Vongsafood

Xan: Char Siu pork

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 06:51:00 +0000

Check it:

I cooked the pork shoulder sous vide for 24 hours at 150F, then diced it, tossed in a char siu sauce and broiled. Not to be outshone, the Brussels sprouts also rose to the occasion:

I am especially pleased to have tentatively solved a technical problem that had plagued me since I started sous vide cooking so many years ago. The juices from the cook bag can be used as the base for a sauce, but because they cooked at a low temperature, the proteins have not yet denatured. When you heat them in a sauce, they tend to cross-link, coagulating into an unappetizing mass that needs to be filtered out. I feel dumb for never realizing this before, but if there is already liquid in the pan and the juices are added slowly, they denature separately and don't cross link to other proteins that have already denatured. The result was a very good sauce which I cooked down to a glaze. I still need to do some further testing and tinkering to make sure this method is robust, but it's exciting.

Here's my porky sauce, happily bubbling away:

By the way, given the COVID situation, it's just unrealistic to have a full stock of herbs available whenever you need them. So I decided, I will just have cilantro all the time. It's quite at home in this dish, but I have also been putting cilantro on a lot of things that normally would not get cilantroed. I'm pretty happy with this situation, personally.

Anyway, gosh, you cannot take a bad picture of that pork.

Xan: Chicken piccata

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 21:00:00 +0000

If you browse the Vongsafood history, you will find many roast chickens. Lately I don't roast as many whole chickens as I used to. I got bored of it, to be honest. Now I often prefer to separate the chicken into parts, and use the dark and white meat for different purposes. In the most recent case, I used the dark meat for a pressure-cooked lentil stew (no photograph sadly, but I will share when I make it again). I saved the breasts for chicken piccata.

Boneless yet skin-on, the best of both worlds. Why do we see either boneless skinless or bone-in skin-on, even though it's hard for consumers to remove bones but easy to remove skin? Why not just leave the skin on in both cases and let us decide for ourselves if we want to remove it? I imagine the blame lies not with Tyson but with consumers who ignore this fact - that skin is easily removed - and that boneless skinless therefore sells much better. PSA: There's recent research that chicken skin is much more healthy than previously believed, being high in "good fats." I'm not sure our definition of "good fats" is done evolving, but that's what I hear lately. In any case, crispy chicken skin is delicious.

Rant aside, it makes little difference to me personally. Breaking down chickens is one of my more favorite kitchen tasks, and by your 100th chicken it's pretty quick, too. I mean, I will never be Jacques Pepin fast even after watching his chicken deboning video dozens of times on Youtube, but...either I don't have time to cook, or I have time to break down a chicken to my preference. Moreover, industrial chicken processing often does a poor job of leaving enough skin on the chicken breast, so your own results will be better.

Anyway, here is my latest chicken piccata:

Generally for any pan sauce lately I will use ghee instead of butter, and thank you mr. liquid soy lecithin for your smooth emulsifying ability.

I have two more chickens in my freezer and am seriously considering doing this again for both of them.

Not pictured above, Pacific Coast Harvest sent me celery root, so I cooked that up too.

I hate the taste of celery, and I guess I was hoping that celery root would taste different. Like you know how cilantro and coriander are from the same plant, but those people who hate cilantro (the leaves) are fine with coriander (the seeds)? Well, celery root did taste different. It tasted a thousand times WORSE. It was like the unique celery flavor component that I hate but so intense that I couldn't eat it. Broccoli instead to go with my chicken.

Xan: Vongsafood in the time of coronavirus

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 05:49:00 +0000

After a long hiatus, Vongsafood is back due to popular request! As I write this post on March 14, 2020, Seattle hospitals are down to a 3-day supply of gloves. The coronavirus on our doorstep is keeping us away from restaurants, so we must busy ourselves in the kitchen more than usual. We have a well-stocked pantry, freezer full of meat, and a weekly vegetable delivery.

A note on coronavirus and food safety: See this great article - https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavirus-a-comprehensive-guide.html

Anyway, on to food pictures. I will go back about a month and hit the meals I managed to photograph even though I wasn't expecting to start food blogging again.

We recently signed up for a weekly vegetable delivery from Pacific Coast Harvest (PCH), which is not a CSA exactly. Each delivery is fully customizable, and they make it easy to see how far your food is coming from (so you could eat "local" if that's your thing), but you can also get stuff from CA/Mex if you want.

Pressure-cooked those carrots to make them fudge-like:

They were pretty good. But. Most people who are like, "These local organic fresh vegetables taste so much better than supermarket veg"...it's like 50% in their heads, right? They often can't tell them apart in blind taste tests, or the difference is much smaller than they had perceived, right? Well, I wish I could be one of those fully bought-in people so I could experience these more expensive vegetables as truly revelatory. They are good. But the first-order thing is buy vegetables you like, don't let them sit around too long, and prepare them well. Cut out the bitter cores out of carrots if you care so much about flavor. You will notice I did not do that here. (Doesn't mean much since they are small carrots, but one time PCH also sent me these monster fat carrots and I also didn't do it then, so what does that tell you).

PCH also has some other items besides produce, like fresh pasta, which has resulted in us eating more pasta than normal. Now that I know from Mom that al dente noodles and pasta have a relatively low glycemic index due to some side-effect of the noodle-making process lengthening the gluten chains (Mom, can you provide a link? not sure I got the details right), we have also been happy to eat more of them.

With pasta in hand, I made this Caramelized Shallot Pasta from NYT Cooking that everyone has been raving about. I thought it was good, although not raveworthy. Caramelized shallots and anchovies are great, but I already add them (and many other "flavor bombs") to food on the regular. So how much of the hype is "This is a truly great combination of flavors!" vs "This is great compared to my normal cooking that doesn't make gratuitous use of flavor bombs." Personally, I have been logging and rating everything I cooked in the past month, and this pasta got the lowest rating so far ("ok"), which seems a bit unfair in retrospect, but still not exactly a ringing endorsement. You probably shouldn't listen to me, though, when so many other people love this dish. Actually, I would love some of you to try it and report back to Vongsafood!

My ratings have so far ranged from "ok" to "good" to "good!" to "great" to "great!" (Only a matter of time before variations on "bad" show up; we have been lucky this month). What I'm more excited about is this next pasta sauce, which received a "great!" rating. I'm actually using the same fresh pasta in both cases. But the sauce is quite different. OK so there's Italian sausage, which is a big unfair advantage. But the "secret ingredient" that really gets me excited is a pressure-caramelized globe eggplant. The eggplant came out a deep brown, and I lightly pureed it and added it to a fairly standard tomato sauce which was left over from another purpose (pizza).

It's very easy to pressure-caramelize eggplant: 500g eggplant, 30g water, 2.5g baking soda for 20 minutes at high pressure. This will caramelize the eggplant straight through by lowering the caramelization point (via baking soda increasing pH) and increasing the boiling point (via pressure). We have talked about pressure caramelizing vegetables on this blog before. But I never thought to try it on eggplant before, nor can I find any evidence of other people pressure-caramelizing eggplant. This is my new solution to the problem of eggplant: full of water, sucks up oil, generally annoying to get any browning -- and the most common variety in American supermarkets (globe eggplant) is the worst performer in all these categories! So instead of dealing with these issues, we rig it so the eggplant will caramelize in a wet environment, even though browning normally doesn't occur until well above the boiling point.

There's another problem I have with eggplant, which is that certain menbers in my household will eat it. This preparation solved that problem!

What I want to try next: Caramelize other parts of the sauce at the same time as the eggplant. Onions, that's a given. They aren't great out of the pressure cooker if your goal is stand-alone caramelized onions (inferior flavor and you will be left with a lot of liquid to strain or boil off), but as a sauce component it might work well and save enough time to justify the tradeoff. And what about the tomatoes themselves? An issue here is that tomatoes are acidic, which fights against the baking soda for attaining a minimal pH to caramelize at 240 degrees. And you generally don't want to add too much baking soda to things; you will start to taste it. But on the other hand, I know Modernist Cuisine has a recipe for caramelized ketchup, so I'll look into that. The solution may involve tomato paste.

UPDATE: I tried it! It earned my first "Bad!" rating! Vongsafooders, I went too far. I probably should have anticipated this. Just as pressure-caramelized butternut squash puree is too rich to eat on its own, you don't want to caramelize your entire pasta sauce. So now I have two pounds of a new flavor bomb in my freezer...

Anyway, I guess this turned into a pasta essay. So against my better judgment, I will share one other slapped-together lunch which tasted surprisingly good. Mind, it does not look good. But, I had leftover angel hair (Owen likes pasta), leftover guacamole (Owen likes guac). And did you know you can poach an egg in a coffee mug in the microwave? So I just combined these things for a quick lunch and it was pretty satisfying.

Don't get me wrong. The Caramelized Shallot Pasta was better. But points for novelty and simplicity, and look at that egg!

