Lab waste reclaimed

Mediocre coconut baozi paste turns out to be perfect for deep-fried coconut mantou. Served with sweetened condensed milk mixed with fresh lemon juice. Spectacular.

mine looked just like this:

Coconut Baozi with Salmon

A couple of food experiments- some parts worked, others, not so much.

Coconut Baozi- substituting coconut milk for both the water and the fat in this recipe.

2.5 cups AP white flour (11.7% protein)
1 cup coconut milk
2 tbs. sugar
1/4 oz. dry yeast (1 pkg.)
1 tbs. baking powder.
1/4 cup 110F water
12 portions salmon 2 - 3 oz. (but all the same!)

optional
1 tbs. white vinegar

mix water, yeast in a small bowl. mix dry ingedients. combine everything. form into ball.
knead and beat until smooth. allow to rise. beat down, divide into 12 portions. wrap around salmon and other fillings. (I just used salmon alone in this test, but salmon + spinach and mushrooms, or with a pat of lemon dill butter, or with watercress and shiitakes would work)
Allow to rise. (opt.) add a bit of white vinegar to steaming liquid. Steam 10-15 minutes depending on size and thickness of fish.

basically this is a reinterpretation of the classic Salmon en Croûte.

What didn't work: in spite of all that coconut milk, coconut flavor was very subtle to absent. It also seemed to yellow the bao. Bottom line, it was kind of pointless in this recipe. I'll try coconut bao again, but next time solid coconut goes into the dough, and I either cut or eliminate the coconut milk and bump up the sugar. I'll stick to entirely sweet flavors and serve it with sweetened condensed milk mixed with fresh lemon juice. Possibly fill it with mango custard to get a fake poached egg effect?

What worked: Fish cooked nicely. Maybe needs juice. A lemon and dill butter with leeks would be awesome. Or maybe serve in a savory broth? Tomatoes, leeks and black cardamon?

Photos from spicy bunny prototyping

Broke down a rabbit for the first time in a while. I'm using all of it, and thinking about building a multicourse meal around rabbit and strong spices.

Cheese course I'm building around Buffalo Rabbit Wings- made from the front legs and shoulder. Forearm is frenched, shoulder is not. One easy, one hard. Planning on four different blue cheeses, celery and carrot. Prototyped w/ just carrot and fourme d' ambert. 4 'wings'/rabbit means 2/person. I think that's enough for a cheese course. Sauce is classic - Frank's RedHot emulsified with butter. Added some powdered fennel seed as an experiment... tastes incredible.
Presentation needs some work.




pics from the amuse bouche didn't turn out- I'm a terrible food photographer.

Anyway, used half a rabbit kidney, roasted, and a hemisphere of green apple from a large melonballer, mated together to form a sphere on a bamboo skewer. Dipped it in a powdered chili mixture like the Cambodian girls at work do with slices of green apple and green mango. I need to figure out what they call that snack.

Also made a clean rabbit stew. I cut the vegetables very carefully in a Japanese style, dredged diced rabbit loin in rice flour, cayenne pepper, and coriander seed and browned it off, added potato, carrot, shiitake, onion, shallot, bay leaf, long pepper and kombu; deglazed with rabbit stock and simmered for an hour and a half. This was excellent, but not terrible spicy, so I'm not sure if it makes the cut.

The other half of the rabbit loin went into a Thai red curry. I'm very good at Thai red curries at this point so this was pretty effortless. I may change this over to a Panang curry and add pineapple and brined green peppercorns. Probably to be served with a ball of sticky rice rolled in a chiffonade of thai basil.

All the meat from the saddle went into the soup and curry, so no classic roasted saddle of rabbit. C'est la vie.

Jerked the thigh of the rabbit very traditionally with my coarse jerk paste. Allspice, black pepper, sea salt, suagr, cane vineager, scallion greens. Marinate meat overnight and braise with rabbit stock. Served with pear chutney. Key chutney spices are kolanji, black cardomum, long pepper, fenugreek, garlic, tumeric root, red bird chili, cider vineager, palm sugar. Garnish with scallion. Probably I will use a less coarse grind on my jerk spice next time, and debone the thigh, and reduce the braising time to be less traditional (i.e. less well-done). Possibly roll the thigh into a gallantine?



