Anger Burger

I understand that for a lot of you these deer are magical forest ballerinas, but at my mom’s house they are thieving seed ninjas.  She even bought this tall feeder box to keep the deer out, but of course the second after I took this photo that deer stood up on it’s hind legs and started cramming it’s eathole full of seed.

My mom is used to this so she immediately went outside and started hollering at them, which did absolutely nothing and I was left clutching my cell phone wondering if I’d have to call a deer mauling into 911.

But they do this almost every day.  She walks out there and they casually saunter off, and five minutes later they wonder around the other side of the property and show back up at the bird feeder.  Merry Christmas, deer assholes!

My sister brought these and despite knowing we’d regret it we all ate one.

They tasted like you think.  Waxy chocolate.  Pure liquid sugar center that instantly chokes you.  Scented blueberry Mr. Sketch marker flavor.  Mmm, tastes like dreary drugstore Christmas.

It’s been six years since I’ve been in Olympia for more than a holiday visit, and the first time in six years that I could hotglue a bunch of shit to packages since I wasn’t shipping the presents in from another state.  God bless hotglue for reals.

Never dismiss the joys of hotgluing stuff to stuff.

This year we cooked absolutely nothing on Christmas day.  We made dips and sliced meats and cheeses and thawed shrimp all on Christmas Eve, and then merely decanted it all to plates for the festivities.  It was plenty of food and no one was trapped in the kitchen making food hot while everyone else enjoyed themselves drinking schnapps and tripping over dogs.

 It only took us nearly four decades as a family to get it sorted out, but we’re on track now.

I have a lot of sympathy for cookbook writers, if you can believe it.  It can’t be easy to compile a couple dozen recipes and have them all be interesting or reliable.  In the several years I’ve written Anger Burger I can maybe – maybe – construct a cookbook of recipes that aren’t outright stolen from other writers and bloggers.  And theme?  The Anger Burger cookbook would best be described as a tectonic collision of ethnic misuse.

But all that being said, there’s one cookbook  that has repeatedly made 2011′s Top Ten cookbook lists, and it’s a book so disappointing that I was angry that I wasted calories carrying it home from the library.

Pam Anderson’s Perfect One-Dish Dinners has great range.  We have:

• Curiously banal Perfect Spinach-Artichoke Dip that is made “perfect” by the substitution of low-fat cream cheese and low-fat mayonnaise for the full-flavor versions.

• Hilariously questionable Indian Six Layer Dip consisting of layered curried sour cream, cheddar cheese (?!), yogurt chutney, flaked sweetened coconut, peanuts and green onions.

• Guaranteed super-flop Braised Salmon, which has you boil carrots, shallots and potatoes in unseasoned broth until tender, remove them to a platter kept in a warm oven, then simmer salmon fillets and asparagus in the same unseasoned broth until cooked all the way through, removed to the platter with the vegetables, and then watering down the broth and heating it in the microwave to pour over your totally fucking bland and overcooked fish and vegetables.  THIS IS PERFECT IF YOU’VE RECENTLY BEEN HOSPITALIZED FOR STOMACH SURGERY.

• Roasted Almond and Cream Cheese-Stuffed Green Olives, which is a cocktail olive that you remove the pimento center from and replace with a little piece of cream cheese and an almond and then serve on a platter.  Which, you know.  Okay.  But It’s not like I’d ever put this into a cookbook, which is pretty much the same thing.

There are plenty of normal-sounding main dishes, but they are all just that: normal sounding.  They’re on the whole blander and plainer than I cook, though I appreciate having solid recipes to personalize.  But I don’t need to be told how to make enchiladas from store-bought enchilada sauce and pre-cooked chicken.  And I don’t think anyone in my family would eat a stew of cubed pork, sweet potatoes and prunes.  And I realize that I should back off and let the good recipes stand on their own, but I keep coming back to wondering how this made more than one Top Ten list.  But people love it.  They repeatedly describe it as “simple” and “doable,” which I can’t argue with.  And lord knows I respect a woman that refers to a pan of macaroni and cheese as a “complete dish”.  But I’m once again reminded of how entirely I am not the intended readership of the cookbook industry, and that makes me grumpy.