PCH has also been sending me eggs, by the way. The above is not one of them. The PCH eggs have a deep orange yolk, which people strongly prefer in taste tests. By this I mean that they prefer the deep orangeness, not the flavor. When regular eggs are dyed orange, no one can tell them apart any more. I am cursed to know this, but I still do like the experience of orange eggs. Hey, you know what else turns them orange AND improves the actual outcome? Salting the beaten eggs 15 minutes before cooking!

It's good to be back, but I'd better stop here. I will get to non-pastas in a follow-up post.

Blueberry Crisp

noreply@blogger.com (Kathleen) — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 21:15:00 +0000

It's been a long time since anyone posted here, and I have some Halloween themed treats that in particular need to be posted. But I just thoroughly enjoyed my Easter dessert, so I thought I'd post it!

There were lots of berries at low prices at the greengrocer's this past week, and after a quality check, I settled on taking home a few pints of blueberries. I can't remember the last time I baked with blueberries, so I was looking forward to searching up a recipe. I wasn't very enamored of the cakes, crumbles, and tarts, so I settled on making a blueberry crisp, very simple, following Martha Stewart's recipe. It turned out very tasty indeed!

Xan: Linden and Chris Wedding!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 07:06:00 +0000

We had a great week in England for Linden and Chris' wedding in June!

I've been going to a lot of weddings lately, but this was a unique wedding for me. The microscopic size -- 14 of us in all -- meant that, much like Antman, we could do some amazing things that have never been physically possible at larger scales. We all spent the week at Middleton Hall and cooked our own food and went on day trips to interesting places. As every cook knows, it's three times as hard to cook for twice as many people in a foreign kitchen, and four times as hard to clean up after them. But we just about managed it, and had a great time. We pulled off some real upscale dining, at least in the sense that the numbers on our bathroom scales have moved in the general direction of up!

You will not find any pictures from the ceremony here, because this is a food blog, and because Linden asked us not to eat during the wedding ceremony. Sorry to rain on your parade, but you can't very well expect sunshine from a wedding in northern England, can you?

Even so, I will include a few pictures that could plausibly be considered food pictures from some perspective. For instance, from a puffin's perspective, a beak full of minnows is a hearty lunch:

Puffin on Farne Islands, captured in flight by holding binoculars to the lens of a camera phone.

Furthermore, it must be said that from an Icelander's perspective, the puffin itself is lunch:

We did visit Iceland on the way home, and yes, when in Rome...

And from a French perspective, the walls of Bamburgh castle are lined with escargot:

I just like this photo.

You know what, I'm just going to post my favorite photos and I'll be damned if they don't have something to do with food.

Here's a sheep -- eating!

"Sheep in Sheep's Clothing"

Here's a mushroom -- calling all hobbits!

Moosh-roooms!

Here's a delicious Arctic tern-over!

Photo credit: Dad.

You see how it goes. Just you try and stop me! I spent just about 30 years mastering the English language and it will damn well say what I say it says! We actually have to discuss the matter of the terns on the food blog, because if I had to pick one word in the entire English language to describe terns, it would be PECKISH!

If I had to pick a second word in the English language to describe terns, it would be graceful. If I had to pick a third, it would be misanthropic -- they hate people. But English lacks the word I'm really looking for, which is a searing hatred for all multicellular lifeforms not currently involved in the raising of their young.

Calling all peckish graceful misanthropes! Anthropos sighted! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!

The incredible thing is that terns seem to seek out opportunities to take offense, in much the same way that squirrels seek out opportunities to make you feel guilty for turning them into roadkill. Unlike other birds, terns build their nests right along human walkways, and then they go ballistic and dive-bomb anyone who walks by*. There will be pecks, so be sure to wear a hat.

[*Actually, a better theory is that while terns hate humans, they hate other birds even more. So they nest inches from the humans because at least the seagulls won't bother them there.]

And it's not just pecks. Before we visited the Farne Islands, we were told to abandon all hope -- everyone gets pooped on. Indeed, the ranger sported a convincingly white-streaked hat. However, this hardly being my first rodeo, I immediately reassured everyone that only Dad would be pooped on. I can't say why birds always go for him, but I am pleased to say that my preregistered prediction proved 100% correct as usual. The "streak" continues!

O tern of terns, I shall name thee Peckin-Pa.

As you can see, the Farne Islands were a highlight for me. There were also some nice castles, and Grandma enjoyed a round of Skittles:

Do you really want to be the one arguing that Skittles aren't a food?

Rehearsal Dinner

The wedding week activities were fun, but at some point we really do need to get cooking. Linden asked me to handle the rehearsal dinner. This was to be the big meal of the wedding, and since I like constrained optimization problems, I gladly accepted. I needed a menu of foods that (a) scale well to 14 people, (b) are robust to an arbitrarily lousy kitchen, (c) could be cooked in a 3-hour window, and (d) satisfied an extensive list of dietary restrictions.

Empirically, it is pretty clear to me that constraints in the kitchen generally enhance creativity. But before I even got cooking, I faced a more significant constraint: the dress code was formal, yet I couldn't very well cook in a suit! I solved this problem by purchasing Genuine Chef Clothes, which are surprisingly cheap on Amazon:

Photo by Chris Day

It was a good call, too. I got carrot soup all over myself! (Honestly, who designs an immersion blender without a splash guard? The British, that's who! Soup is done when it sticks to the walls!)

I will be wearing my chef clothes ironically at all future dinner parties.

Anyway, we started with a first course of pressure-caramelized carrot soup, forged in the fires of Mt. Doom:

Linden and Chris each got one-carrot rings in their soups.

This is an easy soup, provided you have access to the high pressures found in the heart of Mt. Doom, which, at Vongsafood, we do. Caramelization reactions ordinarily begin at upwards of 300 F, well above the boiling point of water. If you want to caramelize carrots in a skillet, you must first boil off the surface moisture before the carrots start to brown -- and even then, only on the exterior. But if you double the pressure, the boiling point rises to 250. And if you add a bit of baking soda to create an alkaline environment, the caramelization point drops to 230, below the new boiling point! The upshot of this is that you can now caramelize your carrots in a wet environment. The pressure forces baking soda inside the carrots, which end up brown on the inside. We are talking about perhaps a 50-fold increase in the concentration of delicious caramelization reaction byproducts. Then all that's left is to carefully puree the carrots, thin with carrot juice and garnish.

For the main course, we roasted a couple of chickens and some leg of lamb:

I didn't take enough pictures. But if you want my opinion, the soup and the chicken were pretty good. The lamb was probably in my bottom quartile, but that's an unfair comparison since normally there is a lot of technology involved.

I was let off the hook for dessert. Yuandi made a lemon tart, which was really good!

Parade of yellows: Lemon tart with mango sorbet

I have a theory that yellow foods are the best on average. There aren't many of them, but they really are an amazing group. Anyway, you should all be very impressed with this lemon tart. In the grand scheme of things, meat is pretty forgiving. Roast lamb will always be okay, even if the oven is off by 50 F. But baking in an unfamiliar oven? Good luck!

Hungry for more?

Here are some other yummy foods we ate over the week.

Linden's pork ragout

"Who Kippers the Kippers?"

Fish and chips

"Now you salmon, now you don't..."

Duck Egg McMuffin

Inadvertently pulled chicken tikka masala

Unnecessary Miscellany

I will never forget...

Were-rabbit sighting! Dear Linden, I'm definitely NOT implying that rabbits could ever be a food.

Chris VA with trusty pun whisk

"Cayenne, Cayenne, wherefore art thou Cayenne? A pepper by any other name would taste as spicy..."

Photo by Dad "It Was Worth a Bit of Tern Poop" McPapagrumps

Conclusion

Linden and Chris are married!!!

...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Xan: Sous Vide Brisket!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 01:06:00 +0000

This brisket was brined, cooked sous vide at 155 F for 48 hours, then roasted in the oven for a few hours to develop the bark. 155 F is a nice compromise -- the texture is still like typical barbecue, but noticeably juicier.

Next time I'm going down to 24 hours, which should make it even juicier.

Barbecue is such a religion. I feel like I'm expected to have an opinion. But my only opinion is that it's a silly thing to be religious about. I'm still waiting to encounter a regional BBQ style that isn't delicious. I guess I like KC barbecue sauce the best, but that's probably just the sugar talking.

On the other hand, BBQ a great thing to be scientific about. If you're friends with science, you can get away with things like not having a smoker. Liquid smoke is legit, my friends. And there's no need for a smoke ring, because smoke rings don't contribute to taste. Actually, you can create a "smoke ring" by brining meat in curing salts for a few hours, but never in history has there been a better time to call something lipstick on a pig*. It's cosmetic!

* Sorry, I just couldn't save this one up for the next time we are cooking pulled pork.

