
30 g NH pectin
150 g glucose
150 g inverted sugar
15 g citric acid

Perhaps you'd see the mixture of sugars, pectin, and acid and think jam, or maybe you'd wonder what inverted sugar is in the first place.  Would you question the need for five whole vanilla pods?

Me?  Well, I, for one, was trying to figure out where the hell the fruit was.  I re-read the recipe repeatedly.  Nope, still not there.  I checked the US and Spanish versions on the CD.  Not there either.

Then I did what I inevitably do when attempting a Ferran Adria preparation: I just take the plunge, and trust that the end product will, in fact, be a reasonable facsimile of the finished dish in the little photo attached to the recipe.

Guess what?  It worked again.  Somehow the three star Michelin chef was right, and the three ring circus amateur was chastened yet again.

The Recipe Collection Meme

Aside from the obvious implications for my fantasy life ("You will be silent!"), perhaps the greatest fringe benefit of being married to a real, dyed in the wool, glasses wearing, Dewey decimal system-knowing sexy librarian is that there is always someone to organize our cookbooks and recipes.

You see, I have the organizational ability of a chimp, and an untrained chimp at that.  My "organizational system" relies entirely on my ability to remember on which floor, chair, table, or counter I last left a cookbook or recipe.  Rachel's organizational system, on the other hand, relies on, well, reliable things: file folders, shelving units, and the flawless consistency of the order of the Roman alphabet.  She's tried repeatedly to impress upon me the importance of keeping things in their place, but I'm still a work in progress.

All this is my little way of introducing my responses to the recipe meme.  You see, without Rachel my recipe collection would be several large piles of cookbooks and countless sheets of sauce-splattered paper.  Because of her, my recipe collection is several large shelves of cookbooks and a well organized binder of sauce-splattered paper.

I was actually tagged twice for this meme.  The first person to tag me was Tania, from The Candied Quince.  Tania has the same passion for food that Rachel and I do, and, more importantly, she shares a genuine love for our hometown, Toronto, and the diversity of appetites it encompasses.  I was also tagged by The Blog That Ate Manhattan, perhaps the most unconventional food blog around.  You see, TBTAM is a Manhattan obstetrician, and her blog isn't just about food, it's also about the challenges she encounters in her practice.  Where else can you go to read about making scones and making babies?

Without further ado....

El Bulli's nori croquant, little voices, and my kitchen alter ego

Snap! Thwack!  Buzz!

"Shit!"

And with that, my mind began to race.  "How are you gonna finish making the nori croquant now?," said the smug little voice in my head.  "You have to get to work and Rachel's going to be pissed that you broke the food processor."

Yes I had.  Sitting in my hand was a shard of plastic, and sitting in the bowl of the processor was the chopper blade it used to hold in place.

"Shut up," I replied, but I had to admit the little voice had a point.  I was running late and I still had large chunks of hardened sugar that had to be ground into a powder if I was ever actually going to finish making the damn croquant.

No problem, I'll just reattach the blade, press PULSE, and...

Snap! Thwack!  Buzz!

"Shit!"

Then it happened.  I morphed into the ultimate cross between a nueva cocina chef and a jury-rigging, secret agent hero: I became Ferran MacGyvrià.

Love Potion No. 9: DC Duby's Science Kit

Do you long to seduce your beloved by plying them with chocolate confections and whispering sweet nothings such as "Hydrocolloids are hydrophilic polymers that generally contain many hydroxyl groups and may be polyelectrolytes" into their ear?  Would you invite the object of your desire to explore tensioactivity back at your place?  Does your ideal date culminate in "science gel"?  And would you invite friends to join the two of you?

If so, DC Duby's Science Kit is the love potion for you.

Would you know what a hydrocolloid is if you hadn't read that first paragraph? If the answer is no, the Science Kit will be a disappointment.

For Valentine's Day, I gave Rob a Science Kit from the revolutionary chocolatiers at DC Duby, thinking it would be a perfect fit for his interest in molecular gastronomy. Billed as experiments involving chocolate from a "multi-sensory perspective," the kit contains the instructions and most of the ingredients needed to prepare four chocolate-based dishes, each with a hot and cold preparation. We lost no time inviting friends over for our Weird Science/Wild Sweets day -- after all, many of the ingredients had short shelf lives.

