EXTREEEEEME CLOSE-UP

I'm pretty good with tech, but cameras and I have never really gotten along.

One of my favorite writers from another website I'm involved with said:

Get to know the macro features on your camera a whole lot better. Like it or not, food blogs are identified with food porn these days, and I suspect that awkward blurry closeups just won't do...

She was right; I hadn't realized it until just now.

I hadn't eaten all day so I made myself a sandwich for lunch and, while photographing it (which has become a sick sort of habit, let me tell you) I figured out what I was doing wrong or, if I were being honest, where the stupid macro button was hiding.

Expect to see a bunch more pictures like this:
...going forward.

Every time I look at that photo, I have an extreme diner craving. Gr.

Souper!

You start with a chicken. You bake it, put it on a big plate and strip off what you want to eat. Half of the breast gets sliced for sandwiches; the remaining leg and thigh get saved for chicken salad; the pickings from the bones go great over mac n' cheese; the bones themselves, if you've got some time and some water, get boiled down for soup stock. A chicken, if you do it right, can last a while - at 79 cents a pound for the bird plus some veggies and a few pounds of potatoes, you could conceivably feed two people five wholesome dinners for 15 bucks. That's 1.50 per person, per day.

Out of all the iterations that chicken will go through over five days, it's the soup that doesn't get any credit. Soup feels like the last wheezing gasp before resigning yourself to hitting up the grocery store again.

(Chowder, before y'all New Englanders start getting antsy, is a completely different animal that, at least right now, I'm not qualified to speak to. Check back in five years.)

From a culinary level, though, soup is dead-simple - boil a picked-clean chicken, add vegetables and simmer until it's reduced by half; top off the water and do it again. Complexity is not a trait usually associated with soup. It doesn't really get much more difficult than that.

Pshaw.
This is a recipe for a split-soup - two simple soups, cooked separately, combined at the table, garnished and served. It's sweet and devilishly spicy, creamy and hearty, and with an undeniable stomach-filling bulk.

Ingredients:

Soup 1: Black Bean
(This soup is a version of David Ansel's from his book, The Soup Peddler's Slow & Difficult Soups, modified to make it fight better with the pumpkin soup. Check him out.)

• 1 tbsp. vegetable oil
• 1 large can (15oz) diced tomatoes
• 2 large cans (15oz) black beans, drained
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, diced
• 2 1/2 tbsp. ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper
• 1/4 tsp. paprika
• salt and pepper
  

Soup 2: Pumpkin
(This is a variation of a recipe found on Mom!Mom!.com, similarly modified.)

• 2 tbsp. butter
• 1 can cooked pumpkin (NOT pie filling)
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 1/2 cup half-and-half
• salt and pepper
  

Garnishes (in whatever combination you like)

• green onion
• Grated cheddar cheese
• plain yogurt / sour cream
• fresh cilantro
• fresh parsley
  

The Gist:

Black Bean:
Saute the onions and garlic in oil in a pot until the onions are translucent and the garlic smells like garlic. Add the spices and commingle for a few minutes. Add the drained beans and the undrained tomatoes, cover, and simmer of low heat. The longer you cook it, the better it will taste. It's supposed to be spicy; you can adjust its heat to your whims, but keep in mind that it's only half a soup and that it will be tempered by its compatriot.

Pumpkin:
Saute the onions in the butter in a pot until translucent. Add the rest of the ingredients less the half-and-half, stir to combine, and heat to a simmer. This soup should be thick; if it's watery, simmer off its excess liquids. Take off the heat, add half-and-half and stir to combine. This one is supposed to be sweet, though just short of cloying - add more brown sugar if it's too salty.

Gently combine the two soups at the table, ladling one over or around the other. Garnish and eat.

Be sure you let me know how it goes if you try it.

Shrimp Salad As a Metaphor For...Oh, Whatever.

Decadence in food is simultaneously misunderstood and underrated.

The prevailing opinion on decadence seems to be that it either requires exotic ingredients or intensive preparation. Quail eggs poached in the tears of a war widow might make somebody's bow tie spin, but in my head it would be much, much easier to provoke a similar reaction from a hungry patron with peanut butter on fresh, seeded rye: just use the heels of the loaf, under-toast them, sprinkle the surface with kosher salt and serve open-faced.