Kathleen: Weekend Baking

noreply@blogger.com (Kathleen) — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 23:25:00 +0000

This weekend I was meant to go for a long ramble with a couple of my friends. Sadly, our walk was cancelled (especially sad since the weather was quite good), and I felt it would be a waste of my weekend to use it watching TV and playing games. So in addition to errands, mowing the lawn, cleaning, and so forth, I have done some baking.

This week the greengrocers had some very cheap blackberries on offer. Cheap blackberries is not often something I come across, so of course I had to make a blackberry pie. This is my first latticed blackberry pie in twenty years. Obviously I have a bit of practice doing lattice ahead of me, but I'm immensely pleased with the results.

Yesterday was more normal cooking; I made a red curry and basic muffins. The muffins are the same type that Mum used to make when we were children, nothing special but my favorite muffins to make. This is the muffins, 36 hours after they came out of the oven.

Xan: Kerr Lake 2015!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 06:10:00 +0000

We have just returned from VongsaCamping 2015 at Kerr Lake. This year's group: Mom, Dad, Kathleen, myself, Catherine, Chris VA, and also a cameo from Monica and Devin. Linden was notably absent, and yet somehow constantly present by phone, despite limited reception and significant timezone differences.

Regardless, good times were had by all. And, as this is technically a food blog, it must be said that we ate particularly well this year. Mom used to say that after a week of camping, regular food tastes amazing. However, I think this has slowly become disingenuous. The food gets better every year and at some point we just started eating better than we typically would at home.

What happened to us and when did we get so spoiled? It's hard to pinpoint a single cause, but if I had to describe the evolution of our camping menu, it would go something like this:

In the beginning, we were like everyone else. Beans and franks, you know? And grill food -- burgers, I suppose, and more franks? Not sure. I'm too young to actually remember the beginning, frankly, but I think it was a very frankly time.
Over the years, we picked up some great camping recipes from other campers. Chicken Chili and so forth. Things that are easy to prepare in quantity with limited tools.
However, we came to realize that it's so hard to cook anything in the wilderness that we ought to prepare as much as possible in advance. Dad would bring ribs that just needed reheating. Mom would precook onions and sausage and I would premix a dozen spices and then a Moroccan ragout involved nothing more than heating up a can of diced tomatoes together with precooked onions/sausage/spices, ready in 10 minutes.
As more and more partial and complete meals were prepared in advance, planning took on a life of its own. Meals were either planned or panned. And it turns out that if you do 10 times as much planning, you can eat twice as well.
From here, we continued to optimize, optimize, optimize, until we had so many great recipes that it became impossible to even cut the menu down to an amount we could eat in a week. This time, we had to have a two-dinner day to make room for it all. I even stopped catching catfish, which I'm told is an "improvement" in the menu, even though I don't necessarily agree.

What do you think, Vongsas? Is that what happened, or did I just make it all up?

I will now recap the food highlights of the trip, at least from my perspective.

Chapter 1: A cake with True Grit.

A few years ago, we discovered you can make cake in a Dutch oven over coals. Unfortunately, we had a little trouble with the orientation of our Pineapple Upside Down cake, which a certain person extracted from the oven only to drop it right into the sand. It was a very confusing experience. One minute we were looking forward to cake, the next moment we were looking down. We dusted it off as best we could, but it was certainly a cake with True Grit. It could have been much worse, actually, if it had fallen upside-down...or is that right-side-up? Whereas cats always land on their feet and toast always lands butter-side-down, Pineapple Upside Down Cake is guaranteed to land ambiguously.

In any case, this year we took no chances. We did a Texas Sheet Cake instead, which is always the right way up, and I was in charge of removing it from the pot, and there were no accidents, and it was glorious. You don't mess with Texas Sheet Cake.

Chapter 2: The Fires of Mount Doom.
Perhaps you don't know it yet, but there is really only one question you should be asking right now. You should be saying, "Xan, I get that you guys baked the cake in the Dutch oven, but what about the icing?"

You should be asking this because the answer is that we melted the icing on the fiery slopes of the goddamn Volcano we built with our bare hands.

One tries to minimize the cursing on a family food blog, but in this case we have found that sanitizing only makes the Volcano angry.

Specifically, what you see here is Chris wielding his trusty 40-oz bottle of 63% ethyl alcohol Germ-X hand sanitizer. The Volcano clearly does not appreciate attempts to clean up its act.

How this happened: Me and Chris are, of course, always looking for new ways to control fire. So I pitched him the idea to build a camping oven from scratch and see how good we could get it going. We quickly put together a small test oven with a few rocks and wet sand:

We were impressed with how well it worked and decided we needed Something Bigger. So we collected a bunch of rocks and dredged the lake bed for mud to act as mortar, which was baked pretty hard by the heat of the oven. Here is the oven in progress:

We found some mystery bricks and an old grate left behind by another camper. The fuel would go on the grate, and ashes would fall below like in a grill.

Some nice flat rocks would make for the roof of the oven and double as a stone cooktop.

We also added a smoking chamber which in retrospect was a mistake, as we did not actually have access to any woods that would be nice for smoking foods. It's mostly pine and sweetgum in the nutrient-poor soil around the lake.

Of course, at some point Chris decided that the chimney should be a volcano, and it was all downhill from there, in a Run-For-Your-Lives, Kill-a-Man-Jaro sort of sense.

To be perfectly honest, after hours of building this behemoth, we were not at all sure it would, you know, work when we lit it up. But as soon as we set it ablaze, smoke just shot out of the volcano.

Of course, we had to name it Mt. Doom.

One fire ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness BLIND THEM!

Anyway, you get the idea. It was pretty awesome. The next day, Chris built up the volcano even more.

Lake mud, cast into the fiery chasm whence it flame!

Sadly, I do not have any pictures of it on fire. Nevertheless, the stone cooktop got hot enough to toast our garlic bread.

Chapter 3: Chop chop! Pull pull! Pork pork!

While Chris was building out the Volcano, I was also engaged in another ambitious project: spit-roasting an 8 lb pork shoulder roast over the open fire. I wanted to make a spit from scratch. This turned out to be difficult. In fact I was fortunate to have access to a couple of particularly helpful tools.

First of all, this year finally saw the arrival of a proper felling axe. We retired our beloved hatchet, affectionately named Old Faithful by Chris, for its longstanding habit of faithfully flying off the handle in mid-swing. I will shed no tears for the departure of Old Faithful, and no fingers either.

Wielding the mighty felling axe, I was able to effortlessly hew the necessary lumber from a downed pine. I fashioned a pair of tripods to hold the spit, and used one of Dad's woodworking tools to remove bark and sharpen the spit itself:

Make no mistake -- that spear would have skewered a wild boar! But I had only purchased an NC fishing permit, not a hunting permit, and so I was forced to rely on the domesticated variety. (For now). We coated it in Memphis Dust and went right through the center.

The idea here is to have a main fire blazing off to the side, which generates embers, which are moved near the pork to cook it under moderate heat in a controlled fashion. The fire itself might contain perhaps a whole tree..

I always do like to include a whole tree in a fire like this, because you can just keep pushing it in as it combusts. This one was long dead and dried, but still quite heavy and Chris helped me to drag it over.

In the absence of a battery-operated rotisserie, draft animals, or fellow campers willing to do my bidding, I simply turned the spit every 20-30 minutes. After 7 hours on the spit, the pork looked like this:

Can you smell that? It smells GUUD!

Not done yet, though, as we were going for pulled pork.

Chapter 3.5: Lightning Strikes!

Pulled pork is an all-day affair. Unfortunately, all the day was not fair. Before the pork could finish, we were beset by a Most Epic Thunderstorm and had to resort to Backup Contingency Rain Plan #1, which was to throw the pork into the Dutch Oven, surround it with coals, cover it with foil, and wait out the storm.

Two hours and two inches of rain later, the storm finished. An hour after that, so did the pork. We pulled it, and dug in!

Pretty good, under the circumstances! And I will say that despite the fall of rain and night, we never once dropped the pork.

Epilog

Of course this is but a small sampling of the Kerr Lake 2015 menu. I wish I had pictures of all the food, but it's hard when your phone is mostly off. Maybe next time we can try to put together a more comprehensive review. In any case, I hope you have enjoyed this recap of our caper, jumbled as it may be. Yeah, think about it.

An epilog, charred. From the Greek epi- meaning "upon." A log on a log is an epilog. A frog on a log is an epifrog.

A pig on a spit on a log, to wit: epihog.

Xan: Santa Fe Salad

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 31 May 2015 14:39:00 +0000

Catherine loves Chop't, a sort of "Coldstone of salad" chain that is currently found only in DC and NYC. Because we do not currently live in either of those places, I modified a fine knockoff recipe of her favorite salad, the Santa Fe Salad.

Here is my version:

I like it a lot, but I have never had the real thing myself, so I rely on Catherine's evaluation. She says it is really good!