Olympic Fudge cooling on the stove. Still the most reliable fudge recipe I know of.

About once every two or three years my friends Yuko and Sol invite a group over for family-style sushi dinner, and I basically didn’t even let Mike get off the phone when Sol invited us before I was backing out of the driveway and headed for Seattle.  If more people were prescribed sushi parties instead of Xanax the world would be a better place.

Perhaps the best part is that they encourage making hand rolls so that all of that frustrating sushi-rolling can be abandoned in favor of mashing food into your food-hole.  Honestly, it’s very clever: just fold sheets of seaweed into quarters and they break apart into perfect squares.  Smear some sushi rice on each square.  Fold/roll/taco into any shape you want and then eat.  They’re good for two or three bites, so by the time they start falling apart you’re already done and ready for the next one.

Also, each time Yuko’s dinnerware just slays me.  Everyone’s plates had different little Totoro images on them.

Eel.  Stop avoiding it.  It’s delicious and soft and not fishy.  And if you order it at a Japanese restaurant the chances are that it will be covered in a teriyaki-like sauce, which makes everything edible.

Sol’s famous spicy tuna is still a mystery to me, even though he’s told me how to make it half a dozen times.  Every time I make it, it just does not turn out the fucking same.  He’s lying to me, I’m sure of it.  The famous anecdote about the spicy tuna is that many years ago Mike the Viking and Sol ate an entire cereal bowl of this stuff with spoons because Sol “accidentally” made too much.  They just ate it like ice cream.

You poor bastards.  You wish you were at this table with us.

We discovered that everyone, including the two people who actually were raised in Japan, held their chopsticks a little differently.  I thought I held mine totally wrong for years, but it turned out that I was closer that some.

AND THIS STUFF.  I hesitate to tell you the ingredients because I fear you won’t believe me when I say: it was infuriatingly good.  So simple: coconut milk, soy milk, a little sugar, some soft baby tapioca pearls and some tiny cubes of soft sweet potato.  I KNOW HOW IT SOUNDS.  But it was like… something fairy royalty is served when they are in bed in their jim-jams and just want a little something sweet and comforting to eat.  It made me feel six years old and safe and happy.

Also:

It’s ribbon candy.

I’m serious, this is important.  Because for some reason ribbon candy is this impossible, mythological item, something that Baba Yaga gifts to the wayward traveler who has won her good graces.  And I know in my mind it should be thin and opalescent like glass, and each color should be a different flavor.  However, what I’d been finding in real life was thick, clumsy candy covered in flaws and breaks.  THIS DOES NOT FIT IN WITH MY SLAVIC FANTASY CHRISTMAS.

So, I was skipping through the frosty deep winter forest when I came across a box of Russell Stover ribbon candy for something like $2.  I clapped my hands and gnomes danced around me and little snowbirds burst across the sky like a whorl of ice crystals.

The best part is when you try to break a piece off it explodes into a thousand tiny shards, some of which fall to the floor and later stick to your socks.

They’re beautiful like edible Christmas ornaments and I keep looking at them with satisfaction, but I’m not sure there is anything practical about them at all.  I mean, that’s a dumb thing to say.  There’s clearly nothing practical about candy spun into fancifully antagonistic shapes, but what I mean is that I can’t think of a scenario where you won’t be picking slivers of sticky, half-melted candy out of the carpet, your clothes and the dog’s fur.  The upside is that they are tasty, and the white ribbon was vanilla flavored, which briefly broke my brain.

Hey, as long as you’re here, I want you to see something.  See, I knit.  I don’t talk about it here because then it’ll be a cooking and knitting website, and that path leads to kitten videos and talking about feelings and I think we’d all rather just drink an irresponsible amount of peppermint schnapps and argue about House Hunters.

But look at these ladies:

Her sweater says “Hello” but her eyes say “I’m going to land a hatchet between your fucking eyes, peasant.”

Hay now!  Some of us are happy to be wearing a mint green acrylic sweater!

So, I didn’t get my camera back from Seattle, primarily because my mom was hospitalized for a small case of pneumonia she’d been hiding from us and thus the trip back to Seattle was postponed.  I realize I’m blaming my recalcitrance on my mom, but there’s nothing unusual about that.  Sorry mom.  I love you!

In the meantime, I’d like to issue my parents a formal apology for requesting pita sandwiches in my lunches as a child.

I’m trying to cut back on the bread in my lunches, so last week I bought a sack of whole wheat pita breads.  And then struggled and cursed myself and those stupid goddamn dry little pockets of terror for the next five days.  Each and every time, no matter how carefully I tried to smear a bit of mustard or peanut butter or whatever onto one interior side of the pita, at least one side if not both of the entire thing would blow out.  It took me right up until the last one to commit to it no longer being a pita pocket, but a pita sandwich.  As in, it’s not a contained unit of food, it’s a half-moon shaped sandwich with two very thin slices of bread on either side.  Which works okay for the peanut butter and jelly days, but less successfully for the ham and lettuce days.

So mom, dad: I’m sorry.  I’m sorry I made you assemble those nefarious fuckers for my sack lunches.

Who is the douchebag with two thumbs that left her camera in Seattle?  THIS GAL.  I guess I’ll tell you later about the bitchin’ sushi dinner my friends threw.

Not that it matters, because I think we all know that I haven’t been documenting my cooking.  Between my day job and the Debbil¹ Hob, I’m more interested in eating than cooking, which means that Trader Joe’s frozen pasta dinners are on the goddamn menu.  Mmm, frozen dinner.

Still, I want to tell you about some keeper recipes from the last  month.

• Pumpkin-Cardamom Rice Pudding.  My friend Amani told me about this recipe because we share (among other things) a near-psychotic obsession with all things cardamom.  It’s a solid recipe, and I actually had that rogue single cup of pumpkin puree that needed using, so this was that rare occasion where I didn’t need to buy extra ingredients.  Bonus entertainment: the single douchey comment someone left on the recipe web page.  I swear it wasn’t me.  I liked the recipe.  I want to make it again with coconut milk and almond butter to replace the pumpkin.

• Collard Cobbler with Cornmeal Biscuits. Two of the two people I told about this recipe in person both made sour faces when I said the name of the recipe, which leads me to believe it deserves a name change.  Maybe creamed collards with cornmeal biscuits?  I think it’s the “cobbler” that throws folks.  All I can say is: it’s fucking delicious.  I added mushrooms and used Mexican-flavor Field Roast sausages for my vegetarian dad and it was dope: rich without being cloying, smokey-spicy, totally brilliant on a cold, rainy night.

• Veggies baked in Apricot and Thyme.  Okay, so, there might be some refining that needs doing on this one, but it’s heart is in the right place.  The first batch of this I made turned out watery and the potatoes were raw in the middle, and I know the oven was holding steady at 350°, so I’m just going to go ahead and hazard a guess that either the oven needs to be set higher, or the whole thing cooked at least 50-100% longer or a combination of both.  But if you’re feeling experimental and not under tremendous pressure to get these cooked at an exact time, please make them.  The flavors are sublime together.

• Warm Tuna and Bean Salad.  I used this one more as an inspiration than as a recipe, but the end result was so goddamn scrumptious that I’m giving you the link anyway.  If there’s one thing that you take away from it: poach your tuna in flavored olive oil.  You will not regret it.  I skipped the cranberry beans because I’m lazy and fuck that.  Otherwise I just made a heap of roasted, sliced fingerling potatoes and green beans, tore up the warm tuna over it and then quickly made a simple balsamic vinaigrette with the warm poaching oil.  And then I crammed about four pounds of all of that into my mouth.  And I felt awesome afterwards.

There!  Try those.  Report back.  I’ll get my camera and we’ll get this party back underway.

¹ Thanks to commenter Kim for calling it that; it stuck.

I forgot how much having a day job rearranges your entire life.  I know, I’m punching me in the ear, too.  Nevertheless: bringing lunch to work!  Right now it’s fun, in a few days it’ll be getting old and by this time next month I’ll be eating nothing but pizza-by-the-slice and street meat.

