Anger Burger

Occasionally, I register my disgust on the internet, like so:

I was so disappointed today when I went to purchase my usual
weekly box of Alpen and discovered the familiar, cheery red and white
box was now a badly-designed dull brown.  Such poor graphic design!  The
photographs of the grains and the color palette look like something from
the 70’s – and not in the happy, Scandinavian way that Alpen looked
before.  I’m not sure what possessed you guys to change the box so
drastically, but I’m sad to see it.

Sincerely,
Sunday

What am I going on about?  Oh, why, just this totally retarded box redesign from my favorite healthy cereal, Alpen:

Please tell me I’m going nuts, because where I’m standing from, this looks like a lovely, sort of retro but pretty delicious-looking cereal that has been transformed into a 1970’s-made-for-TV-movie cereal comprised of mulch, horse hay, compost and owl pellets.

Alpen had this to say in its defense:

Thank you for the email giving us your review of the new Alpen box
design.  We are very sorry you didn’t like the new graphics.

We appreciate receiving our customers’ suggestions and comments about
our products, and we have forwarded your comments about the packaging to
the appropriate department to take under consideration.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further comments.
We hope you will continue to enjoy our other products in excellent
health!

Regards,
Kathy Zorn
Technical Services Coordinator
Weetabix North America
Barbara’s Bakery Division

Kathy, I didn’t respond because I don’t want to be the lunatic who keeps emailing you about the Alpen box, but I just want to understand what is happening.  Do you want Alpen to fail?  Was this an act of vengeance?   A spurned lover down in the box design department, perhaps?  Some Republican scheme to torture eaters of hippie cereal?  The last part I’d understand, but in all seriousness, it’s working.  Each time I pour a bowl of Grim Alpen for myself, I think, here’s one bowl of muesli closer to my demise.

So there I am, digging through my recipe archives¹, looking for something to do with the rest of my quart of buttermilk when I remember that Smitten Kitchen did a buttermilk cake a while back and off my fingers flew.

Unsurprisingly, the cake is amazing.  It’s perfect.  And as it took 30 minutes to assemble and 30 minutes to bake, an hour after starting I was rewarded with a lovely, fragrant cake that I had little intention of sharing with anyone.

The downside is that the recipe re-fired an old irritation I have for the whole “milk + lemon juice = buttermilk” wives tale.  And it pains me to see Smitten Kitchen trooping along with it — it causes such a hitch in my giddyup to see my beloved bacteria-laden buttermilk impostered so poorly with acidified milk.  You see, milk and lemon juice together does not make buttermilk.  It makes, as mentioned one sentence ago, acidified milk, which is not really the same at all.

A fair comparison is to say that thickening milk with gelatin is the same as making yogurt.  Sure, it looks similar, and all it’s missing is that critical fermentation process.  Additionally, some of the more authentic buttermilks (like Knudsen) add small flecks of butterfat to the milk to boost flavor, making it a lot more like the actual stuff you would theoretically get from the making of butter (hence the name – buttermilk is actually the residue from making butter) (or rather:  used to be, it isn’t any more).  You might even be able to find honest-to-goodness real buttermilk if you have a local dairy representin’ at your farmer’s market.

This isn’t to say that milk and lemon juice together don’t make an interesting product — they do — it’s just that I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t just use buttermilk instead.  An even better substitute would be mixing equal parts plain full-fat yogurt to whole milk, but again, what is this, the Cold War?  Is there a ration on buttermilk?  The stuff keeps forever in the fridge, why not just buy a pint?

Still, that’s life, I guess.  Some people care about human rights.  I care about buttermilk.

(Seriously, this recipe is great.  Go get it.)

¹A pile of print-outs and unlabeled lists of ingredients.

Man, I have hashed this over in my head so many times I feel like I’m breaking up with the damn cup.  How do I say this?  Am I making a mistake?  Am I actually an asshole like everyone keeps telling me I am?  Can I even find a better cup?