Ingredients

1 head of Romaine lettuce
1 cup of baby spinach
1 cup corn (canned, fresh, or frozen/microwaved)
3/4 cup grape tomatoes
1 avocado
1/2 cup pepper jack cheese
Two cooked chicken breasts, chopped (optional)
Tex-mex Ranch dressing (purchase from Chop't or make your own, see below)
1/4 cup fried onions

To make your own Tex-mex ranch, mix a quarter cup of ranch with the juice of one lime, 1 tsp paprika, 1 tsp cumin. In the future I will experiment with adding some cayenne.

Procedure

Chop vegetables and cheese into small pieces! Salad is hard to eat! Make it easy!
Mix ingredients together (including chicken if you are using it), aside from dressing and fried onions.
When ready to eat, toss individual servings with dressing and sprinkle fried onions over top.

Linden: Easter dinner

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 09:20:00 +0000

In England, we get a four-day weekend for Easter - Good Friday and Easter Monday. On the Thursday leading up to that weekend, me and Chris returned to our favorite restaurant - the Theo Randall at the Intercontinental in London.

This is the kind of place where Papa would say to Mama, "Our children have become accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle", despairingly. It is expensive and fancy, in a restful, luxurious, enjoyable kind of way. It also has the most amazing lemon tart, and amazing chocolate cloud cake, and also the beef ragu that inspired me to find, try, and add to regular rotation my pork ragu. And this time, we happened to be there on the day his new cookbook came out, and Theo Randall came out to talk to us and sign his book for us. (It turns out, his ragu tastes better than mine because he adds a stick of butter at the end.)

Now I don't buy a lot of cookbooks (usually, they are finicky and fiddly and either super fatty, use super expensive ingredients, or lots of simple carbs), but I bought his, because it has all three of those recipes. And it was super worth it, because it had a recipe for leg of lamb that I used three days later for Easter dinner. It called for butterflying, which I had not done before but was pretty easy (plus, it meant we did not have to cook a massive leg of lamb for just three of us. I did cut it into thirds and froze the other two portions). Then I seared it and put it in the oven to finish. We had it with a traditional roast dinner.

Plus Yorkshire puddings (which always seem to come out 3 minutes after you've sat down to eat). Every time I cook Yorkshire pudding with roasts that aren't beef, Chris says to me, "but Linden, why are you making Yorkshire pudding? We're not eating beef." BECAUSE THEY ARE DELICIOUS. And, because it's not like the English have ever been able to accurately and faithfully cook any other culture's food, they have no leg to stand on. And, ALSO, because some midlanders told me recently, that in Yorkshire, the HOME OF YORKSHIRE PUDDING, they make it with everything ever, and this roast beef thing was just made up by southerners. SO I WIN. Yorkshire pudding with everything!
The best thing about Easter was that while I was cooking Easter dinner, he and his mum did the spring gardening, and our garden now looks less like a wilderness.

And then for dessert, I made a french apple tart, which . I had a moment when making this where Chris asked, "Is this hard to make?" And I said, "No, it's pretty straightforward, I'm not sure why I didn't make this years ago" and then had to backpedal - BACKPEDAL - because in the negotiations of how often I cook this, Chris thinking it's straightforward is not in my interest, and in reality, it's not exactly Level 1 dessert making (brownies and cookies); it's more like Level 4 or 5. You have to make the tart crust and chill it, prepare the filling, and peel, core and quickly&regularly thinly slice your apples and then arrange them on the top of the tart. I didn't make it 4 years ago because it would have been really hard then. But it is so worth it, except that it disappears so quickly? And Chris got really upset that I sent some of it home with his mum?

It is SO GOOD that I'm including the recipe here. Set aside at least two hours unless you are an apple peeling ninja. (Modified from here)

Pastry:
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 pinch salt
1/2 cup butter slightly softened
1 egg yolk
3 T cold water

Frangipane:
1/2 cup butter, softened at room temperature
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 egg yolk
1 T Cognac or calvados or apple brandy (traditionally it's made with calvados, which is a French brandy made from apples, which is different from apple brandy, which is American brandy made from apples. You can substitute cognac, which is what I did because it is more flexible and if I'm going to buy a big bottle of spirits that I'm going to use 1T at a time, I'd rather it work in more than one dish.)
2/3 cup ground almonds
2T all-purpose flour

3-4 medium sweet apples (I used gala) peeled, cored, halved and thinly sliced.
Powdered sugar for sprinkling on top.

Directions.
1. Pastry: Stir together flour and salt. Add butter, egg yolk and water, and stir until the mixture forms large crumbs. Add water until you can form a ball. Wrap the ball in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 30 mins. (Pastry dough easily lasts 2 days in the fridge if you're doing this in advance. Wrap it well, and don't leave it next to bananas or onions, because dough picks up fridge odors.)
2. Frangipane: Cream butter and sugar. Mix in egg and egg yolk. Mix in cognac. Mix in almonds and flour.
3. Roll pastry dough out to a 12 inch circle. Put in 10-inch tart or pie pan. Press into bottom and sides. Prick with a fork and flute the sides. Put back in the fridge and chill until firm.
4. Preheat oven to 400F (200C). Place a baking sheet inside oven while it preheats, on a lower rack.
5. Spoon frangipane into chilled pastry and spread into even layer. Arrange the apple slices in an overlapping spiral pattern. Each slice should have one edge pressed into the frangipane until it touches the pastry base, and then overlap the previous slice. Start at the outside edge, and work towards the center.
6. Place the pie plate on top of the baking sheet in the preheated oven. Bake for 15 minutes, or until the filling begins to brown. Reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Bake for another 10 minutes, then sprinkle sugar over the top of the tart. Return to the oven for 10 more minutes, or until the sugar caramelizes slightly.

Done! Eat warm.

Xan: Flank steak with secret ingredient!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 15:01:00 +0000

Flank steak, roast mushrooms, salad.

This is going to sound weird, but the secret ingredient to Catherine's favorite flank steak is...fish sauce! According to Nathan Myhrvold, marinating the beef in fish sauce will mimic the flavor of dry-aged beef. I don't think it really nails the flavor of dry-aged beef, but I see where he's coming from. It's a richer, more complex and savory flavor.

Use 3g fish sauce per 100g beef and marinate in a ziploc with air squeezed out, for 3 days. (You can do one day if you like, but then I would cut the fish sauce by half). Thoroughly pat dry and then cook like normal. In this case I have sous videnated the steak at 135. If you are cooking sous vide (and now I'm talking to an empty room), do take the marinated steak out of your bag and pat it dry to get rid of excess fish sauce before cooking. (Fish sauce inside the meat = good. Fish sauce outside = fishy).

Xan, Catherine, Kathleen, Jenny: Chicago Thanksgiving!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 15:59:00 +0000

After a disappointing turnout of zero physical guests last year -- although Linden and Chris did join us digitally via Skype! -- we were excited for Mom and Kathleen's visit to Chicago for Thanksgiving 2014. We had a great time and made too much food, which is the point of course.

After years of dissatisfaction, I decided to go ahead and separate the dark and white meat. I did an especially fine job of encasing the breast in bacon this time. In fact I attained 100% bacon coverage:

However, the oven temp was a bit too low and the bacon did not render and brown enough. It was still good though!

Meanwhile, the dark meat was braised in wine and stock:

Elsewhere, Kathleen and Catherine worked on the braiding of the herb bread:

As you can see, they have both contracted an acute case of PaulaDeenitis, also known as The Orange Horror. That's what happens when you sneak sweet potato biscuit after sweet potato biscuit before dinner, even though it is expressly forbidden:

"I only ate three!"

Here is a full plate:

Turkey breast with gravy, turkey thigh, stuffing, brussels sprouts, roast potatoes, sweet potato biscuits, herb bread, salad.

There was also some caramelized pumpkin soup:

And finally, pie!

It looks like I've been thoroughly shut out of the pie-making decisions at Thanksgiving time, although I anticipate this changing soon. As you can see, the King of Pies is clearly absent. Apple pie is good, but pecan pie will always be the best. That is an objective fact. Furthermore, I'm not a big fan of pumpkin pie, although apparently this was the best pumpkin pie anyone had ever had. As you can see from its extra-deep orangeness, it is a Paula Deen recipe, which also means it is the worst pumpkin pie anyone has ever had. This pie has butter and half-and-half and cream cheese and whipped cream. I am now completely surrounded by orange people, and they're orangening more with every slice. In fact I can hear them in the other room right now, eating pumpkin pie for breakfast. I give them a week, tops. After that, I will be making all the pie decisions!

Kathleen's chili salsa!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 15:36:00 +0000

Kathleen sends in a picture of the prepping her famous All-Chili Salsa! In this salsa, she dispenses altogether with the usual "filler" of tomatoes, onions, and other unspicy foodstuffs, using a variety of hot peppers in their place. After chopping up the peppers, the salsa needs just a squeeze of lime to be complete.

