Anger Burger

Sushi mackerel and shiso leaves?

Is perhaps one of the best flavor combinations ever to be existing.

Now, sushi mackerel (called saba at sushi restaurants) is always pickled or cured in some fashion because it is dangerous to eat fresh – within 48 hours of death, the mackerel develops a bizarre form of food poisoning called “Scombroid food poisoning”.  Unlike most food poisoning, the culprit is not bacteria or parasites, but a simple chemical process brought about by exposure to oxygen.  Basically, the fish becomes saturated with histamines, which in turn causes a severe allergic reaction in whatever consumes it.  What kind of allergic reaction?  Well, all of them.  The poor schmuck that ate it gets flushed, itchy, nauseated, headachy, stuffy, the works — pretty much every reaction you’ve ever had to ragweed or a cat or wool or whatever, but all together at once.  Weird, right?

Don’t worry.  Fishermen know this and know that their jobs are fucked if they try and sell old fish, so mackerel fishermen take their catch directly to a curing plant that usually has the buggers either frozen or salted and/or otherwise cured within 24 hours.  But it also means that you shouldn’t buy fresh mackerel unless you’re walking your butt straight home and then cooking it before you even take your jacket off.

That’s okay with me, because I love that sushi mackerel is essentially pickled.  It’s oily, vinegary (the cheap stuff is really vinegary, which I don’t mind, honestly) and salty but clean at the same time, like if sardines weren’t fishy-tasting.

And that brings us to shiso, the mint-family herb also known as perilla, Beefsteak and Japanese basil.  The flavor is quite a challenge to describe, but putting it somewhere between mint and basil is a safe start.  Instead of the skunky pepperiness of basil, though, it has a high, reedy topnote of flavor, a sweetness that is both floral and spicy.  To be perfectly frank, I think it’s fucking amazing.

Paired with anything at all oily or rich, it’s an epiphany.   Which brings us back to mackerel.

Oh, mackerel and shiso.  I think you’re on the shortlist for my deathbed food.

It’s foodblogger meme week here at Anger Burger, I guess.  Now, when I first read about this, I remember thinking “No.  That won’t work.”  Because why would kale crisp after just a short stint in the oven?  Wouldn’t it just wilt?  And so, because the only thing standing between me and truth was a $1.99 bunch of kale, off I went.

I concede that this is definitely an overcrowded pan, but I’m lazy.  If you want perfectly crispy pieces, split a bunch of kale between two baking sheets.

And behold, it’s true: “roasting” kale turns it into fragile crisp that I wouldn’t call a “chip” in front of a child unless you wanted to hear about how much it isn’t a chip for the rest of your life.  In this instance I think “chip” just refers to its addictive quality, and it’s like nothing else I’ve ever eaten.  The pieces totally shatter and disintegrate in your mouth with thicker bits lingering behind to chew on like some strange vegetable jerky.  The flavor is almost malty and can easily be manipulated by adding aromatics before cooking.

At Bon Appétit they roasted whole long strips of Tuscan kale for a striking if probably messy snack.  Their method of much lower cooking for a longer period is probably what ensured the pieces being so evenly dehydrated.  Still, the Anger Burger method of crowding the pan and then haphazardly dumping the whole pile onto a plate for faster mouth-cramming during a DVD of Bones works just fine, too.

Fragile Kale Shards
two people can easily polish off a single bunch of kale like this, so make more than you think you need.

1 bunch kale of any variety
2 Tbs. olive oil
big pinch of salt
pepper

• Preheat oven to 350.
• Wash kale and fling dry because you don’t have a salad spinner and forgot to wash it ahead of time.
• With your fingers, tear the kale into “bite-size” pieces, whatever that means.  Don’t use the rigid center rib of the kale (though these are perfectly edible, they won’t roast crisp – you can save them, if you’re that kind of person, to cut into small chunks and braise with butter and some fine champagne vinegar later and pretend like you didn’t totally just cook up what basically amounts to garbage).
• In a large bowl, use your hands to toss the kale with the oil and salt and pepper, make sure each leaf is evenly coated.  Spread onto baking sheet, taking care to avoid any pile-ups.
• Bake for 10-15 minutes, watching closely to avoid burning.  It’s okay to give it all a toss at some point with a heat-resistant implement to make sure that the pieces are all drying out equally, but really, even the not-so-crispy chewy ones are totally addicting, like the soggy french fries that are actually my favorite.
• Eat warm or at room temperature.