Mmmmm... Moto's doughnut soup

Canadians are addicted to donuts.  Not only do we have more donut stores per capita than any place on earth, we have a slavish devotion to one brand in particular, Tim Hortons (a name that makes grammar police cringe, but Toronto Maple Leafs fans wax nostalgic).  There are more than 2600 Tim Hortons in Canada, almost double the number of McDonald's restaurants.  It's hard to understate the chain's importance or the homey feeling it inspires in Canadians, particularly in Canada's small towns, where the franchises serve as social hubs, or even outside of Canada.  Did you know, for example, that the Department of Defence recently asked Tim Hortons to open a franchise for the troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan?  It seems the generals realized that the best way to combat homesickness and improve morale was literally to provide soldiers with a taste of home.

Even though this national institution was taken over by Wendy's, the giant American burger chain, in 1995, the marketing of Tim's remains hyper-Canadian, with commercials that play on national themes:  hockey, curling, immigration, and hockey and immigration (to view some of the emotional pornography of which I speak, follow the "Click here to view the Proud Fathers commercial" link on this page).

In 2001, the Canadian donut market was r-r-r-r-r-rocked (sorry, but if you're Canadian, you'll understand) by the opening of the first non-US Krispy Kreme in suburban Toronto.  Despite breaking all sales records upon its debut, Krispy Kreme was eventually slaughtered by a combination of bad management, bad luck, and a pesky doctor named Atkins.  As a result, the company's previously robust presence in downtown Toronto has been reduced to a tiny rump of donut racks in gas stations.  Maybe those hockey-themed commercials really do work.

SHF #17: Yo quiero El Bulli's yoghurt tacos

Sometimes I think the toughest part of being Canadian is knowing the correct way to spell a word.  Take yogourt, for example, or is that yoghourt, yoghurt or yogurt?  You see, Canadian English typically uses British spellings, not American, but every once and a while we like to let our orthographic hair down and come up with a little something of our own.  For some reason, "yogourt" happens to be one of those rare words that is uniquely Canadian.

I mention this because I was unsure how to spell "yogourt" correctly (read, the Canadian way), which is a real handicap when writing a post about it.  I ended up running to the fridge to check the spelling on one of our containers.  "Yogourt" it is, then, for me and,it seems, for mes frères et soeurs franco-canadiens.  For some reason, French-Canadians also spell the word yogourt, and that too is a variant (the standard French being yaourt).  Finally, something beyond hockey on which the two solitudes can agree.

But enough about yogourt spellings, let's talk about "yoghurt" tacos (that's the spelling on the recipe, so I will use it in that context only), our dairy themed dessert for Sugar High Friday #17, hosted by Spittoon  Extra.  As some of you may have read, I now have a copy of El Bulli: 1998-2002, a cookbook with which I've become somewhat obsessed.  Lucky for me, Ferran Adria seems to like his yogourt, because he uses it frequently, and, in this dish, he uses it almost exclusively.

Rocked lobster

My tiny apartment-sized freezer and I play a sick game with each other.   I stuff it full of goodies, or "oldies but used to be goodies and one day may be goodies once more," like unused baguette ends and bananas with even the slightest blemish (I'm very picky about my bananas).  I have the best plans to make banana bread, or bread crumbs, or bread pudding, or banana bread pudding.  Our freezer is bursting with my good intentions. 

Said freezer retaliates by hiding crucial dinner ingredients deep in its dark frosty recesses.  It zaps my bagels with freezer burn.  Sometimes it even spits the frozen bananas -- often blackened and shriveled like the trophies of a pygmy headhunter -- at me when I open it.

It's a love-hate thing.

Problem is, Rob has the freezer packrat mentality as well.  So when he gleefully volunteered to take all the lobster remains from our Superbowl Sunday feast, I wasn't surprised.  As everyone knows, you need lobster carcasses to make lobster broth, the essential base for a number of lobster dishes.