Here is the cast of characters, ready to be diced:

You may ask yourself, if tomatoes have been replaced by peppers, then what are peppers replaced by? I mean, as you can see, Kathleen has replaced tomatoes with habaneros (in the back) and chocolate habaneros (the dark ones), onions with lemon peppers (yellow), and cilantro with fish peppers (green). Where can we go from there? What are those wrinkly red and orange things?

Brace yourself. I'm sorry to report that Kathleen has just progressed into Stage VI of the Heat Madness. I did not even know her affliction had a Stage VI, yet here we are, undeniably. The mystery pepper is none other than the Bhut Jolokia, the fabled ghost pepper, and Kathleen has obtained no fewer than five of them. Yes, you should be scared. The Ghost pepper clocks in at over 1 million Scoville units. (For comparison, jalapenos are rated at about 1,000 Scovilles).

In case you haven't noticed, ghost peppers are a primary hallmark of insanity in the 21st century. There are dozens of lunatics on Youtube taking the "Ghost Pepper Challenge," and it never ends well. For example:

Family, friends, I beseech you. No longer can we stand idly by. No longer can we ignore the warning signs. It is time and past time to stage an intervention, or we will lose Kathleen forever to the deepest depths of the Heat Madness. The time for actions is upon us. What say you?

Xan: Sous-vide pork tenderloin

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 07:34:00 +0000

All things considered, pork tenderloin is not my favorite cut. I'm just not on board with the emphasis on tenderness over flavor. If I have to choose between them, I will take flavor any day.

Technically, now that I have my immersion circulator, I don't have to choose between them. I can take tough, flavorful cuts and make them tender, with a longer cook. Even so, I'm not going to completely stop eating the naturally tender cuts.

Cooking sous-vide for a short time (1-4 hours) has its own advantages. Over this short time, the meat truly loses almost no moisture, ending up noticeably juicier than meat cooked either the conventional way or over an extended stay in the water bath.

Here is pork tenderloin cooked at 138 F for 3 hours:

Pink and juicy.

And if anyone is wondering about the safety of cooking pork to 138 degrees: The idea is that bacteria die much quicker at higher temperatures, but by holding the meat at 138 for long enough, the same number of bacteria are killed. This pork has been completely pasteurized, which sous-vide allows me to do at a lower temperature than other cooking methods allow.

So not only is the meat cooked evenly from edge to edge, but it can also be safely cooked to a lower temperature throughout, if desired. We could go down even further from here, although at this point the binding constraint has nothing to do with science. I must always ask myself: Will Catherine eat it?

Anyway, this is easily the best pork tenderloin I've made.

Unless it was this one a few days before:

Yo dawg, I herd you like two-packs, so I put a two-pack in your two-pack so you can eat while you eat...

I'm not sure, but I had two chances to experiment because Costco sells pork tenderloin in two packs. I gave half of my two-pack to Ryan, but it turns out each half of the two pack is also a two-pack, because Costco is the eternal trailblazer of embiggening.

I served one of these with squash soup:

Really excellent, but that's for another post. (Forthcoming!)

Xan: Sous-vide leg of lamb for Easter!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 23:35:00 +0000

As usual, we had leg of lamb for Easter! I was really excited to sous-vide it, because leg of lamb is a cut with wide swaths of fairly lean meat, yet also a decent amount of connective tissue. So I hypothesized that it would really benefit from an extended stay in the water bath. I did 24 hours at 137 degrees F, but next time I might even go down to 12 as it did not need that much tenderizing.

Before we get to the cooking, though, I want to say a quick word about how I trim meat. Look at this leg:

There's a pretty thick fat cap. People tend to either take it all off or leave it all on, but I think that's missing a great opportunity. My goal is to take most of it off, leaving just a thin layer of fat:

It doesn't require super butcher skills. It doesn't have to be pretty. Just make it look something like that, and don't worry, it will be beautiful after it cooks.

Ode to crispy fat.
Shall I compare thee to a simmer's bay leaf?

No, because that would be silly. But I will tell you why you should bother to follow my trimming instructions.

You should bother because there's nothing so delicious as browned, crispy fat, and only the outermost surface of the fat will ever get crispy. Non-crispy fat can be good too, although frankly it doesn't hold a candle to crispy fat, and if you leave a lot of fat on, most Americans will simply cut it all off anyway. But everyone loves a thin layer of crispy fat.

I mean, that's basically what bacon is. That's the reason everyone loves bacon, even though it is 50% fat, even though they trim the fat off their steak without a second thought.

Nevertheless, you could conceivably go your whole life without explicitly noticing that crispy fat is the component producing max deliciousness. So I'm here to beat you over the head with this obvious-in-retrospect fact. It's easy to verify. The next time you are trimming your steak at the table, try cutting off the very outer edge of the fat and eating it. You won't be disappointed.

And, by the way, I think you should mostly ignore recipes that tell you to leave a big fat cap so the meat will be basted while it roasts in the oven. Basting action can serve a purpose (effectively frying the outside of the roast), but a little goes a long way, and fat takes a long time to render. After the roast is done, you will probably be left with a thick layer of all the unrendered fat that did not baste your meat, so what was the point of it? If you happen to be surrounded by people who like to eat that stuff, then by all means, leave it on. Otherwise, you can get 95% of the flavor boost with 5% of the waistline boost by trimming most of it away.

Results.
Anyway, so I bagged the lamb with olive oil, garlic, and thyme:

After cooking, the lamb was quickly seared, to produce this:

I served it with carrots and asparagus, and Israeli couscous which I combined with my egg-lemon soup recipe, which turned out to be a really good idea:

As you can see, the meat is perfectly pink. There is no visible fat, only a thin crispy layer working its invisible magic on the look and taste of the final product.

To Victory!
And now I would like to make a very special announcement: Victory! As we know, lamb is an acquired taste, and one that most Americans have not acquired. Less than one pound of lamb is consumed for every 100 pounds of chicken in the US. And there was a time when Catherine too did not like lamb. She would eat it, but only begrudgingly. I have worked hard to change that, because lamb is one of my very favorite meats.

Recent months have seen considerable progress. First, she started to complain when I would cook lamb for myself and chicken for her. Then I started to get actual positive reactions. And with this dish, I got a genuine rave review!

Wolf me down, and your journey towards the lamb side will be complete!

Furthermore, I have since replicated my results with a lamb shoulder roast (forthcoming), so it wasn't just a fluke. It's safe to say that Catherine now loves lamb, just like me and many of my fellow Vongsas. Huzzah! It's only fitting, now that she's a Vongsa too :)

Xan: Sous-vide short ribs!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:58:00 +0000

72-hour sous-vide short ribs at 144 degrees, and sous vide eggs:

As you can see, at 144 they are still fairly pink, and because of the long cooking time they were hard to get out of the bag without falling apart. They were pretty good, although next time I think I will go down to 135 degrees for 72 hours.

I don't have a gratuitous shot of breaking those egg yolks, so here's one from a similar adventure a couple weeks later:

That would be Ryan's hand...

Didn't I tell you before that I just serve everything inside a spaghetti squash now? Apparently I was actually being serious.

Xan: Sous-vide beef chuck!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 21:50:00 +0000

Kris and Cammy got us an Anova immersion circulator off our wedding registry. You Vongsafooders probably know that already, because I have been going on about it for 2 months now. I know, I know, that's a lot of talk and no pictures for a guy who has a food blog. But don't worry, your patience will be rewarded. Today!

Background

Sorry, but I have to give some background on sous-vide at least once. If you just want to see the results, scroll down to the next section.

To quote from wikipedia,

Sous-vide (/suːˈviːd/; French for "under vacuum") is a method of cooking food sealed in airtight plastic bags in a water bath...for longer than normal cooking times—72 hours in some cases—at an accurately regulated temperature much lower than normally used for cooking.

Much like the internet, meat is basically a series of tubes, except full of water instead of the NSA. And when you heat it to a given temperature, the tubes contract, squeezing out water that will never come back. (Unfortunately, the internet doesn't quite work that way).

Ordinary cooking methods produce a gradient of doneness. By the time the center is cooked to the desired temperature of, say, 130 degrees, the outer layers of meat are overcooked. Sous-vide cooking gets around this by cooking the meat in a water bath at the exact temperature you wish your meat to end up. As a result, it can never overcook and stays pink from edge to edge.

Furthermore, consider a tough cut like beef chuck. Normally, you would cook it at a higher temperature (say 190 degrees) to break down all the tough connective tissue. Unfortunately, the tubes still contract and you are left with dry, gray meat. Of course, chuck is full of fat so it's still delicious. But what if you could have the best of both worlds?

It turns out that connective tissue will break down at lower temperatures, but much more slowly. Enter sous-vide. By holding the water bath at 135 degrees for 24-72 hours, the chuck becomes tender while remaining pink and juicy. (Photographic proof below!)