In the meantime, I’m desperately addicted to this:

The short version is: it’s spicy juice.  The longer version is that they are sweetened, lightly flavored beverages with a smidgen of capsaicin in them, so they have a little bit of a burn.  The weirdest part is that my Crohn’s disease is not bothered in the least by it, and in fact the opposite.  I’ve been feeling pretty good lately, and the niacin-like rush of the capsaicin is no joke.

My only grief about the product is that I feel it could do with a little less sugar – while they don’t taste overly sugary, 40g per bottle is pretty much the upper limit of what I am comfortable consuming in a beverage and are what’s keeping me to one or two a week as a treat.  I guess I’m that nutbag asking them to make a sugar-free version, but there it is: some of us can’t digest sugar well and have to divvy up our sugar intake between the things we really can’t live without, like marshmallow milkshakes and bowls of Franken Berry for dinner.

It is to my great surprise that one of the thing I currently miss most about Los Angeles is Magnolia Bakery:

My friend Hatherly brought me a full box of a dozen cupcakes on our last day in L.A., and I ate them as I drove north along California’s central valley.  They sat on the floorboard of the Penske where they got rather warm, as though they were fresh baked and prematurely frosted.  They were indescribable ambrosia.

There are many great restaurants I’ll miss about that city, but most of them have analogues in Seattle and Portland.  As far as I know, that can’t be said about Magnolia.  And I can bust out a pretty mean cupcake of my own, but not that vanilla cupcake.  And I’ve tried.  You’d think I’d be happy just knowing they existed, but I am not. I am furious.

In opposite news, I think I finally figured out butternut squash.

I used to really dislike it, primarily for it’s wet mushiness, but I keep cooking it in the hopes that I can squash-whisper it’s secrets.  My conclusion?  Cutting it smaller.  I finally roasted a pan of butternut squash that I really enjoyed, and by cutting it into little bite-size cubes and roasting in a few spoonfuls of coconut oil at 375° for an hour until the cubes started to caramelize.  Salt and pepper finished it off.  We mixed the whole pan into a pot of pesto-dressed pasta and crumbled goat cheese over the whole pile and called it dinner.  Not too sweet, not too damp.  Success.

Now I’m going to go mope around Costco with my dad.

The dog is recovering in normal dog fashion, in that she seems as though nothing traumatic happened to her until she suddenly crashes out into deep coma-like naps.  I, on the other hand, am entering into that second-guessing everything stage.

While the vet was right about what needed to be done – the lump had to be sent for biopsy, the tooth was abcessed, the nails too long for non-sedated clipping – I don’t think we’d stay with him in the future, were we staying in Los Angeles.  I don’t like that he told me that dogs didn’t have any recovery to worry about when having molars removed — when pressed he admitted that they could possibly get dry socket like humans, and should probably not eat hard food for “a day or two”.

He was also very offhand about the very reason I took her to him in the first place, that she has an infection around her fingernails.  The home-care for this is a tiny $20 container of  damp antibacterial wipes that are almost impossible to get in and around her nail bed because of the stiff hairs there.  I called and asked how well I should be cleaning them – should I be scrubbing them clean or just wiping them down? – and was given another vague answer of “Just wipe them clean as best you can.”  To which I answer: well, which is it?  Just wipe them clean?  Or as best as I can? Because as best as I can involves stuffing the stupid pad up under her fingernails and up under the hairs, which causes her visible discomfort.

It was my mom who pointed out that I like to know precisely how to do things, and my vet is of the old school philosophy that animal recovery just sort of works out if you surgically remove anything weird and then give them some antibiotics.

I sadly set about making the last pie of the Guacamole House, using the phyllo crust alternative, and was not at all surprised that it turned out way too sweet.  I mean, I was surprised, but not surprised that the last pie of the house would be a fucked up one.

I had some nectarines going south, and a few Honeycrisp apples, as well as some frozen blueberries and about half a cup of dried sour cherries that needed using.  Normally I hate getting rid of food just to get rid of it, but pies are natural recipients of the kitchen-sink method.  Anyway, it was a lot of fruit and I added a loose cup of brown sugar, which would normally be just right for the same amount of apples.  If they are tart apples, which these were not.  Also: overripe nectarines.  And ripe blueberries.  And a sugary phyllo crust. I mean, it was delicious, I just had to snack on some potato chips between servings of the pie, I’m no fool.