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?