Because I love meat, I've been excited about sous-vide cooking for a while now. I did some experimenting back in January 2011, but I certainly wasn't going to cough up $500 for a large countertop appliance, plus another $150 for a large vacuum sealer gadget.

A few years later, immersion circulators are just starting to become affordable for home cooks. They are smaller (you just attach them to any pot), much cheaper, and actually outperform the countertop appliances anyway. And I discovered Ziploc vacuum bags that you pump the air out of with a small, $5 plastic vacuum pump. What's not to love? It was clearly time to jump aboard.

Great, let's get to the meat of it!

The very first thing I cooked was beef chuck, and it was amazing.

I sealed the meat in a vacuum ziploc and pumped out the air. Then I put it in a water bath at 135 degrees F:

24 hours later, this emerged:

It's nothing special to look at yet. All the magic is on the inside. Since meat doesn't really brown at 135 degrees, next we give it a quick sear on all sides:

After a couple minutes...

...the meat is transformed into this:

Now let's cut into it and see what we have:

Yep. As promised, it is pink from edge to edge. This is beef chuck with the consistency of a good steak, and more flavor to boot. Dinner is served!

The texture can be adjusted by varying the cooking time. To produce a more falling-apart texture, we could increase the time to 48 (or even 72) hours. But we really like the 24-hour chuck and have cooked it several times now.

More to come!

Xan: Assorted pics

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 08:35:00 +0000

I am dreadfully overdue for a food update. But I am also dreadfully overdue for bed. So here are a few pictures from months ago, to hold you over.

Pac-Man meets pulled pork:

These go very well together, maybe I'll make it into a thing. Cornbread pork sandwiches?

Also, apples. And maple syrup and barbecue sauce, courtesy of Anne!

Actually we started eating a lot of cornbread.

Sometimes Catherine complains about chili, but I learned that she doesn't complain if there's cornbread.

*

Next up, here is Catherine's muffins with Linden's granola:

And here is a photo titled, The Lean Tower of Papa:

Incidentally, here is one titled, A Sight: Four Sore Eyes:

I don't know who comes up with these titles...

*

Next up: Adventures in sous-vide and pressure cooking!

Xan: Roast Chicken with Spaghetti Squash. It's magically delicious!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 07:16:00 +0000

Wouldn't it be amazing if we lived in a world where you could cut a squash in half and find this:

Unfortunately, plants haven't quite mastered pseudo-meat yet. Even when they're trying to be eaten, at best they are sweet, not meat. Or maybe nature is just messing with us. Maybe the carrion flower is nature's way of saying, "Well...we can make meat grow on trees...but instead we're just going to torture you."

Well if nature won't lend a hand, we'll just have to do it ourselves.

Or not. It really depends who you are.

Like Maru box cat, Catherine loves the white meat. And like Maru, she doesn't have to lift a paw to get it. From her perspective, this world is observationally equivalent to one in which you could cut open a squash and magically find chicken.

What magic is this?

Actually, that's not quite true. Catherine doesn't even have to cut the squash. In fact, I would go so far as to say that she can't cut the squash. For this mighty task requires a mighty tool. Behold, Mewlnir the Mouse Hammer!

Take heed, for I am called many things. The Bane of Bones. The Crusher of Cutting Boards. The Squasher of Squashes. The cabinets will quake when I am unsheathed. Lo, my gleam will slice through the air and you will know that I am come. You will know me then by my One True Name. Fear me! I am Mewlnir the Mouse Hammer, the Destroyer of All Things.

With a name such as Mewlnir, you will surely want a backstory, and here at Vongsafood we sure do love our utterly foodless and completely superfluous Vongsatangents!

A Tale of Two Tangents.

It was the best of tangents, it was the worst of tangents. Depending who you ask, it was either a really good or a really bad idea for Kathleen to get a cat. Is there a Schroedinger joke in there somewhere, or not? Two things are known: first, that Dad would prefer the cat dead and nameless, and second, that Kathleen would prefer the cat alive and, well, named, but not necessarily well-named.

When Kathleen got a cat, she solicited name suggestions. Dad's only comment was:

It doesn't deserve to be named, but in order to avoid the whole Love
Symbol: "Cat formerly known as It" awkwordity, I will refer to it as
Scrod.

I, on the other hand, offered literally dozens of excellent suggestions for cat names. From the Periodic Table alone, I generated so many good ones: Fluoraline. Chloraline. Mrs. Iodine! Mrs. Dr. Iodine! Beryllia. Zinc.

Yet somehow she rejected those. So I looked to my pantry and Greek mythology. Parslephone! Shallothalia! Thymelpomene! Paprikat! All rejected. It seems that Kathleen has no taste, although in retrospect I clearly should have suggested something spicy. Death Stalker? Ghost in the Darkness?

Next I tried dinosaurs (because...dinosaurs!), but to no avail. Deinonycat, Pterodacatyl, Quetzalcatlus, and more, all extinct before they even had a proper chance.

What about candy? Everyone likes candy! I know Kathleen likes candy. Kitkat? Snickers? Mrs. Goodpurr?? Jaffa Cat?!?

Alas, no dice. It was time to weaponize. Cats are always trying to stick people with their claws, so...Felis Cactus! Come on, that's great! Or might she prefer a karate cat? I know Kathleen likes Harry Potter, so what about Mrs. Chuck Norris? Such a cat would even come equipped with Mrs. Chuck Norris facts. Mrs. Chuck Norris is the reason Waldo is hiding. When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Mrs. Chuck Norris. There is no Theory of Evolution; just a list of animals Mrs. Chuck Norris allows to live.

No? Why ever not?!?

And so we come to my last, best, and most desperate suggestion. A name never to be used lightly. A name so powerful that time seems to slow whenever it is uttered. I am referring, of course, to Mewlnir the Mouse Hammer. The power! The glory! Can you hear it? Can you hear the sound of all the world's mice collectively squeaking in terror?

And so, naturally, she named her cat Grace.

I think we can agree that "Grace" is what you name your cat if you want it to throw little mouse tea parties and ice cream socials.

Anyway, how Kathleen rejected this frankly awesome cat name, I will never know. What I do know is that after she did, I was free to claim it for my meat cleaver. And I don't know how "Grace" is working out for her, but I can tell you that Mewlnir is doing a fine job in my kitchen.

Though my kitchen is a black box from which delicious dinners magically emerge, it is nevertheless full of Catherine's Mickey Mouse plates and Mickey Mouse hot pads and Mickey Mouse pizza cutters.

So. Many. Mickeys.

But in this sea of Mickeys, one tool rises above the rest. When the Mouse Hammer comes out to play, the pantry rattles with the fear of all things. The mice go into hiding, and sanity is restored, if only for a time.

A mighty tool requires a mighty wielder, and only I am mighty enough to wield Mewlnir. Which is why, as I said 2 hours ago, Catherine cannot cut squash.

[A cleaver is excellent for cutting big things like squash, because it can be halfway through and the top of the cleaver is still sticking well out of the squash. That means you can whack it right on top, right in the center, and keep driving it through. A thinner knife gets a couple inches into the squash and then what do you do? Apply force from the handle? Good luck. Maybe put another hand on tip of the knife, sticking out the other side of the squash? Have fun with that. By the way, your knife is now stuck in a giant, dense squash. Furthermore, the deeper you are able to cut, the more stuck it will be, when you eventually have to give up and try a different angle. Whatever you do, it will not be safe. Anyway, I'm sure even you, a devoted tiny-print-reader, are tired of hearing about Mewlnir. Which is a shame, because Mewlnir is awesome. Mewlnir Mewlnir Mewlnir.]

Nevertheless, though Catherine cannot cut squash, she can still eat this:

Technically this one is mine, as our contract specifies that Catherine gets all the white meat.

Because, as we have established, magic. It's just chicken, spaghetti squash, carrots, and sweet potatoes. The chicken has paprika, chili powder, brown sugar, salt, and pepper, and everything else has...chicken. I mean, pan drippings. Yep, that's about it. Nothing fancy, but magically delicious! You can't really go wrong here, which is a lie, but I like the way it sounds.

Using sophisticated econometric methods, I estimate that our relationship is at least 80% magic, of which only about 10% falls in the kitchen. It's fortunate there is so much magic to go around, because there are Mickeys in all the other rooms as well. Aaaaaaaaaah!

Goodnight everyone! And see you at the wedding! I'm going to bed now, which is a lie, but I like the way it sounds...

Xan, Catherine, and Kathleen: Turning up the Heat!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 08:01:00 +0000

[We break radio silence to bring you this special edition of Vongsafood. In today's episode, we chronicle one family member's lifelong quest to conquer Spice Mountain. Also, Pizza Madness -- that's making you mad with pizza. And what does a hedgehog have to do with pie? All this and more on today's episode of Vongsafood!]

The rest of this post will not, however, sound like NPR.

Kathleen came to visit us in Chicago last weekend! As you are no doubt aware, it is a very good idea to hide the spicies before Kathleen arrives. Unfortunately, things were just a little too hectic on Friday and I missed this crucial hosting step.