Rabbit liver is left-over. I need ideas. It's kind of a hard sell in anything larger than amuse bouche size. Maybe rabbit scrapple? a pate? Maybe part of the gallantine?

Dessert I'm thinking carrot spice cake with fennel ice cream. I need an ice cream maker first, cause shaking it by hand sucks. Also, fresh bulb or just fennel seeds or both?

On Football

You'd think after watching literally hundreds of hours of football I'd know what some of the positions are, some of the rules, and maybe the name of a play or have some sense of strategy. Nope. The average American ten year old girl has a more sophisticated appreciation of football than me. However, I have observed that ignorance is by no means an impediment to being a football fan. In fact, It may be a prerequisite. Fandom has only one test- for us, or against us. Beyond that, it is utterly egalitarian, embracing the stupid and ignorant alike as brothers. Therefore I believe it is my prerogative to observe in a completely objective manner that my team is better than your team. While I certainly am too rational to believe that this confers any particular advantage in status to me personally, I hope that some of you are stupid and irrational enough to believe that it does and act accordingly.

Foie Gras BLT

I guess I thought I was being clever putting a seared slab of foie on a BLT, but a quick Googling shows the Foie BLT popping up on avant-Americana menus from NYC (at Laurent Tourondel's BLT Prime, ldo) to Chapel Hill and everywhere in between. Some variations drop the L for Lettuce and substtitute L for Liver, but that's just cleverness for cleverness' sake and serves no culinary purpose. Others add something sweet, like a tomato preserve- and that's interesting. The only variation in my version is to drop the mayo- we really, really don't need it here- and add some Greek yogurt mixed with a chiffonade of mint.



Toast the ciabatta in the pan with the foie, it absorbs the tasty fat and gets crisp.
Add sliced tomato (sprinkle with sea salt and cracked black pepper), Boston lettuce,
the seared foie, some cob-smoked bacon, greek yogurt with mint and eat.

I'd make it small, it's crazy rich.

Grape Jelly

I was remembering making jam and jelly over a campfire out in the woods in Newark Valley from wild berries and green apples when I was 15 or so... so when I found these wild Concord grapes growing out front of MKS with a wild apple tree nearby I decided to make some grape jelly in the same fashion.



Green apples of course contain pectin. Fancy folks make the pectin separately, but it does work to just throw the green apples right in the pot, quartered.

Added some crab apples for the heck of it. sugar. covered with water, simmer for an hour, strain, reduce. Ended up with about 6 oz. of good jelly.

Biscuit with Bacon and Egg Fusion Remix

One of my favorite breakfast foods is the breakfast sandwich. Both the ghetto Mickey D's sandwiches and the upscale Eggs Benedict and variations thereof. Number one favorite is bacon and fried egg on toast, strawberry jam with sriracha chili sauce. (weird mental aside- that sentence is structured to be thought in Japanese- Ichibon!) Anyway, yesterday I realize I'm out of sriracha again and that gets me wondering how far I can push the southeast Asian thing in a tasty breakfast sandwich.

One trip to Vietnamese supermarket later and I'm ready to make an attempt.

First I want to take some pork belly and make an asian BBQ. I'm a big believer in making things from scratch if i think I can make them better- and I'm just arrogant enough to think I can make a better Asian BBQ than I can buy. Oyster sauce, nipa-sap vinegar, palm sugar, oil infused with red Thai bird chili and szechuan peppercorns is what I go with. Take the skin off the pork belly, throw the belly in a cast iron pan, pour the sauce over it and bake at 300 for 2+ hours, removing the cover in the last hour and turning and basting. Turns out yummy.



Meanwhile, I mix up a batch of backing soda biscuits, something I do most Sunday mornings unless I head out for bagels and lox. This time I add Thai red chili paste to the dough - about one tbs. per cup of flour. I make my own Chili pastes most of the time now, this one has lemongrass, shrimp paste, red bird chilies, garlic, galagal, salt. It needs to age a bit, this one is at about 3 months.

Finally, as everything is coming out of the oven I fry up some quail eggs and assemble the sandwiches. BBQ pork belly topped with a quail egg on a red curry biscuit. Not quite as pretty as I would like but very tasty.



Highly reccomend serving with Ca-phe sua, a strong Vietnamese coffee served with steamed evaporated milk.

Mustard Braised Pork with Lime Pickled Onions

Mustard Braised Pork with Lime Pickled Onions, a simple meal I enjoy quite a bit. It belongs here at the boundary of summer.




The pork is simple, pork butt, brown the outside, add leek and carrot, flash with white wine- I used Herman J Wiemar's excellent Riesling, add a lot of good mustard and top off with chicken stock, a bay leaf, some parsley, peppercorns. Cover and braise for 3 hours or so, removing the cover in the last hour.



pull out the meat, and set aside, pull out veggies and herbs, and reduce braising liquid to form a mustardy jus. Meanwhile, to quick-pickle some red onion....



Thinly slice half a red onion, juice 3 limes, pinch of salt, pinch of white pepper. combine in a non-reactive container and stick in the fridge for 3 hours to a couple weeks.



Note the squeezed lime skins buried in salt. From this I can make a little lime confit in 2-3 months. The salt I'll reuse again to cure some salmon. No waste.

To serve, take a bunch of meat, pour a little jus over it and top with the onions. Also good with corn crepes or in a tortilla.

Nigella Sativa

For some reason, the Nigella Sativa, a plant that produces a small black spice seed, is almost entirely unknown in the United States. It is known by many names. Black Cumin, Black Fennel, Black Onion Seed, Roman Coriander, Black Carroway or Nutmeg Flower in English. All utterly inaccurate names. Kolanji in Hindi. Kezah in Hebrew. ḥabbatu l-barakah or "seed of blessing" in Arabic. It has a long history- King Tut was found with a bottle of the oil extracted from this seed. It is mentioned in the Bible (Isaiah) and in the Koran. In the latter case, Muhammad claims it cures everything but death. Claims of that nature are still quite common.

Whether it cures cancer or not, the seed is an amazing addition to a huge number of foods. Historically it is added to breads throughout the Middle East, sprinkled on Peshawari naan, added to curries and chutneys in India, added to cheeses in the Mediterranean, made into tea in Asia. I find it goes quite well in any number of dishes. Mixed with mashed sweet potato and served with thinly sliced seared salmon. Added to chicken sausage. Essential in pear chutney. Or even in something as simple as a 1-2-3 sugar cookie, which I made today- inspired by Ruhlman's brilliant new book 'Ratio'-about which I have much to say, but perhaps later.

Beer Discovers Fire

So last night I was at the Asgard watching the Sox beat the Rays, drinking beer.

Second inning, a nice 12oz Saison Royale from Harpoon's 100 barrel Leviathan series. 9%, Boston beer. White pepper and rosemary. Classic.

Fifth inning, I commit to a 22oz. bomber of Clipper City's 'Big Dipa', a serious double IPA. Monster hops, 10%, Baltimore. Like 'Loose Cannon's' big brother. A solid pairing with some charred steak tips.

Ninth inning, dessert. I share a bomber of Southern Tier's 'Creme Brulee' with the bartenders. This is an absoulutely incredible beer. Huge pure vanilla nose. Possibly more vanilla than vanilla. The promised burnt sugar and creaminess on the palatte. There isn't anything bad to say about this beer. It's so well constructed that it doesn't need to be a dessert beer. It isn't even particularly sweet. And it comes in at a manly 10% too. Find some and drink it now.

On using R with Labview

R is an open source statistics scripting and graphing tool I use quite a bit.

Labview is a very non-open source dataflow/visual programming language I use daily.

Thomas Baier and Erich Neuwirth wrote a Windows COM Server [R (D) Com] that exposes some R functionality. What little documentation there is is mainly focused on Excel/VB6- but there was a tantalizing note from someone named Paul Larsen very roughly describing how to use it with Labview. Last year sometime I had a few days free and puzzled it out and wrote some nice clear tools/examples. I think I wrote it in LV7.1 though it certainly works in newer versions (tested in LV8.6). Anyway, download here.

Examples include the basics like creating a chart or running a command with a text output-



All structured in a Labview-Logical manner, with functional sub-VIs:




Also included is some stuff for handling symbols (read: R variables) and some rudimentary and somewhat unsatisfactory ideas/examples of how to move your R dataframes around.

For those few of you who need to do this, I think you will find this very helpful.

Everyone else can take this of an example of the sort of thing I do all day.

The Absolute Anacoluthon

So I bought a camera.

But allow me to digress for a moment. Have you noticed yet that I like beginning sentences, paragraphs, and posts with 'And', 'So', 'But', 'Or', 'So' and the like.... conjunctions that witch by their nature should be conjuncting within the sentence, not outside it? I'm not doing it by accident, or ignorance, but rather by arrogance. I like the effect. Negating whole previous sentences. Amplifying previous sentences. Creating cross-linkage inside and outside writing objects of all sorts. It is sort of like .... overloading an operator when programming... taking something we know knows how to conjoin integers, like "+", and teaching it to add... music tracks together. [flute] + [drum]

To a grammar geek I believe it would be called an 'anapodoton', a subordinate clause without a main clause, a member of the class of sentences called 'anacoluthon' or 'without sequence'. As though by giving them a fancy descriptive name in Greek the process has been blessed and found virtuous- I shall quit the field, victorious.

Warehouse 13

This show really bothers me philosophically. It's the 'There are things man was not meant to know' thing writ large combined with an almost animist magic system. Yeah. Cargo cult stupidity with guns and badges running around modern day America. This is anti-science fiction.

The cast is likable, but I keep hoping they will develop a super-villain I could really identify with... maybe a former insider.... who rejects the whole premise and fights for transparency instead of secrecy, study over storage, inquiry over ignorance, science over magic.

And then maybe the main characters might start to sympathize with the villain, but realize they are in too deep... Oh hell, we'd need Joss Whedon to pull it off.

In Mortal Danger

So I made these really perfect brioche Monday/Tuesday. Brioche are a multi-day affair with all the risings and punching down and dough-slapping. I know, sounds like a family get-together.... OK, that's disturbing, moving on.... Started with the NYT Cookbook recipe for French brioche and a dim memory of making brioche for Brunch at the L'Auberge du Cochon Rouge in Ithaca maybe 17 years ago. Actually, when I started doing it we were buying these frozen brioche from France, proofing them and baking them off. They were pretty good honestly. But when I took it over I made my own from scratch a lot of the time. Money was tight and my time was cheap. Or maybe it was because it gave me an excuse not to be cleaning the line Saturday night. Anyway, the recipe starts out pretty good, 1 pkg. 105F water dissolved yeast, 1 tsp. sugar, 1 cup flour, wee bit scalded milk, make a ball and submerge in 105F water till it floats. Nice starter. Now 3 cups flour, salt, 3tb sugar, 1/2lb butter,2 eggs and the starter, combine, knead, make a ball...rise for an hour. All this works good. But then you're supposed to integrate another 2 eggs and 1/2lb of butter without adding more flour. I managed to integrate them, but there was no way the gloppy, sticky mess was ever forming a ball to be worked. Maybe I needed to be working cold.... the kitchen was 90F at this point. Anyway, broke down, added enough flour to pull it into a ball... about 1 cup. Then you work it, and incorperate another 2 eggs. I did one. and added more flour as needed. Worked it some more and let it rise overnight in the fridge. From there everything was back on track... well, no... the recipe says proof for an hour. That is utterly inadequate with dough coming out of the fridge even into hot humid air. It will take 2, or more if the environment is cool and dry. Bake 15 minutes @475. Oh, and the dough freezes well. Not that I have the discipine to not immediately cook off and eat all the brioche possible. I really need a camera.