For my father and I for coming up on fifteen years now, the epitome of decadence is shrimp salad on white toast with lettuce, particularly if it comes from the 3 Guys Restaurant across from the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue in New York City.

Making good shrimp salad isn't difficult, but the ubiquity and low cost of canned tuna has made it far rarer than it really should be. Part of that is because of the perception of shrimp as exotic, crowding the rims of chilled martini glasses filled with ice and cocktail sauce in restaurants with six dollar glasses of water. That perception is deserved to an extent - shrimp for shrimp cocktail, usually branded as "Colossal" by fishmongers, look to be the size of hockey pucks; I say look because I've never actually been able to justify to myself the cost of buying them.

The thing about shrimp salad, though, is that you're going to be cutting the shrimp up and spending money on the big ones is a serious waste of money: frozen 41-50 count shrimp are 4 or 5 dollars a pound in my neighborhood depending on if they're on sale or not, which is actually cheaper than name-brand tuna in a can by weight, even after factoring in the mostly negligible weight of shells and tails.

You can simply substitute cut up shrimp into your grandma's tuna salad recipe if you'd like (though I would cut down on the mayo content a bit to let the shrimp take a bit more control of the thing) but if you'd like something designed for shrimp, try this:


It's hard to be specific about quantities here - a lot depends on the water content of your shrimp, your particular brand of mayo, etc. I'm going to try and give you rules of thumb to keep things easy.

Ingredients:

• Shrimp, frozen or thawed, in their shells
• Lemon juice
• Mayonnaise
• Tomato, prepared as below
• Scallions (optional)
• Parsley, fresh ideally, dried in a pinch
• Paprika
• salt and pepper
  

Theory:

If this were tuna salad, you'd want to add something to fight your teeth a little, an element of crunch. Onion can fill this role, though celery is more common. This is shrimp, though, and the shrimp is going to fight all on its own with a little help from the tomato. You want the sharp bite of the onion, though, which is where the scallions come in. You can go without if you really want to; experiment.

The Gist:

Boil some water and add the shrimp, still in their shells, to the pot - shrimp shells have a ton of flavor and you want that flavor to stay with the shrimp instead of letting it bleed out into the water. Keep an eye on them. You're going to want to boil them for only a few minutes until just before they're done; they'll finish cooking on their own. Cook them too long and they'll lose all of their moisture.

Strain the shrimp into a colander under hot water for a minute, then warm, then cold - you want to step them down from boiling to cool enough to handle.

Shell them. Most commercially available unshelled shrimp these days come with their shells cracked for you and the boiling probably separated the shells slightly from the meat, making it easier. Chop the shrimp into halves or thirds, no smaller. put them into a bowl.

Add enough mayonnaise to the bowl to lightly coat the shrimp. You won't need much, a heaping teaspoon or so. Add approximately half as much chopped tomato meat as you had shrimp. Tomatoes are mostly water - you want to add the drier outside part of the tomato, not the wetter, seedy part. Add half as much chopped scallions as you added tomato, and a healthy pinch of parsley, salt and pepper. Squeeze half a lemon over it, tasting as you go to make sure you don't overdo it. The Paprika is mostly for color.

Refrigerate for 15-30 minutes before eating - you'll want the flavors to commingle and enhance each other, and it tastes better cold.

Serve on white toast with lettuce. It's good on wheat, too, but wheat tries to steal the spotlight; white stays mostly neutral.

Considerations:

• Once you get the hang of it, you can start substituting this for that. One of my favorite variations is to replace the mayonnaise with whatever salad dressing I have in the fridge at the time. It's particularly good with bleu cheese.

I ♥ Beef

When I was a kid, sitting at the big slab-marble dinner table, small enough that my feet didn't quite touch the floor, my dad used to pick up the big ceramic serving dish that the main part of our dinner was sitting on, a roast or something like it, and pour the juice over my plate because I was too small to do it myself. I got to tell him when to stop.

The vegetarians in the audience are probably wincing at the image, but I remember those moments as sweet ones, like the stories of my little cousin, one or two years old, running around his house, grinning like a madman with the end of a barbecued rib sticking out of his mouth. Pacifiers apparently work better if they're covered in barbecue sauce. And if they're, um. Made of bone, I guess.

Love's whatever you think it is. In my family, I've realized, love is a rare steak.

I thought I was alone in this, but Gizmodo proved me wrong.