So, Dad, I apologize in advance for what you are about to witness. I just screwed up, and I take full responsibility. Do not blame Kathleen! She is basically not a player character where spicy is concerned. Whatever control she may have in other areas of her life, when food arrives in front of her, the spicy subroutine kicks in and takes over. It goes like this:

This food is not spicy enough.
I must apply spice until the food is spicy enough.
This bottle does not dispense spice fast enough.
I must remove the lid so the bottle dispenses spice fast enough.
I must shake the bottle harder to increase the rate of spicing.
I must not stop shaking until spice has attained supermajority status.
Spice has attained supermajority status and now controls the spicing vote on plate.
Request further spicing instructions. Food plate constituents: Please advise.
Spice supermajority has voted for More Spice. Executing request.
Food is no longer visible beneath Spice Mountain. Finally, it is time to eat!
My mouth is on fire. It burns so good.
[Cough! Gasp! Wheeze!]
Note to self: Inferior airways still not robust to atmospheric conditions at top of Spice Mountain. Training regimen must continue.

I cannot emphasize enough that these steps just happen. Sometimes Kathleen doesn't even like it that much, but she has to do it because eating ultra spice is part of her identity. There is nothing to be done, except stand back and watch with some combination of awe, amusement, and terror. In what follows, I document a few of these moments for posterity.

Here Kathleen has just executed Step 4:

Red pepper flakes in full pour mode.

And here is Step 5 in action. Dear reader, please do not try this at home. A bottle of red pepper flakes with lid removed should never be shaken vigorously enough to produce motion blur:

As you can see, here we are just starting to lose sight of the People's Pepperoni Party. This is an important step on the road to attaining a 100% Spice Approval Rating from all visible food constituents, and as such it forms the very foundation of Spice Mountain in Steps 9 and 10.

The individual steps of the subroutine are practiced and automatic, and as such they pass by quickly. But I was also able to capture the precise moment of Step 12 at Dim Sum the next day:

This is her second dish of chili sauce. She has decided to drop all pretense and simply put it on her plate.

Anyway, you might think that next time I will be more careful to hide my red pepper flakes. However, you would be wrong. Your mistake is to presume that I still have any left.

What a rookie mistake! Do you even know Kathleen? The more experienced among you are more likely thinking, "But Xan! So far you've only discussed a single bottle of red pepper flakes and a couple dishes of chili sauce in Chinatown. Kathleen was there for 3 days! What happened the rest of the time?"

Pepper Palace is what happened. Kathleen discovered Pepper Palace.

Kathleen gleefully displays her spoils.

Inside the bag: Ghost in the Darkness, Pain 100%, Death Stalker, and two more monstrosities I can't remember the names of. This kept Kathleen busy -- and my hot sauce reserves safe -- for the rest of the weekend.

Of course, Kathleen also travels everywhere with at least one bottle of her own personal hot sauce. Don't mess! She's always packing heat. Someone should probably get her a holster.

*

Okay, can we talk about actual food? There was actually food, somewhere, underneath all the spice.

Is this pizza one quarter cheese or three quarters pepperoni. It depends...are you an optimist or a pessimist?

Kathleen really wanted deep dish, being in Chicago and all, but I refused to make it, and she was pretty happy with this pizza instead. Because it is so delicious, of course.

In principle this pizza can be very easy to make but I amped it up and it is now more of a maximally delicious pizza than a maximally convenient pizza. On top of the dough, we have tomato puree, salt, pepper, oregano, basil, paprika, caramelized onions, sundried tomatoes, cheese, pepperoni, and panko bread crumbs. (Of course I had my own cheeseless one).

That said, it can be done with as little as half an hour of active labor, if you know all of Xan's secrets of timesavingness.

Kathleen really liked this pizza. In fact, as is her custom, she "praised" it by favorably comparing it to my past "failures." "You didn't used to make pizzas like this!" she said. It is always about my what a long way I've come. However, in this case she completely failed to negate her compliment, because she compared this pizza to my pulled pork pizza, and we know how certain members of the family feel about that one. So there! I'll take it!

You know what else? Why does everyone in the family always have to say things like, "Don't you dare tell Linden, but this pizza is the best!" Relax, Kathleen, why would I ever tell Linden you said that? She would just be mad at both of us. Especially you, since you're the one who said it and also you forgot her birthday. And the rest of you lot: I get it, okay? Mom, I agree it's best if Linden thinks you "like all of your children's pizza equally." And Dad, I would never reveal that you bestowed upon my pulled pork pizza the highest culinary compliment you are capable of giving, namely the suggestion that I should drop out of school (i.e. fail to graduate) and make pizza instead. The point is, I think I'm old enough to keep a secret. Relax, everyone.

And Linden, you too! Don't blame Kathleen for forgetting your birthday. Unlike me, she does not have a foolproof organizational system for remembering these things. She relies on her far superior elephantine memory, which means she always remembers your birthday, she just doesn't necessarily remember that it is currently your birthday. Also, what do you want for your birthday? I did not want to ruin your birthday by asking.

See? See how considerate I am?

I feel like I'm five steps ahead of you people. I know what you're probably thinking right now: Gee, I really, really hope Linden doesn't read this post...because then she would have to think of something for Xan to get her for her birthday.

No no no. You are totally missing the point. Linden does not want anything for her birthday, but she also doesn't want to be forgotten. She wants to be asked but doesn't want to have to answer. So because I am a genius, I have found a way to ask her without making it common knowledge between us that she has been asked, which means she never has to admit she has been asked, even though she has, and thus she never has to answer. (Unless she actually wants to, in which case she can).

And because I am a double genius, she can also never complain about any of the other content of this post without making it common knowledge that she has been asked and therefore has to answer. More specifically, she can never complain to me. She can make all your lives super difficult, but the beauty of it is that I never have to live with any of it. And that, my friends, is called treble genius, because it does treble damages.

*

Speaking of pizza and Linden and her birthday, when I talked to her on her birthday, she suggested that I replace half of my bread flour with whole wheat flour in my pizzas. So I tried it, and the results were pretty good!

It's denser than my usual dough, but not that much, and overall I was surprised at just how well it behaved. It definitely had that whole wheat flavor, and reminded me a bit too much of bread in some bites, but I will definitely be repeating.

*

Coming back to Kathleen, I will be in big trouble if I don't mention how good this pie was! Kathleen and Catherine made a chocolate pecan pie. How good? Really good!

Kathleen said multiple times that the pie was "for me." Somehow her eyes told a different story...

"I wish Xan weren't so attentive. Also, this pie is not spicy enough."

You can also see a gratuitous magic bar on my plate. Just because.

AND look at this hedgehog cookie cutter she got me! In the background you can even glimpse a second hedgehog cookie cutter in huff-and-puff mode:

Mmm, delicious pie!

We don't have a lot of cookie cutters, but I don't see the purpose of keeping the rest of them at this point. I can scarcely imagine a scenario where replacing your cookie cutters with hedgehogs wouldn't automatically improve the outcome.

Linden: Granola Recipe

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 23 Nov 2013 13:07:00 +0000

When I lived in Cambridge, it was freezing and the best way to stay warm on the weekends without heating guilt was to cook; I wasn’t eating a lot of processed food and I had a lot of free time on the weekends so I did a lot of tweaking of a granola recipe from TheKitchenSink.

And now, Mama has been ironing out her breakfast regime, and has moved towards what is apparently a Swiss breakfast, which I think should involve Cuckoo clocks but apparently just involves yogurt. And I had just made a batch, so Kathleen granola-muled some home to Mama on the way to some conference.

Here’s my version of the recipe – basically the same as the original minus the refined sugars (original recipe here: http://thekitchensinkrecipes.com/2008/08/29/when-the-mountains-call/)

Be warned, it makes your kitchen smell amazing. (...no pictures, because I sent it all to Mama.)

Cherry-Almond Granola

4 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup coconut flakes, unsweeteend
3 tablespoons flax seeds (or whatever you have, I am currently using linseed)
3 tablespoons sesame seeds
1/4 cup sunflower or pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup almonds, chopped, plus 2 tablespoons whole almonds
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup canola oil
2 tablespoons agave nectar
1 tablespoon honey (optional – it makes the granola stick together.)
1 tablespoon almond extract
2 cups dried cherries (make sure that there’s no added sugar)

Preheat the oven to 375. Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil. In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients except the dried fruit. Stir well to incorporate.

Spread the mixture on the prepared baking sheet, spreading it out into an even layer. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes (depending on the depth of goldenness you’re looking for), stirring every 10 minutes.

Remove the granola from the oven and and cool completely, in its pan, on a wire wrack. Once the granola is cool, mix in the dried cherries.

Jenny: English muffins!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 21:12:00 +0000

Mom sends this photo of her English muffins!

Me wanty!