First, the beginning: on various blogs around the web I’d read about the Keep Cup, an Australian company with a plastic – yes, plastic – travel cup.  No gimmicks, other than a claim at environmentalism (which in turn is just: use our cup instead of disposable ones).  But it hooked me:

1. It comes in an 8oz size
2. It does not have a handle
3. It has a sippy cup lid that appears to actually work.

I hate travel mugs, and having been a barista for nearly a decade, I’ve handled pretty much all of them.  I can taste metal.  The drink holes are messy.  They don’t break apart in enough pieces to thoroughly clean.  They’re all too big.  You get the idea.  And here was the Keep Cup, which, despite sounding like a retrograde feminine product, was sitting there quietly defying every single hate-point I have for travel mugs.

The only problem is that they aren’t sold in the US.

I think to myself, big deal, I’ll order one.  I send and receive international packages semi-regularly, and mail from New Zealand takes about five days.  I gulped and re-thought the whole thing when I saw that shipping was going to be the same price as the cup itself (about $10), but I forged ahead.

Now we are to the part where I am not sure what to say.  You see, nothing wrong happened, exactly, but I just… I guess I got rubbed the wrong way by the company.  I’m not sure how else to explain it.  First, an email went totally unanswered.  I tried again a week later and got a rather flustered email back about how busy the company was.  Then, three weeks later when the cup had still not arrived, I sent another email and was told they’d do tracking on it for me and get back ASAP.  Which I guess stands for something else in Australia, because no one got back to me.  A month after my order, the package arrived and looked like it’d been carried on a raft at sea after a long donkey ride through the desert.

Which, okay, whatever.  Shipping is a game of dice, especially international shipping.  And the cup arrived, and all is well, so what do I have to complain about?  Nothing, really, except for that feeling where you have to work really hard to give someone else your money, which is a feeling I dislike greatly.

I had planned to take photos of the cup and out about, a kind of documentaire vérité of the cup doin’ its business, but the truth is that I’ve forgotten to take a photo of it in use for two months now, and the cup and I are still a little frosty toward each other.  It works fine.  It’s great, in fact.  To someone who doesn’t value physical lightness the cup might seem cheap, but this is a positive for me.  It’s plastic.  For once, something isn’t overbuilt into absurdity (see also: toothbrushes).  The whole lid pops apart for cleaning.  The silicone band is grippy and insulates fingers from heat.  On the same subject, the plastic doesn’t insulate nearly as well as one of those steel monstrosity travel mugs you can give a concussion with, but again, for me it works.  The simple summary is: if other mugs are Hummers, the Keep Cup is a Prius¹.

I sincerely recommend this cup to you, provided you’re anything like me.  I guess my reservation is: be prepared for a difficult birth, but the baby will be great.  And let’s hope Keep Cup can find an American distributor.

¹Which is also to say: in a streetfight I’d much rather be the person with the insulated, 20-ounce. stainless steel travel mug, but I’ve come to accept I am not a predator in my species.

***I tried to work some comment about iPads and Keep Cups into this post, but I’m just failing today.  Maybe you guys can help me out.

I’m ashamed at how little I am exploring Los Angeles.  Part of it is being without a car, yes, but… really that’s no excuse.  Which is how I found myself on a subway full of people wearing no pants, realizing that I am actually less than an hour away from Chinatown by public transportation – which, I might add, is also the same amount of time it would take me to get there were I driving myself.  This is where I demurely slap myself in the forehead.

We wanted to go to Empress Pavilion, a well-known Los Angeles dim sum joint both loved and hated in equal measure.  Online reviews expound of the bitchiness of the cart servers (um, have you ever had dim sum before?) and the quality of the food, while others insist they had the best dim sum of their lives.  It doesn’t matter: I wanted to try it.  And of course they stopped serving just before we would have arrived.

Instead, we walked over to CBS Seafood (there’s also an ABC Seafood and one must assume an NBC Seafood and a FOX Seafood as well), where we got the full on Whitey Treatment.  This is to be expected.  We are whiteys.  But our friend Justin was, how shall we say, very dehydrated?  And was literally begging the waiters for a cup of water.  We had to ask 5 different people and waited 10 minutes before water came (there were only three other tables of customers).  Then we waited another 10 minutes to order three small dim sum plates.  Then we waited another 10 minutes to get it.  And I think the point at which you can’t get food quickly enough to keep from getting hungry between servings, it is time to leave.  I don’t often get whiteyed-out of a joint, but it does happen occasionally.