Here are some other flavors that you can use to vary the kale around, many of which I’ve tried (“Asian kale shards” being a personal favorite, with sesame oil and togarashi, the Japanese spice blend) :

sesame oil
togarashi
gomashio (Japanese condiment blend of ground sesame seeds and salt)
balsamic vinegar
hot chili oil (just a little!)
crushed red chili flakes (like from the pizzeria)
a tiny drop of truffle oil  or a pinch of truffle salt (fancy!)
Italian seasoning
lemon pepper seasoning
a little sugar (salty sweet!)
garlic powder
Cajun seasoning
finely grated parmesan cheese added about half way through cooking time
replace the oil with any oil-based salad dressing (think vinaigrette)

Anyway, you get the idea.  Go crazy.

I’m as much a sucker for foodblogging trends as the next hermit, which means that a couple of weeks back there was a big to-do over Jamie Oliver’s milk chicken – in fact, if you Google “Jamie Oliver’s chicken in milk” (there, I did it for you) you get nothing but blog links as far as the eye can see.

Now, braising or poaching chicken in milk is no epiphany.  Low slow cooking makes for moist, tender chicken, and vaguely exotic flavors (cinnamon) combined with comforting ones (lemon & sage) and you have a viral recipe.  Oh, and it’s ‘dead easy’ as the crumpet-eater would say.

The first time I made it, I have to say that it wasn’t awesome.  And it wasn’t the polarizing curdling of the milk that everyone nattered on about, it was that the flavor was a fence-sitter, neither beguiling nor familiar.  Even worse was an attempt to use the leftovers the following day in a chicken-salad sandwich: the cinnamon flavor had amplified despite the removal of the stick to the extent that I felt like I was eating a mulled chicken cider sandwich.  Actually, that sounds good.  Scratch that.  Hell, it just tasted too cinnamony.  There.

But the recipe nagged at me for months now until I decided to remake it, and this time with a few changes.

First to go was the whole chicken.  I’m getting to a stage of laziness in my life where the idea of removing meat from a chicken carcass just makes me want to take a nap.  Isn’t this why we have grocery store butchers, to make the pieces smaller?  Yes?  No?  And fuck browning a chicken in a hot pan and flipping it over.  That’s for the younguns.  And people with better tongs than me.  And people who don’t have to clean the grease spatters off their chrome cooktops.  So first thing’s first: replace whole chicken with parts, and if I’m going to be cooking parts down, it has to be thighs.   Into that goes everything from the recipe minus the cinnamon stick, and with a few slight alterations.  For starters, finely grated lemon peel, as I saw several places, is too much lemon.  In fact, two lemons is too much lemon.  The rind of one large lemon, sliced in wide, shallow cuts, made for the exact right taste I was looking for.

The other step I questioned was leaving the garlic in their skins – the skins protect the garlic from breaking down, but since my cook time was going to be reduced by a third (the pieces cook faster than the whole body), the protection wasn’t necessary.  Also, it was a pain in the arse (hi Jamie!) to squeeze all the garlic out of their little skins while eating.  Yes, I said that.  I am so lazy I can’t be bothered to slow down and extract a fucking garlic clove from it’s paper.  What.  I’m an animal.

I also added sansho pepper, which is a Japanese seasoning made from the leaves of the Szechuan peppercorn plant.  It’s not nearly as hot as the peppercorns, but still has a exotic, bright, hard flavor that tastes to me vaguely of Anaheim chilies.  Despite my dislike of the original recipe, Jamie was onto something: without a new flavor, you’ve just got chicken in milk.  Add a strange pepper flavor (or even another herb) and you’ve got something else, something interesting.  And it may come out the other end looking like a breast-fed baby puked all over your chicken, but damn if it isn’t delicious.  We ate every last bite.

Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in Milk
Here’s the original, if you’re into that kind of thing.

1 3½ lb organic chicken
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 stick of butter
olive oil
1/2 cinnamon stick
1 good handful of fresh sage, leaves picked
zest of 2 lemons
10 cloves of garlic, skin left on
1 pint milk

• Preheat the oven to 375°F and find a snug-fitting pot for the chicken. Season it generously all over, and fry it in the butter and a little olive oil, turning the chicken to get an even colour all over, until golden. Remove from the heat, put the chicken on a plate, and throw away the oil and butter left in the pot. This will leave you with tasty sticky goodness at the bottom of the pan which will give you a lovely caramelly flavour later on.
• Put your chicken back in the pot with the rest of the ingredients, and cook in the preheated oven for 1½ hours. Baste with the cooking juice when you remember. The lemon zest will sort of split the milk, making a sauce which is absolutely fantastic.
• To serve, pull the meat off the bones and divide it on to your plates. Spoon over plenty of juice and the little curds. Serve with wilted spinach or greens and some mashed potato.

Sunday’s Chicken in Milk
And my version, if you’re into things that are better.  Serves two.

1 package of chicken thighs (about 6) with skin and bones still intact
salt to taste
1 tsp. (or more to taste) of Japanese sansho pepper (also good: Grains of Paradise or Long Pepper)
2 Tbs. olive oil
1 of those plastic containers of sage, leaves picked
1 lemon’s peel
as many garlic cloves as you want¹, peeled
1 pint of whole milk

• Preheat oven to 350°.
• In a heavy saucepan that can go into the oven, add the olive oil over high heat and sear the chicken thighs on each side to, as Jamie says, get that “tasty sticky goodness”.  But say it to yourself in a British lisp.
• Remove the thighs from the heat and allow to cool enough to pull the skin off them.  Discard the skin or save it to cook it down and make schmaltz.
• While the thighs are cooling, pour out all the fat from the pan and return to low heat.  Slowly pour in the milk, taking care to scrape up all the “tasty sticky goodness” from the bottom.  When the thighs are ready, put them back into the milk along with the garlic cloves, lemon zest, sage and salt and pepper.  Put lid on and stick in the oven for 30 minutes.
• After the 30 minutes are up, turn the thighs, make sure they’re getting cooked evenly.  Cook for another 30 minutes.
• After the hour is up, pull  the pot out of the oven and eat however you like.  I like to get all the meat off the bones using tongs and a sharp knife so that I don’t have to struggle with the bones as I’m eating, but that’s probably being fussier than you are.  Also take care to dig out all those garlic cloves that poached in hot milk for an hour, they’re the cherries on top.

¹ Don’t worry, as long as they are whole cloves they don’t really add garlic flavor to the dish, just a faint perfume. Really. You can use two or you can use twenty and the chicken will come out the other end tasting the same. However, if you used twenty then you now have twenty delicious cloves of slow-cooked, mild, milky garlic to eat with bread.

Today I am not feeling so hot – the kimchi fest of last night maybe wasn’t such a super idea.  Still, it’s always a risk eating anything (sometimes even rice bothers me) and I’ve made my peace with that¹.   As I was thinking about this I remembered that a few days ago my friend sent me an email saying that she’d seen a commercial on TV for a website called “Living with Crohn’s Disease.”  And I sighed.  Because I’ve encountered these guys before.

Living with Crohn’s Disease is run by Centocor Ortho Biotech Inc., makers of a very successful and very expensive drug treatment called Remicade.  And this is where things get confusing.

There is also a blog called Living with Crohn’s Disease, which as near as I can deduce isn’t at all affiliated with Centocor, but it’s hard to tell – “Scottie Roy,” the fellow that ostensibly runs the site, has little to make him seem like anything but a fabrication, aside from the fact that he doesn’t seem to have an ulterior motive (I could email him and presumably clear all this up, but then I’d be confused with an investigative reporter).  Roy’s blog is often informative if utterly without personality² (I would never have read this arresting Esquire article written by a Crohn’s sufferer, elsewise).

Let me get to my point: how moral is it that a drug company is running a “community” for its potential customers?  When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so good.  On the other hand, who better to host this sort of whine-fest than the people making the money off it?  Oh, who am I kidding, I can’t be neutral about this; I think it’s fucked.  Remicade costs $2000 per dose.  PER MOTHERFUCKING DOSE!  The alternative is to use the hated prednisone, a steroid with more side-effects than badly cooked crystal meth — but! — at $20 for a generic-brand run of it, guess which one your health insurance is going to pick?  Now I’m ranting.

And then we have the website itself, which appears to have been assembled over the course of 30 minutes by someone with a lifetime subscription to iStockPhotos.  Wee!  Even with Crohn’s you can look forward to having your frisbee deathgripped by a mob in ecru.

Even better yet!  Oh my god, this makes me actually laugh.  Yay, tickletime!  And you can eat all the dandelions you want!  Oh, the laughter is hurting my diseased colon.

As an experiment, I decided to sign up for the “Living with Crohn’s Disease” (website and not blog) symptom assessment quiz, wherein I assumed I’d be told that perhaps Remicade was the drug for me?  Until I read the EULA at the bottom:

“Your name, address, and other information that you give us will be used by Centocor, Inc., and companies that work with Centocor, including other affiliates and parent companies, to support Centocor’s business.”

Bright red font is my emphasis.  Because: HOLY FUCK, NO SHIT.  I can’t even be sarcastic about it, it’s so cut and dried.  In my apartment building is a British couple that I’ve come to be friends with, and one night over dinner they remarked on the blatant and horrific American trend of marketing drugs directly towards customers.  “Ask your doctor if Prodick is the drug for you,” etc and etc.  It launched a mild discussion (I played the devil’s advocate: shouldn’t people be informed of their options outside the doctor’s office?) that I still haven’t personally resolved, at least until I saw Living with Crohn’s Disease (website and not blog).  One thing I know for certain: drug companies should not be allowed within 100 yards of stock photography.

¹ And by “made my peace” I think we both know I mean “have developed a stable hate towards.”
² I’m also concerned about the fact that his “posts” consist entirely of fully copied articles from other sources, and often with little effort made to clarify that he didn’t write them. I’m not saying this is done purposefully, only that it is another point making it difficult to tell if the blog is legitimate or not.

Blah blah blah blibberty jimjam blah.

Look, everyone knows about Kogi BBQ.  Except my mom, I guess.   And maybe my cousin.  And sister.  Okay, everyone¹ back in Washington probably doesn’t know what I’m talking about, and it is for them I will do a little ‘splaining. You see, it’s a taco truck, but it’s Korean, and while the food is good (more on that in a moment) it’s the way that it became famous that is so curious.  It was through Twitter.  They just Twittered where the truck was going to be and the people would come.   Just to be contrary (who, me?) I feel compelled to add that I think the whole “Twitter made them famous!” and “They’re the first viral restaurant ever!” talk is a side-serving of bullshit.  I mean, it’s well-meaning bullshit, but it’s just not good science.  Like, restaurants have never experienced overnight success before?  And add to that the not small issue that Kogi can drive to where the bars are? The only reason this hasn’t happened to a actual Mexican taco truck is because of language barriers (ooo, no she di’int!) and because in L.A., taco trucks are boring.

Anyway, I don’t want to analyze the truck.  I just want to talk about the food.   I figured we’d get a taco, because, well, it’s a taco truck.  We chose a spicy pork and found it to be quite lovely, though no moreso than a traditional Mexican taco — a good one, that is.  Still, at $2 it was a nice bite of food and certainly better than a lot of the gristle-tacos I get slipped around here.

Now, the kimchi quesadilla caused us some grief.  Mike wanted nothing to do with it.  I didn’t think I could eat the whole thing but I desperately wanted to try.  We compromised by Mike grudgingly agreeing to try a bite, which was all the leeway my guilt needed, so we ordered it.  Unfortunately, the walk home caused irreparable damage to the poor quesadilla, being as that I didn’t know it was going to come slathered in liquid.

So a tip to future Kogi eaters: order it without the soup on top (and without the mind-bendingly salty sesame seasoning, too) unless you’re going to slam your face into it toot-sweet.  Otherwise, I found it to be a beguiling mishmash of food – crispy (in places, and in theory), cheesy and rich and threaded with that lovely breathtaking crunch of kimchi all the way through.  Perhaps by design this is one of the better drunk-foods I’ve ever encountered.

Ah, and here’s our girl.  The short rib burrito.  This was a thing of beauty, my friends.  A truly and genuinely excellent burrito.  Not all overwhelmed with rice and beans and lawn clippings and newspapers and whatever the fuck else, but a simple, slender meal of soft, sweet beef, some seasoned cabbage, some… other stuff.  Honestly, I have no idea what was in this.  If I’m reading Kogi’s website correctly, all their burritos are technically “breakfast” burritos with egg and potato, but I can’t say that I tasted or noticed any egg or potato.  I honestly don’t care what was in it — I just want another one.

I have a habit of saying my name “Sunday – like the day” when I am talking to strangers.  Spelling it seems to confuse everyone.  The fellow at the Kogi truck just went, “Oh, okay!” like, yes, like the day between Saturday and Monday.  You know, the Lord’s day:  Sandely.

¹Except for my dad, who is a bigger webnerd than me and sends me emails telling me stuff that is going on in my own town even though he’s 1,200 miles away.

After a nicely uneventful return trip¹, I have to admit that it’s good to be back in Los Angeles again.  And what better time to come home than Halloween, when the city punches you in the eyes with gloves made of Dadaism.

Getting back into old eating habits has been curiously elusive.  I had decided long before we returned that I was straining uncomfortably at my jeans and it might be time to lose some weight.  I’d probably just ignore it, to be honest, but seeing that I can’t afford even a new-to-me thriftstore pair of jeans, it’s actually more sensible to just drop five pounds.

Buuut.   I’m no good at dieting.  I’m good at eating moderately healthy, which is what my compromise will be.  And I’m good at eating chocolate, so that’s going to have to find its way in, too.  Luckily, according to my totally unscientific and blindly hopeful dieting method, I’m allowed to eat chocolate. Actually, I’m allowed to eat whatever the fuck I want to, but I am trying to not eat fried or particularly fatty things unless I’m dead certain I can’t live without them, and as of right now, so far that’s none.

Anyway, so, chocolate.  I encountered this B.T. McElrath chocolate bar at Whole Foods² yesterday and I had to have it.  Passionfruit and tangerine?  Ooo! Ooo!  Me!  Me!  And better yet, the mixture of white and dark chocolates, a blend that I absolutely love despite the fact that I’m just making milk chocolate in my mouth?  Yes please.

And no kidding: this is one of the most beautiful bars of chocolate I have ever seen.   This is the bar of chocolate you set out on a nice cutting board with a sharp knife when guests are over and it seems super fancy but really you’ve just set out a $3.50 bar of chocolate for people to share.

Unfortunately, that’s where the luxury ends.  It tastes like a solid mediocre bar of chocolate.  With the words “passion fruit” and “tangerine” in the title, I want it to be floral and zippy and zesty, but instead it’s just occasionally a little tart and doesn’t have much character otherwise.  Like me!

¹Minus the part where engine #3 wouldn’t start. True!
²I should note that I don’t really shop at Whole Foods, because it is  outside of our budget in a way that is nearly hilarious.  I am, in fact, one of those Whole Foods haters.  But I grudgingly admit that they are the only store anywhere even close to me that carries the shaving cream I like and/or the world’s best marzipan.