They look like a cross between American buttermilk biscuits and English muffins, i.e. way better than English muffins. We need a new name for these. Biscuimuffins? Vongsamuffins?

Actually, maybe this is the way English muffins are supposed to be. I kind of assumed the English muffin was a bad take on a regular American muffin, just like the English doughnut is a bad version of the American donut. But it could go in reverse. Maybe Americans can create good foods out of bad English foods.

I am not going to bother checking any of the relevant food history to support my theory. Instead, let us simply agree that, whatever the case may be, this is far better than the alternative where American and English foods get Frenchified.

(Why must everyone french their lamb racks?!? STOP! STOP IT! That stuff is delicious!)

(And toad in the hole definitely should not croak...)

Xan: Cheeeeese?

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 21:31:00 +0000

Hello folks,

Do any of you have trouble with your cheeses molding and if so what do you do about it? For instance, I would like to shred lots of mozzarella all at once and not have to shred it each time I need some. But then it gets moldy and I can't cut off the outside of every shred. Can you freeze cheese? Or how should it be stored?

As far as cooking goes, cheese is an unusual ingredient for me: I use it frequently enough but it is never for my own consumption, and so I never actually taste the results of my cheesings, and so I never know what to do differently next time. When I started cooking, I used to complain if I had to touch cheese, which seems pretty silly in retrospect. It was probably just an excuse to complain. On the other hand, many people are grossed out by the mere sight of meat, even though meat is great while milk products are the devil.

Xan: Weighing the benefits of kitchen scales. Also, cookies.

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 08:10:00 +0000

In the kitchen I prefer work first, reward second. I go to great lengths to avoid making things dirty because I don't want to have to clean them up later! When possible, I do manual prep work up front, rather than using a kitchen machine (even if it's much quicker and easier) that I then have to clean. Even if it takes less total time to clean the machine than it took to do the manual prep work, I prefer to do the work first and get my reward second.

That may seem odd. But if I do the work first, it's just part of the cooking. If I do it second, it becomes a chore I have to force myself to do now instead of later.

Sometimes I will fail and procrastinate, making a bad situation worse. But even when I succeed in forcing myself to clean in a timely fashion, it's still worse than if I didn't have to force myself. Just as, even if you successfully exert the willpower to abstain from an unhealthy slice of chocolate cake, you are still worse off than if the cake didn't exist to tempt you in the first place. Exerting willpower is costly. Making yourself do things now instead of later is draining. So I avoid it when I reasonably can.

I would rather clean a knife right before I use it than right after, even though it would seem to take the same amount of effort in the naive view of things. In either case, you have a clean knife while you're using it, which is the only time it really needs to be clean. Unfortunately, your cohabitant may prefer the knife to be clean the rest of the time as well.

This explains why I often make the seemingly odd decision to do things manually that "should" be done a more modern and efficient way. My most preferred cleaning method by far is to not make things dirty in the first place!

You can roll your eyes all you want -- and probably would, if you saw the lengths I've gone to in order to avoid the food processor -- but I know how my brain works. As cooking goes from a hobby to a regular routine, even small differences in costliness start to dominate my decisions of what to make and which pans to use. I pretty much don't care how much work a dish is the first time I make it, because making new things is exciting. But by the 10th time, it's just not happening if there's something annoying about its preparation.

And so, to the title of this post. The kitchen scale has become one of my favorite kitchen tools. It doesn't get dirty by use; to the contrary, it is a substitute for getting things dirty. It strictly dominates using measuring cups, because it is faster, more precise, and doesn't get anything dirty.

I make pizza dough maybe once a week. This involves a bowl, a fork, and a scale. That's it. I put the bowl on the scale, pour the ingredients right out of their containers by weight, and mix it up with a fork. It's 5 ingredients: flour, salt, yeast, water, olive oil. The mixing takes like 15 seconds. It's so easy that adding measuring cups and spoons would easily double the amount of prep work involved. And then I would have to wash them! Even if it was just a rinse to get the flour or yeast off, the measuring cups just might sit there on the counter to be dealt with later. Ugh.

In fairness, it's a no-knead dough so then I have to wait till the next day to use it. But that's not the kind of procrastination problem I have. Personally, I have no trouble cooking ahead, I only have trouble cleaning ahead (I hate cleaning, but I like making dough, so why would I put it off?). Your mileage may vary. My approach in the kitchen is not for everyone, but it works for me.

Every so often I buy a sack of onions from Costco and thoroughly caramelize a whole batch of them. I freeze them in an ice cube tray and then I can put caramelized onions on every pizza I want by microwaving half an onion ice cube for 10 seconds. It's a fancy and delicious pizza, and honestly the "hardest" part is grating the cheese!

And I cook it in a cast iron skillet. It does not stick, and just leaves a little oil behind. For months now, I've cleaned my cast iron with a soapy sponge, because it's easy and my prior method was definitely not. They say not to use soap, but what do they know. There's no sign that I'm ruining the seasoning and every sign that I'm easifying the cleaning.

Catherine's kitchen philosophy is so different from mine. Today she made Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies using both the Kitchenaid Mixer and the Cuisinart Food Processor. This simply blows my mind. Meanwhile, as she was making her cookies, I made a pie crust using this recipe, which is notable because it requires not a food processor, not a pastry blender, but a fork. Mix flour, salt, and butter by hand, mix in some sour cream with a fork, done. I was so excited! The recipe does say to "vigorously whisk together the flour and salt"...but ha! Surely you jest! Like I'm going to dirty a whisk to mix flour and salt. Wait...would anyone do that? I mean, that is the most pointless use of a whisk I have ever heard of. (Technically false). 90% of the time a recipe calls for a whisk, I use a fork anyway. I know, right? Forks are the best.

We'll see how the pie turns out tomorrow. Meanwhile, the cookies were really good. But I must warn you, there were a lot of them. I should not use the past tense because there are still a lot of them. I've never seen so many freshly baked cookies in my entire life. We filled the cookie jar, and two whole plates, and another bag, and our stomachs!

"How many cookies did you eat?" "I don't know..."

That's not even all of them. She's still in the middle of cooking them.

Let's check out another angle, just to drive the magnitude home:

OMG SO MANY COOKIES

These are pretty much the best cookies ever, for the record.

Xan and Grandma: Pork!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 05:10:00 +0000

Grandma says it has been raining a lot in Thailand, but the water will be gone by the time we get there. She also sends along some pictures of her pork ribs! Sadly, they will also be gone by the time we get there.

Made with Dad's BBQ sauce.

Source: Makro!

And here is her Kanglian:

A healthier option! This cancels out pork, right?

I mean, look at all those vegetables!

As it happens, we have been eating up some delicious pork ourselves. Pork shoulder, specifically. Mark Bittman's Roast Pork Shoulder, Puerto Rican Style, from How to Cook Everything.

This turned out to be a very yellow and brown meal. Or as we say in the crossword business, ochre! We have pork, bread, corn with pan drippings, and microwaved honeycrisp apples of deliciousness!

Mmm...

Three little pigs!

That's plate #1. It was so delicious that I pigged out (!) and ate a double meal.

*

Mark Bittman's Roast Pork Shoulder, Puerto Rican Style
(paraphrased and modified by Xan)

Ingredients

One 4-7 lb pork shoulder, trimmed of excess but not all fat

Marinade:

4 cloves garlic, peeled
1 medium onion, quartered
1 TBS dried oregano
1 TBS table salt
2 tsp black pepper
2 TBS peanut or other oil
2 TBS white wine vinegar, cider vinegar, or other vinegar

Steps

If you have a food processor or hand blender, blend together all the marinade ingredients. Otherwise, just finely chop the onion and garlic, and mix everything together.
Place the pork and marinade in a gallon ziploc bag or other container. Coat the pork all over with the marinade and place in the fridge for 1-24 hours.
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Remove pork from the marinade and roast for 2-3 hours until done. The internal temperature should be 150-160, and the meat should be fairly tender.
Rest for at least 15 minutes, slice and serve.

Notes:

This is not pulled pork. We are not cooking it for hours and hours so it won't get to that falling-apart level. When I do a 4 lb shoulder, it takes about 2.5 hours to get to 155, and it's still sliceable, as you can see from the pictures.
I crisped the roast up in a skillet right before serving, which is why it is so browned. Alternatively, if it is not browned to your liking, you could always let the meat rest for a bit, crank the oven up to 450, and put the roast back in for a few minutes.
In any case, what you should really take from this recipe is the delicious marinade. You can apply it to the pork and cook it any way you like.
I actually poured the entire contents of the marinade over the pork before sticking it in the oven. The marinade has a paste-like consistency (at least if you use a food processor or hand blender), so it will stay on top. This obviously hinders browning so if you have troubles with that, don't do it -- maybe pat your roast dry with paper towels instead! But since I was going to use the skillet afterwards, it wasn't a problem. The marinade paste forms a really nice, substantive crust.

Oink oink!