This is in danger of becoming a food blog.

Ricotta Gnocchi (a.k.a. Gnudi)

Ran across this gem surfing food blogs- incredibly simple and tasty. Recipes vary, but the part that doesn't is 8oz. drained ricotta per egg. Add some amount of flour... I like less... under half a cup. Not more than 1.5 cups. Salt. sometimes shredded parm, or melted butter, or zest, or parsley or sage. Very wet dough, use a lot of bench flour to roll it out. Roll is the wrong verb, though.... you need a light hand. Helps if everything is cold. Use a marble if you have it. Extra dough seems to last a week.

I've made the ricotta gnocchi three times now, and prepared it 5 ways. More dough in the fridge for another try this weekend.

1. Ricotta gnocchi with beurre noisette and brown sugar
2. Pan fried gnudi with blueberries and sour cream
3. Ricotta gnocchi with watercress pesto
4. Gnudi with porcini in a red sauce
5. Ricotta gnocchi with bacon and maple syrup

All good, but the one with blueberries was awesome.

I've been using a spectacular whole milk ricotta from a local Vermont farm, but on the agenda is making my own from scratch- I made mozzarella from scratch many years ago, and this looks much easier. Also I'm going to try rice flour and potato flour for gluten-free variants.... not that I'm into that sort of thing, but it helps to have a few recipes in your pocket... and sometimes they turn out better. For example, 50% rice flour/50% all purpose/salt/cayenne makes vastly superior fried calamari.

Mixed Greens Salad with Wild Boar Lardons and Garlic Scapes

Wild Boar Bacon Lardons. Garlic Scapes. Grilled Champagne Mango. Kalamata Olives. Each delicious by itself... cooked perfectly, pleasing to the eye and ear and yet, my god, what a complete failure. A Salad at war with itself. A disunion of flavors. Utter disaster. A failure only magnified mispairing it with a chilled 8 dollar Tempranillo.

Sometimes this happens. Not usually this badly.

The feral boar bacon (from Savenours) has an intense taste, balanced by a strong hickory smoke. I've been eating for breakfast with oatmeal (diced apples and brown sugar). Against that background, It wasn't clear how much this would take over a dish. The mango, a perfect foil for Chicken thigh, or Tilapia, got murdered here. Hickory + mango = yuck. The Scapes could hold their own combined with the lardons, and the combination even tasted good, but the textures and sizes meant you had a hard time getting these in your mouth at the same time, and, once there, you didn't like the way it felt. The Kalamatas also had enough oomph to stand up to the lardons, but the flavors refused to combine. Kalamata + Lardon = Kalmata + Lardon. The tastes alternate back and forth. Not exactly unpleasant, but not good either. Mango and olive, olive and scape, scape and mango.... all failures. It is hard to combine four good ingredients and have nothing work together. Misfiring on all cylinders today.

Jammie Thomas

In 1800s the British had a thriving IP industry. One of their most jealously guarded secrets was the design of a powered loom. In 1810 an American businessman named Francis Cabot Lowell stole those plans. Memorized them actually, but whatever.

And then we named a frakking city after him.

That's what we thought about IP 200 years ago. Real IP, too, not some trumped up gangster thug nonsense from a sickeningly corrupt oligopoly called the RIAA.

And frankly, that's what we still think about IP; aside from some brainwashed suckers, purchased politicians, and the aristocracy that steals the IP from the engineers and artists that actually create it under the legal handwaving they call 'work for hire'.

Welcome to Jammieville motherfuckers.

