ginger

I learnt a brilliant new technique for using ginger in recipes today!

Previously, I'd go to the trouble of a rasp or grater to shred then squeeze ginger "pulp" when I only wanted the juice. Particularly with older hands of ginger, you really don't want tough fibres sticking in people's teeth. Young ginger isn't so much a problem, since it quickly dissolves away when cooked. Problem is, the average grocery store doesn't stock good young ginger, and older ginger have a more pungent, mature flavour profile that I personally prefer in heavier dishes (stews, Asian stir fries, curries).

So... take an old hand of ginger, wrap it in plastic wrap, and freeze it (at least overnight). Then when you need ginger juice, just thaw and squeeze the hand right into your dish! Crazy easy.

Those who remember high school bio will recall the razor-sharp edges of ice crystals, and how they expand to puncture and rupture the once-rigid plant cell walls, causing most frozen vegetables to thaw soggy and limp (celery being the best example for its high water content). The same happens to ginger, and you'll find that once thawed, it becomes a kind of ginger-soaked sponge -- PERFECT for flavour without the fibre.

cabbage

By now, every doctor, food journalist, and TV chef has had the chance to proclaim the virtues of cruciferous veggies (anti-inflammatory, alkaline, high fibre, low-cal, etc). The better known of these include broccoli, cauliflower, horseradish, and the much maligned, oft-cooked-shittily, farty-mc-fart-fart cabbage.

The good news: Pound for pound, it's the cheapest vegetable in any grocery store, it lasts for ages in your crisper, and it's got loads of health benefits. In short, the perfect student vegetable. Save the $10.99/lb fiddleheads for impressing friends (or poisoning enemies -- I'll write an article some time) and take it from someone who's been in school for 21 years: Eat More Cabbage.

Cooked cabbage smells like a gassy dog when it's cooked too slowly or too long. The always awesome Alton Brown devoted a Good Eats episode to this phenomenon, which involves the decomposition of cell walls with heat, which releases mustard gas (yes, that kind of mustard gas, albeit way less concentrated, and not synthesized).

One obvious alternative is raw.
You'll need:

cabbage
apple cider vinegar
dijon mustard
honey
mayo
salt and pepper

It's a basic coleslaw recipe! Shred the cabbage into sizes you'd like to eat. Thinner strips will soak up more dressing, thicker strips will eat like a horse at a feed bag. Whisk a dressing together from a good glug of cider vinegar and a big dollop of mayo, and ease in some honey and mustard to taste. Toss with your shredded cabbage, and salt and pepper to taste.

I could write down some arbitrary quantities, but I never use them. Everything you read will use exact cups and tbsps and all that nonsense, but all these quantities are arbitrary -- all just someone's personal preference -- and there's no reason why mine are any more correct than yours. The best measuring tool is your own sense of taste. The exception to the rule would be baking, which is scientific (literally, in that chemicals and organisms are reacting in exact quantities), but if you can trust in taste and intuition, the universe is your oyster. So for the sake of oysters and the known universe, I'll approximate relative quantities throughout this blog, with only the occasional precision measurement if absolutely necessary.

Cabbage the second.

Cooked cabbage doesn't have to be your grandma's rancid cabbage rolls. The key to cooking cabbage is to be fairly quick and even with your heat. And of course, some help from a few familiar strong flavours doesn't hurt.

You'll need:

cabbage (duh)
salt
sugar
yogurt
an onion
cider vinegar
white vinegar
chicken stock
sherry or other wine
a granny smith apple
chorizo or other tasty sausage
sriracha or other tasty chili sauce

Dice the sausage and fry it up in a bit of veg oil until crispy and pretty brown. Remove and reserve. In the remaining oil/fat, cook some thinly sliced onion on med-low heat until golden. Crank the heat to med-hi, toss in your cabbage, and add a glug each of sherry, cider vinegar, white vinegar, chicken stock, a diced apple, a heavy pinch of salt, and a small handful of sugar. Give it a good stir and lid it for a minute. Then, unlidded, keep stirring until your cabbage is fork tender or done to your liking, and remove from heat. Strain the cabbage and put the liquid into a saucepan to reduce on high heat. Once it gets quite thick -- it should, from the sugar and sherry -- remove from heat and add sriracha/chili to taste, a few dollops of yogurt, and the crispy sausage. Whisk it up, and toss it with your cooked cabbage.

