Shocking the carrots

It takes a long time to soften carrots adequately by sauteing them, so a lot of recipes ask you to boil the carrots first or even mix butter and water and cook the carrots in the resulting lipidous slurry. This ends up tasting OK but the carrots never really taste sauteed to me, they taste boiled! I want that sear.

So this week I tried something new, borrowing a technique I learned a long time ago for perfect sauteed asparagus. Put your butter in the pan, melt it, get those carrots sauteing in there. Put in some salt and whatever other seasoning you want at whatever time suits that seasoning. (Dill is traditional, I used nutmeg this week and it was great) Saute the carrots until they’re nicely browned. At this point they will not be cooked enough. Eat one, it’ll taste nice on the outside but still be crunchy and part-raw.

So now it’s time to shock the carrots. Fill a small drinking glass half-full with water. So maybe a quarter cup, I dunno. Throw the water in the hot pan and immediately, as the sizzle kicks in and the steam begins to rise, slam the lid on. It should sound sort of like a high hat when you crash and then right away mute. Turn the heat down and let the carrots steam in there for about six minutes. When you open it, the water should be gone but if it’s not I would just take the carrots out with a slotted spoon. Result: fully tender carrots that taste sauteed, not boiled.

Watermelon, chevre, piment d’espelette

I spent a little time this summer visiting Institut Henri Poincare for their program on rational points, but this post is not about the math I did there, but about a salad I ate there. Not there at IHP, but at the terrific neighborhood bistro around the corner from where I was staying. I liked it so much I went there three times and I got this salad three times. I have been trying to recreate it at home. It’s good! Not Paris bistro good. But really good. Here is how I make it so I don’t forget.

• Seedless watermelon cut in cubical or oblong chunks, as sweet as possible
• Good chevre (not feta, chevre) ripped up into modest pieces
• Some kind of not-too-bitter greens (I’ve been using arugula, they used some kind of micro watercressy kind of deal) Not a ton; this is a watermelon salad with some greens in it for color and accent, not a green salad.
• Roasted pine nuts (I am thinking this could also be good with roasted pepitas but have not tried it)
• Juice of a lime
• Olive oil, the best you have
• Piment d’espelette

I had never heard of piment d’espelette! It’s from the Basque part of France and is roughly in the paprika family but it’s different. I went to a spice store before I left Paris and bought a jar to bring home. So now I have something I thought my kitchen would never be able to boast: a spice Penzey’s doesn’t sell.

Anyway, the recipe is: put all that stuff in a bowl and mix it up. Or ideally put everything except the chevre in and mix it up and then strew the chevre on the top. Festive!

Of course the concept of watermelon and goat cheese as a summer salad is standard; but this is a lot better than any version of this I’ve had before.

Dinner experiment

Ground lamb from Double Ewe Farm (Arena, WI) bought at Conscious Carnivore, stir-fried with scallions/mushrooms/cabbage/garlic/soy sauce/sesame oil and served on top of shiso leaves from Crossroads Community Farm (Cross Plains, WI) with Hot Mama’s habanero sauce from Belize.

I would include a picture of it but it actually didn’t look very pretty.  It tasted great, though!

 

Curry apple chicken

I didn’t have time to do a real shop and had nothing for Friday night dinner so I bought some chicken and a bag of apples and made something that came out surprisingly well; I hereby record it.

Ingredients:

2-3 lb boneless chicken breasts

5 apples, cubed

some scallions

some vegetable oil, whatever kind, doesn’t matter, I used olive

1 tbsp ground coriander

1 tbsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp turmeric

1 tsp salt

however much minced garlic you’re into

1/2-1 tsp garam masala

some crushed tomatoes but you could use actual tomatoes if it weren’t the middle of winter

Recipe:

Get oil hot.  Throw apples and scallions in.  Stir and cook 5 mins until apples soft.  Clear off some pan space and put coriander, cumin, turmeric, salt in the oil, let it cook 30 sec – 1 min, then throw in all the chicken, which by the way you cut into chunks, saute it all up until it’s cooked through.  Put the minced garlic in and let that cook for a minute.  Then put in however much tomato you need to combine with everything else in the pan and make a sauce.  (Probably less than you think, you don’t want soup.)  Turn heat down to warm and mix in garam masala.  You could just eat it like this or you could have been making some kind of starch in parallel.  I made quinoa.  CJ liked this, AB did not.

I took the spice proportions from a Madhur Jaffrey recipe but this is in no way meant as actual Indian food, obviously.  I guess I was just thinking about how when I was a kid you would totally get a “curry chicken salad” which was shredded chicken with curry powder, mayonnaise, and chunked up apple, and I sort of wanted a hot mayonnaiseless version of that.  Also, when I was in grad school learning to cook from Usenet with David Carlton, we used to make a salad with broiled chicken and curry mayonnaise and grapes.  I think it was this.  Does that sound right, David?   Yes, that recipe calls for 2 cups of mayonnaise.  It was a different time.  I feel like we would make this and then put it on top of like 2 pounds of rotini and have food for days.

 

 

Roasted balsamic brussels sprouts

Note to self:  this recipe is good.

 

Quasi-Moldavian roasted fingerling salad

First fingerling potatoes are at the farm market and I made a salad:

Recipe:  Cut (don’t peel) potatoes, roast at 425 for 20 mins with some salt, pepper, oil (I use grapeseed.) Let cool a bit, then toss with chopped scallions, dill (had no fresh so I used dried), crumbled-up feta, and the best olive oil you have in the house.  I’m liking Partanna lately.