Humility and Japanese Stones

I used to be a professional chef. What that means varies from cook to cook. some people are purists and set he bar super high for 'chef'. Merely running a kitchen isn't enough. For others, nearly anybody who has cooked professionally gets called chef. There are some (usually incompetent) wankers who want to 'professionalize' cooking and require formal education. I generally think a good sous-chef at a quality place who isn't just scraping by, who is working to master his craft... I have no problem calling him chef. The kitchen manager at a TGI Fridays.... sorry, no. I met the requirements of all but the most uptight of blowhards. Ran a big kitchen, big check average, high quality food, hired and fired people, worked the line most nights, but didn't have to every night... ordering, menu control, specials... etc. The real thing.

Reminds me of a line a chef-mentor of mine used to repeat from time to time, in a bad fake French accent. "All my life, I work in the kitchen... they do not call me 'chef'. But I suck one little dick... I am 'cocksucker' for life." Not funny? Work fourteen hours in a tiny 110 degree kitchen for 6 days a week and it gets funny. Besides, it's true.

Anyway the point of all that is that I thought I knew a lot about cooking, the tools of cooking, food in general, and how to run a restaurant. And I did, really, compared to most people and most cooks too, honestly. But ... more than a decade later .. man, I wish I knew then what I knew now.

Take for example, knives. I though Henkels, Wustaf, and Sabatier were the cream of the crop. God was I wrong. These days I only use those to open tin cans and throw at waiters. The stuff coming out of Japan is so much better it blows my mind. Even a relatively cheap Tojiro knocks the hell out of the European competition. And the affordable stuff from Shun crushes the Tojiro... and that's the BOTTOM end of the market. Google Korin. Google Epicurian Edge. Mind blowing knives.

I have a few good knives now. I know how to use them. What I didn't know anything about was how to take care of them. I mean, I have a steel, and can do the swishy thing with it fast enough to make you peasants ohh and ahhh... but it would be so wrong to bang a Japanese knife, even a Shun, against a steel. It isn't like that actually sharpens, anyway. How could it? The blades are harder than the steel. Enter the world of Japanese sharpening stones. I can't even begin to do the subject justice. I don't know enough except to say I think I may be edging into some seriously cultlike territory.

A Beston 500 and the Bester 1200 arrived yesterday. Two incredibly pretty ceramic waterstones. These are so much better than the glazed little dual sided King waterstones my roommate uses for his chisels. Now I just need a pink 220 and something around 4000 grit... and It's enough to make me reconsider.... was I really a chef? A guy who was that ignorant of the most basic of the tools of his trade... and had no idea how to maintain them?

2-7 Triple Draw

So I played a little triple draw for the first time today. That's a lowball poker game where ace is high and straights and flushes count against you. It's pretty amazing to me as a badugi player... 1. that you have (what appears to be) the correct odds to draw as often as you do. 2. How good the median showdown hand is. I mean... 75432 is the nuts. A smooth 8.... might occasionally be worth value-betting. A 9 is ... usually beat. In badugi, A234 rainbow is the nuts, but I can often value-bet a T badugi.

Playing a new poker variant for the first time is mind-expanding. It shakes loose automatic plays and preconceptions you may have accumulated. When you pause, you aren't posing, you are actually thinking. Actually analyzing. I need to bring this back with me to my regular games. I suspect that the really good players are like that.. all the time.

Anyway... this was just at the .50/1.00 tables, so we're not talking crazy money here. Ten bones, as GV at WLTV would say. But I managed to pull out a nice little 8 dollar win. Wouldn't normally mean anything to me but my first time playing the game... wicked pissah... as we don't really say here in Boston unless we're being 'ironic'.

In the Courts of the Sun

When I spotted Brian D'Amato's book in the Science Fiction section at Borders, and I didn't recognise the name I should have realised something was wrong. Or maybe I did, subconsciously, because I skipped over it a few times before I bought it. Perhaps the cover art was a little too Dan Brown, The font a little too Grisham. But I read the first few pages and it seemed legit. Time travel of a sort, something went wrong, hero in danger. You've seen the plot before, right? Hero uses knowledge to overcome adversity. Maybe the characters are undeveloped etc... but we know that's because the real protagonist isn't the hero, it is the world, science, knowledge, the scientific method, reason. Maybe that's just a throwback to Campbell and the 'Golden Era', but most real Science Fiction has this secret protagonist. Everyone can die, but technological optimism survives. See 'Wreck of the River of Stars' by Flynn. 'Signal to Noise' by Nylund. 'Saturn's Children' by Stross. This book is missing that. Completely.

