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'.