Just sayin' - I know what dad's getting for Christmas.

Wok Me Like A Hurricane

Let's face it: most of the time, fried rice is the second half of a cheap Chinese takeout combo meal used to validate charging you an extra three bucks when, if you had stopped and thought about it beforehand, you would have realized that all you really wanted was an egg roll with your moo goo gai pan. It's an afterthought.

If it's done right, though, right the way Chen Kenichi does it, fried rice is a ballet, a collection of textures and flavors simultaneously working together and fighting with each other - gooey enough to be lifted with chopsticks, light enough to avoid feeling greasy, and spicy enough to singe your eyebrows.

Chef Chen makes it look easy and it's easy to describe with words, but honestly I've never had fried rice that good in my life. Not even close.

The concept of fried rice, though, is a fundamentally sound one, and one you can apply to less austere, more utilitarian (and less Chinese) dishes - take some day-old rice you don't want to go to waste, heat it up in a pan with some oil in it, add some vegetables and call it a carbohydrate.

This:
is one example that happens to work excellently as a side dish, just like its forefather, but a side of a different sort. If you'd like to use it as a main course, double it. Oh, and don't be scared by the vanilla - it's used purely as an aromatic and won't appear in the finished dish as anything more than a pleasant background note.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup cooked brown rice (fresh or day old, but day-old is actually tastier)
• 1 red onion, roughly chopped
• 4 white mushrooms, chopped
• 2 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp at a time
• 1/2 tsp minced garlic
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
• Salt and Pepper
  

The Gist:

If you don't have any leftover rice handy, make some. The method is up to you - I have a rice cooker, but a pot on the stove with some water in it works fine, too.

Combine everything but the rice, the turmeric and 1 tbsp of the olive oil in a bowl and let it sit at room temperature while you heat a pan over medium-high heat.

Speaking of pans: do you have one of these?
A slope-sided, flat-bottomed pan will make cooking this easier - while it's totally possible to do it in a frying pan, a wok pan will keep the oil hot, make the rice easier to move around and help you not get food all over your stove-top.

Anyway. Once the pan is hot, add the vegetable mixture. Keep it moving so it doesn't burn, and cook until the onions soften and the mushrooms brown. It should take 5 minutes or so. Pour the vegetables into a bowl and rinse out your pan.

Add the second tbsp of oil and heat it up to medium again before adding the rice and the turmeric. Keep moving the rice as you did before with the vegetables for 5 minutes or so before adding the vegetables back to the pan. Work them together and get them off of the heat before it burns.

Eat up! I made this as a side for pork chops and peas and it was fantastic. I'm sure it would work great as a main dish tossed with shrimp or ham, as well.

Mmm. Ham.


Considerations:

• Turmeric, though tasty, will turn everything it touches (your hands, your stove, your pets) a frightening shade of yellow. Try not, as I did when I cooked this, to pour it while standing under the influence of a ceiling fan. (oops)
• Stir-frying with olive oil is usually a bad idea - while it's more flavorful and healthier than its cousins, it also starts to smoke and at a much lower temperature than, say, canola or peanut oils do. To that end, you don't want the heat to go any higher than a tick over medium. You can get away with it here, though, because nothing you're going to be cooking is going to kill you if it isn't cooked through; just don't try this with chicken.
  

Serves 2 as a side dish or 1 as a meal. It doubles, but only up to a point - any more than double this recipe and you might have to cook it either in a stock pot or in shifts.

Gouda for You!

Grocery stores in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn are odd places. Real estate in New York City is fantastically expensive and grocers are forced to focus, to pare down their stock to the absolute minimum of what their customers are going to need to buy. As an example, the last time I went grocery shopping at the Key Foods around the corner from my apartment in Brooklyn before packing everything I owned into a U-Haul and trekking up to Massachusetts (a weird sort of reverse pilgrimage - I knew a dozen people who were insistent on making the move in the opposite direction) I discovered the grocer didn't carry yeast, a food-stuff so entirely basic that I had always assumed it was on-hand even if I had never actually needed it until I met a girl who adamantly insisted on teaching me how to bake bread.