What it does have is a snarky modern leftist's cycnicism. I find that pretty tedious, and I live in Boston and lean a little left. I mean, Gay marriage, rah, rah rah. Keep abortion legal. This is someting else entirely. Haliburton causing megadeaths in Florida, for fuck's sake. General contempt for the military. People too hip to mix emotion with sex.

Then there's the cultural relitivism. In spite of, or more accurately, in direct opposition to the title of this blog, I'm conflicted about it. Sometimes. And there's this idea floating through this book that the Mayans were something really special. Like the Greeks. Something about that makes me want to vomit. How D'Amato can equate the two.... The Mayan death culture makes the Spartan's death culture ('Carrying your shield or on it') seem like pikers. Or Hoplites. Pun intended. It is enough to make me a cultural absolutist for a day. The Mayans sucked, and it was a happy, happy day that culture was wiped from the earth. Maybe that's the point of the book, except the book seems to ask, 'Why stop with the Mayans?' I'll tell you why. Because for all our flaws, we don't suck that much. And we're getting better all the time. But a cultural relativist and a cynic wouldn't see it that way. Maybe the Right is on to something when they accuse the Left of being into death culture.

Obscurish Pop culture references sprinkled throughout add a kind of fake hipster feel, like you're reading the Boston Phoenix checking the showtimes at TT the Bear's while sipping a Bacon martini. Whatever. Stephenson does it better. I mean, how many people are really going to know what Kenny Tran's face is going to look like at a final table at the Commerce in 2010? Look, I have a good idea, but I'm a poker geek who posts on 2+2 and plays Badugi. It just doesn't add much. Seems like a very forced way to make yourself look smart.

OK, bottom line. If you think the CIA took down the WTC and that it would be a good thing for the planet if all the people on it died and that things are going downhill and Peak Oil and Malthus and really enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson's books.... This is one for you. Otherwise, go find a copy of Flynn's 'The January Dancer' instead.

Crab Scrapple

So I had this idea to take two Maryland classics- crab and scrapple- and combine them.

Scrapple is delicious pork offal+cornmeal+spices, potted, chilled, sliced and refried for breakfast.

Crabs are nasty aggressive bottom feeders happy feeding off raccoon corpses.

Normally I'm elitist enough to avoid anything but jumbo lump, but for this recipe using whatever comes to hand kind of matches the spirit of scrapple. So I'd use anything short of ... and possibly including ... crab baader meat.

Take 1.5 cups water, 0.5 cups cornmeal, 1 tsp sea salt. Boil water and salt. Gradually add cornmeal, whisking until thick and smooth. add spices and 1 lb. crab. I used white pepper, cayenne pepper, coriander seeds and fennel seeds. I'm a bit of a spice geek, so I prefer whole spices ground in a mortar, but whatever. You can use Old Bay if you want, just don't talk to me about it afterwards. I also added some chopped fresh parsley and shredded parsley root. Both of those are very optional. Mix the cornmeal mush and crab and spices together until uniform and pack into a mould. I used a rectangular plastic ziplock container. worked great. If you use something like a loaf pan, line it with plastic wrap. Work it into the mould carefully to avoid air bubbles. Refrigerate overnight. Slice into 3/8" portions and fry in butter in a medium-low heat cast iron pan until you have a nice brown crust. It really helps if you don't poke at it. Serve two pieces with two fried or poached eggs and some dill baking soda biscuits. Hit the eggs with a shot of Tabasco or a hollandaise heavy on the Tabasco for maximum awesomeness. Mustard based cream sauce- maybe with mushrooms- would be good too.

Worked out great, absolutely nails the texture of Scrapple while adding enough delicacy that I think this could be used on an upscale brunch menu. Oufs a'la Menken perhaps?