Luckily, Justin also has an iPhone, which means that we were made abruptly aware of our proximity to Philippe’s, a Los Angeles institution.  Philippe’s is pretty inarguably the inventor of the French dip sandwich, as well as beloved for their housemade superhot mustard.  And none of us had been there.

The rumors of the tremendous lines were well-founded.  The girl in line in front of us informed her friend that it was “usually much worse than this,” which, I don’t know about you, but there’s not a lot of this shit I’ll endure for any ol’ sandwich.

Which, sadly, Philippe’s was.  I must amend that to say: it was a pretty good sandwich.  The above is lamb (we got one with cheese and one without, to split) and while the meat was good and the bread was great, you don’t dip your own sandwich in au jus, it is done for you as you order, meaning that even if you eat right away — which we did — the result is a soggy, slimy bun.  The meat is also not quite warm enough to melt the cheese, something I didn’t anticipate being so disappointed by.  If I had waited five minutes in line I might feel differently, but after 40 minutes and being elbowed by a group of oversized, drunken sportsfans¹, I’ll probably turn it down in the future.

On our walk back to Central Station, I noticed a cart selling churros.  Not just any churros.  The ones they fill with dulce de leche (or custard or strawberry) when you order.

Oh my god, that was good.  That might have been the best three dollars I’ve spent in recent memory.  It seems baffling that I could fit them in after dim sum and a lamb sandwich, but I have a special extra stomach just for deep fried sweets.  I’m a miracle of science.

¹ At one point the guy behind me tapped me hard on the shoulder and said in an unfocused daze “Are you gonna order?” I stared at him and his friends, unsure what the fuck was going on. You see, we weren’t at the front of the line. “I… will?” I said. He seemed satisfied and we waited for 15 more minutes.

One of the reasons I don’t shop at Whole Foods is because I become obsessed with foods I can’t afford.  Still, a treat every now and again never hurt anyone.  That is, if you take care to ensure the definition of “every now and again” doesn’t translate to “weekly.”  If I used heroin, I suspect I’d be one of those “weekender” heroin addicts.  It’s fine.  I only use on the weekends.  Recreationally.

So anyway, speaking of heroin: Dinon is an Italian company that makes ready-to-eat seafood products, and to be frank I have to stand before them in the refrigerated section and ask myself what else I should be spending $10 on.  And it usually takes me a really long time to come up with answers.  Sometimes, I don’t have an answer at all, and one of them comes home with me.

The white anchovy filets are absolutely gorgeous, like all their products.  These things are incredible fancypants social slut appetizers straight out of the plastic container.  They’re not terribly fishy or salty like you might think (Americans are totally fucked over on the anchovy front) and are instead lightly vinegared, lightly seasoned, and tender.

It’d be a shame to do anything with them but eat them with water crackers.  Maybe not, maybe that’s my empty pocketbook talking.  Sometimes I like to imagine cooking with these, pushing them into homemade focaccia or roughly chopping them up and adding them to a really fresh new red potato salad.  Then I gulp and think, those little fuckers were ten dollars! And then I suckle on them like Omega-3-saturated gold nuggets.

Sorry if you don’t have a Whole Foods in the area. You’re probably better off, in the long run.

I’m one of those fun-killing blow-hards that spits at Valentine’s Day, expounding that expressing love for one another should be a daily activity and not one saturated with weird expectations and sub-standard chocolates laden with cheap vegetable fats.  Likewise, I find Thanksgiving to be a particularly ironic holiday; I am lucky to have a family I universally like, but most people I know can only tolerate an hour of their own kin, even lubed up with White Russians.

All Anger Burger family meals tend to turn into little Thanksgivings, and that’s the way we like it.  Getting everyone together for a “little fish dinner” feels so casual at first, but quickly becomes extravagant.  We can’t help it.  My mom, for example, realized she didn’t have prepared tartar sauce, so she quickly made some from scratch.  And it was lovely.  And went marvelously with some fresh, locally made lox and a Ritz cracker.

Some families have alcoholics, my family has fishoholics.  We can’t just sip a beer eat a piece of frozen fish.  We have to get some fresh rock cod and sablefish.  And then we have to make some homemade beer batter and deep fry it until it is crispy on the outside and soft, buttery and so moist on the inside that the batter will get soggy if you wait too long.  This isn’t foodie-ism, this is pure gluttony.

The next day was a long-promised treat with my dad, the consumption of miracle fruit that he missed out on last summer when I did it with the rest of my family.  Miracle fruit is a West African berry of total unremarkableness, other than the fact that for about 20 minutes after chewing one up everything sour tastes like candy.  True!  My dad was game, but it was also the late afternoon and frankly, he didn’t yet comprehend the Super Duper Awesomeness that he was in store for.

Several whole citruses and a few canker sores later, we were still smacking our lips in delight and gluttony.  If you’ve never heard of miracle fruit, read the Wikipedia link up there, it explains it pretty well.  And then, all of you: order some.  We used the tablets and they work just great, though their effect lasts only half as long as eating fresh or frozen fruit.  It’s difficult to describe with enough emphasis, but grapefruits and lemons become the most incredible, unbelievable candy you’ve ever eaten.  My dad went to just taste one or two pieces and like me ended in silence, hunched over the sink while gobbling down whole fruits.  The worst part is the realization that grapefruit will never taste this delicious again.  Unless you eat another miracle fruit.

Homemade Tartar Sauce
homemade tartar sauce really is better than what you can get in a jar.  no food starches, no added sugar, just a piquant mayonnaise-based condiment.

1 C. good mayonnaise (NOT MIRACLE WHIP, FOR FUCK’S SAKE)
4 T. not-sweet pickles (cornichons are best)
2 T. sharp white vinegar
3 T. capers, drained
salt
pepper
fresh or dried dill (optional)

• Put everything in a blender or food processor and blitz until the large pieces are all knocked down, but small chunks remain.  It will appear to be weirdly runny at first, but if you let it set up in the fridge for an hour or two it’ll be more like tartar sauce.

• If you don’t have a blender or food processor, just finely chop everything and add it to the mayo.  Rustic!

• Also: this is really easy to mess with.  Add different herbs, vinegars, spices, pickled jalapenos, roasted bell peppers … as long as there is vinegar and something sort of vaguely pickle-flavored, the result will be tartar sauce.

I wish a great deal of self-medication (this includes chocolate cream pie) for all during this time of the year — a time I must admit I enjoy, despite my penchant of actually and literally saying “Humbug!”  After all: feasting holiday!

In the next week I will provide you the following:

• A review of a reusable coffee cup that sounds like a reusable feminine device

• Rude commentary (see above point)

• How to make my mother’s Top Secret Christmas Jello Salad¹

• An experimental fudge recipe my mother and I dubbed “The Titanic” (since the recipe’s author claimed it “never failed”) but which we later renamed “The Olympic” (after the Titanic’s sister ship that turned out to actually be unsinkable but which no one made a dramatic movie about)

• Photographs

• Links (maybe)

Aren’t you excited?  I am.  It might be the schnapps talking, but let’s be honest: it usually is.

¹Never actually a secret.

I feel kind of dirty for doing this, but it’s nevertheless something I can’t get off my mind: a list of kitchen gift ideas.  To make myself feel better, I am proud to say that most of this stuff will be almost too late too order for Christmas and certainly too late to order for Hanukkah.  Take that!

1. Sur La Table Melamine Mixing Bowls

For some reason these give me a massive kitchen boner, the red set in particular.  Is it the stacking?  The clean rims?  The Goldilocks not-too-shallow and not-too-steep profile?  I dunno, but I’d sure love to replace my heap of mismatched steel bowls with these.  Did I mention they’re only $30?  They are.  Sigh.

2. Wood’s Boiled Cider

Jesus, will I ever stop talking about this shit?  Nope.  It’s gone into my pies, tomato sauces, Malt-o-Meal, salad dressing, onto pancakes, et cetera et cetera.  It’s not cheap and I certainly don’t recommend using it as a base concentrate for apple cider as their website suggests (though as a cocktail addition it would be incredible) but as an ingredient kept floating around in the fridge, I find myself adding it to — and improving — more recipes than I ever thought possible.  In fact it just occurred to me: mixed with powdered sugar, it’d make the perfect glaze for my sherry spice cake.  VICTORY!  In all seriousness – this is just literally boiled cider, a reduction of apple juice.  You can probably make it yourself provided you have a stock pot, some cider, and some way to make a flame.  On the other hand, Wood’s is a family-run artisanal business that has been doing the exact same thing the exact same way for over 120 years, and I have a kind of awe for that, as well as a well-documented predilection for extreme laziness.

3. Aunty Lilikoi Passion Fruit Products

This, like the boiled cider, is one of those luxury goods that I sort of cringe at just because shipping makes it unsatisfying to order just one item, thus making the endeavor into question of monetary flexibility, but as a bona fide passionfruit addict I have to say: this is the best you can get in the United States.  The bottles of pure passionfruit juice make amazing cheesecakes and ice cream (true: I pour it straight over vanilla ice cream and let it sort of freeze on it and then dig in, nomnomnom!), cocktails (use instead of lemon juice and whatever you’re making is now the tropical version) and salad dressing.  Once, my mom and I made a dressing for apple and shredded carrot salad that was just a little unflavored yogurt, passionfruit juice, mustard, poppyseeds, salt and sugar and it was absolutely incredible.  People gobbled it up.  And by people I mean me.

4. Now Designs Floursack Towels

These have been around for ages and with good reason: they are useful beyond compare but Now Design took it a step further and made them in a range of bright colors.  Normally flour sack towels are either natural cotton or bleached white, both of which I’ve had and both of which turned a decomposed-looking shade of zombie skin after just a few weeks of regular use and no amount of bleaching could get them presentable.  Of course these are three times the cost ($9 – $11 for three) of plain ones, but I’ve thrown away two sets of skanky plain ones and still have my old Now Design ones.

5.  Vintage Kitchen Timer

I bought one of these kitchen timers on sale from Anthropologie a while back, and it has turned into one of my favorite kitchen gadgets.  I bought it mostly because the blue was nearly a match for my Tiffany-blue kitchen at the time, but it turns out to be the handiest damn thing.  It’s magnetic, too, but really I like it because of the analog component; the ratcheting around of the timer makes me feel like I’m gettin’ down to business.

The Anger Burger kitchen has been a barren place, lately.  There’s not a good explanation, I’m just going through one of those crackers-for-dinner streaks where nothing seems worth doing dishes for.  This might on the surface appear as depression, but it’s more of a nervous aimlessness – that, and it turns out that “eating sugar” and “being motivated” were one in the same.   Whoops!

However, I did remember that I had made an apple tart at Thanksgiving and forgot all about it.  I didn’t even think I’d remembered to photograph it, but digging back through Lightroom unearthed a single, grainy shot:

It’s Ina Garten’s French Apple Tart though really, between us little birds, it’s just a pie without a lid.  Really!  The bottom crust is a basic butter-based pie crust, on top of which you layer thinly sliced apple in whatever obsessive-compulsive pattern you can achieve, top with sugar and butter, bake, and ta-da, a pie without a lid.

Overall, it was delicious, though any time you might have saved is totally lost in the time it takes to thinly slice the apples by hand and then carefully layer them into the pastry.  Still, I liked it in large part because it was so thin and because the lack of lid allowed for more of a reduction of the liquids, resulting in a kind of apple pie concentrate.

Now, some tips: Google the recipe and you’ll find some questionable-looking versions out there, which I’m aware sounds profoundly snooty and in fact is, but let’s get serious: you’re making this to impress people, even if only yourself.

• The thinner you slice the apples, the better it will look.  The problem here is that the thinner you slice them, the thinner the tart itself will be as well, and to counter that you’re actually looking at two layers of apple here, but the bottom one made no effort to look nice.  I just quickly packed in about 1/2 the apples and made them as flat as possible, and then came the fancy layer.  This also, if I recall, required one or two more apples than she called for, but since I always buy more than I need it was fine.