So No Yeast Til Brooklyn - the neighborhood had decided that its denizens, predominantly lower- and lower-middle class black people with a smattering but increasingly scary influx of yuppies and hipsters gentrifying the hell out of the place, don't bake bread. I can buy that - baking bread is becoming more of an artisanal skill as time goes on - But here's the thing: that demographic apparently eats a lot (and I mean a LOT) of gouda. So much gouda is eaten in Bed-Stuy that it's actually cheaper per-pound than most of the processed American cheeses, beaten out (but only very slightly) by the store-brand cheddar. I had lived in and around New York City for most of my life and I had never, ever, bought gouda, so I started.

I became a little obsessed to be honest, which is especially problematic with gouda because, no matter how much of it you eat, it feels like you've always got more. It's a very rich and very flavorful cheese, and more than the slightest bit of it at a time can render you immobile in front of the TV without much effort at all.

For awhile my housemates and I were eating everything with gouda on it: Pasta. Sandwiches. Pizza. Crackers. Tomatoes and peppers. It took over our lives until one of them decided that enough was enough and threw the brick of it away when I wasn't looking.

So that was that, or so I had thought. Fast-forward to present day. Gouda was on sale last weekend. I couldn't help myself. I bought some. In my defense, I actually had a plan: I had realized that, while excavating in that brick of cheese back in Brooklyn looking for gold, I had never tried it on a salad.

This is what I came up with:
It was pretty fantastic, light but still satisfying as a meal on its own, intricately flavorful and elegantly textured.

The best part of it is that, the ingredients are all native (in a way) to Bed Stuy.


Ingredients:

• 2 chicken thighs, boned and trimmed and sliced into bite-sized pieces
• 1/2 red onion, roughly cut up.

Marinade:

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1/2 tsp ground sage
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• a healthy few splashes of hot sauce (Frank's Original, ideally)
• half as much as that of Worcestershire sauce
• salt and pepper

Salad:

• Greens of your liking
• 1 tomato, quartered twice into wedges

Also:

• Gouda (of course), shaved
• 1/2 tbsp lime juice (or half as much as that of apple cider vinegar)

The Gist:

Combine the chicken and onion in a bag with the marinade and let it sit for as long as you'd like - the longer it soaks, the better. Overnight is ideal.

When you're ready to cook it, heat some olive oil over medium heat in a pan before adding the contents of the bag. Keep the meat moving or it will stick, brown too fast or burn. Cook it all the way through. When it's done, add it to a bowl containing the greens and the tomato, toss it with the lime juice or vinegar, add the gouda to the
top, toss it again and you're done.

Considerations:

• Frank's really is the best hot sauce for this - tabasco can be overpowering and chili sauce is too thick.
• Be careful with the gouda - I wasn't kidding about it being rich. Two or three big slices or a light handful of it crumbled will do ya.
• If you decide to marinate it for a shorter period of time, reserve some hot sauce and sage and add it while it's cooking to accentuate the flavors.

Comfortably will serve two of you, or one of me.

Enjoy, and let me know how it goes.

So. Let's talk about food.

Let's talk about food (bay-bee).

Too often people eat without thinking about it. I don't mean in as much as they aren't concerned with what's sandwiched between the top and bottom bun of whatever they picked up at their fast-food joint of choice, moreso that they eat because it's necessary without actually thinking about what they like about their food.

Take the prototypical fast-food cheeseburger. Its ubiquity belies its construction - such a burger is a work of genius.

In its most fundamental form, you've got a bun, some beef, a slice of cheese, onions, ketchup, mustard and pickles. Not exactly rocket science - I could make some variation of that burger at home in 10 minutes flat that would have the added advantage of not having lived under a heat lamp for any length of time. For reference (and to give me the chance to show off a little) it'd look like this:
The purpose of the fast-food burger is to provide a buck's worth of caloric intake in its simplest form. Of the seven ingredients, the omission of any of them leaves you with something less than ideal: Forget the pickles and you lose the crunch; lose the ketchup and you lose the sweetness necessary to support the tartness of the onions and the bulk of the beef. Not a penny is wasted in its delivery. It's an intricately thought-out, edible wonder which, in my head, deserves the same level of thought on its eater's end as was expended in its construction.

I like to talk about food, and food prep, and food theory. I like thinking about why I like what I eat, why I cook how I do and how I can make my cooking better. I'm not about to tell you that you shouldn't go to Wendy's. I love Wendy's. But it's probably worth stopping every once in awhile and thinking about why you occasionally wake up a 3am in the throes of a vanilla frosty craving.

Or is that just me?