Modest-looking, but totally delicious, I gah-ron-tee.

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on the side...

• Use freshly ground black pepper, or don't even bother. The oils and piperine in black peppercorns begin decomposing as soon as they're exposed to air and light. See for yourself -- buy some pre-ground black pepper and taste a quantity of it about the size of a peppercorn. Then chew an intact peppercorn... if you can take the heat. Pre-ground is absolute shit. Use it to add fake dirt to your dishes and as traction for your icy driveway. Once it's spent, get a good (opaque) grinder with carbon steel teeth -- easily had for less than $20.

pan roasting

The great thing about being a foodie and a photographer is... well...

I've been busy posting food pics of experiments and creations in a little Facebook album of mine, but those tiny captions won't hold the many things I have to say about the joys of cooking, so I'm cannibalizing my own material here. So to speak.

Pan roasting is one my most favourite kitchen techniques. It's simple, tasty, and makes you look like a pro chef with minimal effort.

You'll need:

pork chops
paprika
cooking oil
a few cloves minced garlic
julienned red chili (to taste)
heavy cream (or half-and-half if that's what ya got)
white wine
butter

Season pork chops with salt, pepper, and paprika (I like a sweet smoked Hungarian), and slap it on an oiled, oven-safe skillet at medium-high heat. Brown the one side, then flip once and throw it into a preheated oven at 375°F. Cook to your liking -- this one I photographed is cooked way past my liking because I forgot how thin the chop was. (As a sidenote: some people are terrified of pork that's not cooked to well-done. Don't be -- pork is loads safer today than in our parents' time.)

Set the chops aside (tent it with foil to rest, if you like), and put the pan back on the stove. Add a few cloves of minced garlic and some sliced red chili, then deglaze with a generous splash of white wine. Then add a glug of heavy cream, and keep stirring and simmering until it's thick enough to call a sauce. Take it off the heat, add a dab of butter, add salt and pepper to taste, and you've got a killer pan sauce.

I've got the sauce here on my chop with some steamed asparagus. Serve with potatoes or some good bread and butter, and you've got a quick and tasty dinner that's good enough for guests and looks like a million bucks.

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on the side...

• Hot pan, cold oil, dry meat. Patting your meat dry before putting it into a hot, well-greased pan is the difference between fragrant brown and mushy grey. Cold pan = stuck meat, and worse still, it'll steam cook instead of frying and browning. Ditto if your meat's soaking wet (i.e. a drippy defrosted steak), and the scalding splatter's no fun either. If you've got time, let your meat come to room temperature before cooking.
  
• Add butter at the end of a sauce. High heats change the flavour of butter and cook a lot of the aroma out of it. Adding butter after a sauce has come off the heat means you use less of it and taste more of it.

a new day

Almost six years have passed since I started this blog, which has seen countless rants, woes, joys, and musings. But after almost two years of inactivity (chalk it up to the rigours -- and more woes... but also joys -- of theatre school), the time has come to wipe the slate clean.

I toyed with the idea of a food blog, but with an ever-shrinking attention span pitted against an ever-expanding roster of interests, there will no doubt be some oil spill, American election, or idiotic encounter to set me off on something tangential and totally inedible. This means: no promises. Food's good, but anything goes.

So, in the next few weeks I'll be trying to find myself again, along with old and new readers who want to come along for the ride. Truth be told, I stopped posting because it's hard to be completely candid when you study and live in the theatre world (oh yeah, I do theatre for a living). I was never very tactful in my blog, I can be particularly untactful in life, and I don't much care for what they call "tact" in the colourful world of performing arts. The latter is a necessity that, at its worst, takes the form of sycophantism, artifice, and politicking.

But... at its best, theatre is a place of magic, music, youthful optimism, and some very interesting people. And by whatever wonderous fate, I've had more than my fair share of all these things in the past year. There's an awful lot to love so far, and I like where all this is going... but I've also got my eye on a master's at UBC. And UWO's MIT. And OPP (yeah, you know me).

But not really.

So let's talk about food.