• Her recipe calls for 1/2 a stick of butter cut into small pieces and put over the apples to bake into them during cooking, and for my money that is way too much butter.  It’s not even gluttonous, it’s just an oil slick.  I think you can get away with the equivalent of a 1/4 stick of butter, or just a few pieces pinched off and dropped on top.

• I drizzled over about 1/4 cup of boiled cider before baking, because I’m totally obsessed with this stuff.  You know how in The Dark Crystal the Skeksis use the power of the crystal to steal the life essence from Podlings and then drink it?  I think that’s what they did to the apples that went into my bottle of boiled cider.

• Ina’s original recipe calls for the pastry to be laid flat on a baking sheet and then layered with apples, which would also work just great, though she advises that it’s alright if and when the juices all leak out and burn.  I think that losing the juices is a incomprehensible tragedy and recommend instead that you use a large tart pan and form the pastry carefully all the way up the sides.

So there you go.  A totally fussy tart that is worth the trouble if you’re showing off, but probably not if you’re going to eat it all yourself at home while watching old seasons of Supernatural on DVD.  Mmm, Winchester boys¹.

¹ Actually I’m just a Dean girl myself. Sam is, well, how should we put this: there’s a reason we call the show Shmoopernatural. Someone’s shmoopy and needs a hug.

So, it’s that holiday where everyone roasts a turkey and counts the ways in which they are grateful for being alive. I offer one and one thing only:

CUPCAKES.  Glorious, beautiful cupcakes.  A friend ordered a load of them from me for a holiday party, and when I asked her what she wanted and she hesitantly answered “Umm… Red velvet?” I answered: “No.”  No one actually wants red velvet.  They want cream cheese frosting.  In which case, in my opinion, they probably want carrot cake.  It’s a strange line of logic, but it’s mine and I’m sticking with it.  So she got a little over a dozen carrot cake cupcakes made with chopped sour cherries and pecans and topped with cream cheese frosting.  And then I made some chocolate-peppermint ones, too, because I have baking-attention-deficit-disorder (BADD).

I’m a tremendous fan of decorating cupcakes with many different toppings because it’s easy and it adds to the appearance of opulence – two kinds of cupcakes suddenly looks like dozens of kinds.  It’s a little deceiving, I know, but people seem to like it.  And I like it, frankly.  I used to have a dream when I was young about dining at a endless table filled with cartoonishly beautiful baked goods.  You can conclude from that whatever you want.  One thing that stuck with me was that no one ever actually topped cupcakes with cherries, something I always saw in cartoons but never in real life.  Ever since then I’ve always had a least a few topped with cherries.  I can’t help it.  It looks like magic to me.

I also can’t recommend shopping at Fancy Flours enough.  They have an absolutely incredible collection of cupcake liners, jimmies, toppers, things they call cake jewels that are basically every girls’ total fucking fantasy:

(They come in a lot of colors and shapes.)  Seriously, right?  Can you imagine how awesome, to have an edible jewel on the top of a cupcake?  Dang.  Also, Fancy Flours sells my alltime favorite cupcake liners, the Tokyo:

These liners are super sturdy and look KLASSY no matter what you do to them.  And, you know, $4.50 for 50 of them is a pretty affordable splurge for a special birthday cupcake or what have you.

The flowers I used in the photos above are the mini pansies, though i’ve used the  wild rose minis before too.  I also think the autumn leaves are fancy without being so girly.  But you get the idea: people think this stuff is alien technology.  For reals.  Like, the first time I put sugar flowers I didn’t even make on top of a cupcake and they freaked the fuck out, I spent a lot of energy explaining that it was just a stupid flower from a package.  I didn’t even make it.  And you know what?  They didn’t care at all.  As far as they were concerned I had pulled a diamond out of my bellybutton.  And that’s when I realized: the things that I value, as a baker?  No one else values but other bakers.  The rest of the rabble will scream and rend their clothes over store-bought sugar flowers.  Take note.