This is basically taken from the Moldavian Potato Salad recipe in Please to the Table but I like it better with roasted potatoes and without the vinegar.  My apologies to the Moldavians.

A boy’s first casserole

CJ had a vision for dinner. I don’t know where he came up with this. But he said he wanted mashed potatoes with green beans and chopped up hardboiled eggs. OK I said but you know what it needs, some Penzey’s toasted onions and we can put some chunks of gruyere in there and it’ll melt. In the end I was suspicious of the hardboiled eggs so we had them on the side. The final product was something I think could easily be sold in the grocery store hot case at $8.99 a pound. I know this looks kind of like barf, but it works. (See also: the Israeli electoral system.)

The turd and the bean, or: the strange life of male nerddom under patriarchy

Everybody’s talking about Laurie Penny’s awesome essay responding to Scott Aaronson’s courageously candid blog comment, all touched off by the canceling of Walter Lewin’s online course after he sexually harrassed one of the students.

Scott is frustrated that shy, nerdy men are seen as “privileged.”  He thinks they’re the opposite of privileged.  I don’t see things the way Scott does, but I’m glad he wrote what he wrote.  It must have been pretty hard to do.

Scott feels a certain distance from feminism because of stuff like this:

Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

But here’s the thing.  Were those workshops, and the feminist writers he read in college, trying to tell him it was a monstrous thing for a man to try to date a woman?  Here’s one clue:  most feminists, like most women generally, are straight, and date men.  Many of the people leading his sexual-assault prevention workshops probably had boyfriends.  Many of the feminist writers he read were married to men.

So where, if not from feminists, was he getting the idea that a romantic approach was inherently a kind of assault?  That’s patriarchy talking.  It’s patriarchy that gets between your ear and your mind and turns “Be sensitive to the cues of the person you’re approaching and wait for consent” to “You’d better not even try,” because it’s patriarchy that presents conquest and seizure as the only allowable model for a man’s sexuality.

Now here my imaginary Scott Aaronson protests, “but I didn’t think all expression of het interest was assault, only that my own wasn’t guaranteed not to be, and nobody would tell me how to get that guarantee.”  To which I can only say:  yep.  When you take driver’s ed they don’t tell you any formula that absolutely positively guarantees you won’t crash your car, hurt yourself, hurt someone else, ruin your life.  If you demand such a guarantee they’ll tell you “All I can say is never drive, it’s the only way to be sure.”  But if this leads you to never drive, because the risk is too great to be borne?  That’s a problem with your risk assessment, not a problem with driver’s ed.

It’s sad and kind of crushing to read what happened to Scott.  He says he wanted to be a woman, or a sexless being.  He thinks that’s because feminism made it seem intolerable to be a man.  But it wasn’t.  Partly it was because he attached vastly more anxiety to the difficulty of dating than most people, even than most shy, nerdy, romantically inexperienced people (hi, teenaged me!) do.  And partly it was because patriarchy gave him a false and vicious idea of what a man was.

That first line again:

Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified.

He was both!  You can be — in fact, it’s hard for a man not to be — both beneficiary and victim of sexism.  Those two things don’t cancel each other out like positive and negative terms in an equation.  They are both there, and they both count.

Turd and bean soup is a terrible soup.  But:  when your friend, who has only turds, says, “I’m hungry, I wish my soup had some beans in it,” it is no reply at all to say “but my soup is filled with turds and the beans kind of taste like turd.”  They are still beans.  Even as your mouth fills with the rich flavor of turd and you feel like puking, the beans nourish and enrich you.

Beef Rendang

Mostly so I don’t forget:  this beef rendang recipe was sensational.  I tweaked it a lot — no chilis because my wife and kids don’t eat spicy, no fennel seeds because I have no fennel seeds, and I cooked it in the crockpot, which made the texture more like a rich beef stew than classical rendang.  But it tasted great and both children were into it, so into the rotation it goes.

Corn and sweet potato chowder

Dinner tonight, cobbled together from various recipes found online:

4 cobs sweet corn

1 medium sweet potato

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

2 scallions

1 red pepper

1 jalapeno

1/4 c butter

1/4 c flour

4 c whole milk

salt, pepper, cumin

Recipe:  Preheat oven to 450.  Scrape corn kernels off the cobs.  Melt butter in pan, add flour, cook until it is roux.  Add a little more butter if needed and saute diced onion and garlic about 5 min until soft.  Add milk and kernel-less cobs.  Remove ribs and seeds from jalapeno and add it whole.  This is going to simmer about 30 mins. and meanwhile you are cutting up the sweet potato and red pepper and scallion and roasting them with the corn kernels until everything is slightly charred and smoky.  That being done, take some of the sweet potatoes and puree them with some soup to make a nice orange-brown paste.  Throw out the cobs and the jalapenos and put the sweet potato paste, red peppers, corn, and scallions in the soup.  Heat through, season with salt, pepper, cumin to taste.

Notes:  It’s not clear to me that the jalapeno added anything.  Also, it was too thick; next time I might skip the roux.

Update:  Skipped the roux, dropped the jalapeno, added a chopped/seeded Anaheim to the red pepper, even better.

Soup looked like this: