Anger Burger

Well, I’m disgusted.  So, I made this raspberry pie, see.  It’s a nice enough raspberry pie, it’s been a recent favorite around here after a long spat of cherry pie requests.  I realize we’re right smack in the middle of fresh fruit season, but two bags of frozen raspberries runs me less than $5 and when it’s too hot out to do anything but slap together a crust as fast as you can before the whole thing starts melting, it’s genius.

So there I am, making this pie, when I remember that Anger Burger reader Jason sent me a packet of guava paste.  Which is well and good, lord knows I love a fruit paste, but I was having trouble deciding what to do with the stuff.  It’s very dense and heavy, and while I wanted to make a guava cake, I knew I would have to cook it down with some water or guava juice to make it work in cake.  And you know, that’s a lot of work for someone who recently bought nicer jim-jam bottoms so that she felt less embarrassed about going out to check her mail in them.  However, I am standing there, staring at the usual pile of pie dough scraps, when a little fruitfly whispers in my ear: pasta de guayaba!  And I’m all, I don’t speak fruitfly!  You’re in America now!  Learn the language!  Freeloader.

First, a taste.  Primary reaction: SUGAR!  Holy christ, that’s sweet.  But then: GUAVA!  Lovely, floral, tropical guava.  It even has the slight grit of a guava – like a pear.  Somewhat disheartened, I wonder how I can make something so sweet palatable.

Hmm, I wonder, while staring at some fresh peaches.  Hmm.  What will I do.  Hmm.  Go buy some lemons?  What would I do with them then?  Hmm.  Man, there’s a lot of fruitflies around those peaches.

I know what you’re thinking: for a lady, she’s a sharp one.

There was enough dough left over for four hand-pies, which included 1 1/2 good-sized slices of guava paste and three slices of peach each.  Unsure of what else to do to them, I left them plain.  Just peach and guava paste, no spices, nothing.  The paste was plenty sugary to sweeten the slightly underripe peach, and I was getting too hot to give a shit otherwise.  I hit them with some egg wash and granulated sugar to form a crust and into the oven they went.

So basically, here’s the deal: this was maybe the best fucking pastry I have made in my entire goddamn life.  The guava paste softened in the heat and peach juices, and the peaches themselves were perfectly cooked.  For whatever reason, instead of suffering under the indignity of a re-roll, my pie dough turned out perfectly flaky and crisp.  The proportions, the flavors, everything about it was incredible.  As I ate I was overwhelmed with a blind fury, incensed that I hadn’t made a dozen of these things instead of wasting my time with that stupid raspberry pie.  Crumbs sprayed from me in a cloud.  I gulped for air around giant, still-warm mouthfuls of pie.

Jason, we may have to arrange for more of this guava paste to belong to me.

I can’t believe I’ve never told you about this before, but I have a law of universal constant named after me: Sunday’s Law of Unavailability.

I mean, sure, Mike named it that, but it’s a real thing.  It goes like this: the moment that I desire something — and the more mundane the item the more unavailable it becomes –  it is nowhere to be found.  Unfindable.  I want black jeans?  No one, and I mean no one makes black jeans for under $100.  I need some linen fabric?  It’s not linen season, tough shit.  Pectin?  My grocery store only carries bulk boxes of liquid pectin.

I can go on, but I won’t.  Because I can scratch one item off the list, and that item is chai.

This right here is my holy grail chai:

I used to love chai, I could and did drink gallons of all that sugary, anemic crap they sold at most espresso shops.  Iced or hot, didn’t matter.  I liked espresso too, but if I couldn’t take any more of the black gold, I’d switch to that candy-scented teat¹ of chai without missing a beat.

Of course, tastes change.  I stopped taking sugar in my coffee a few years back (out of laziness, first, and then out of preference) and more recently I’ve cut back on sugaring my tea as well.  Last Thanksgiving I made myself a cup of Oregon Chai after having not had it in years and almost blew it back out all over the kitchen. I used to drink this swill?

Thus I set off on the Great Chai Quest which we can just fast forward through because it sounds boring even to me, and I’m the one on stage here.  My mom was sitting in the doctors office reading a magazine, and read about Tipu’s chai, which was described as “peppery” and “intense”.  Or something similar enough that she discretely ripped the page out of the magazine and smuggled it home to me.  Because my beef with chai was twofold: it was always too sweetly spiced (much too much clove and cinnamon) and too hard to brew (microwaving a cup of bark like three times, then straining it and then adding a spoonful of sugar was more than I was willing to commit).

But here is Tipu, bless him, who makes instant chai.  But there’s something funny about it.  It’s not like instant coffee where the liquid is already brewed and the resulting product is dried.  Tipu’s is just the most finely ground spices and tea that I’ve seen in my life.  The second I opened the package I thought with awe and terror, this stuff is going to hurt.

And indeed, my first cup following their directions – 1 teaspoon to each 8oz cup – was so strong that it left my mouth burning for about an hour after drinking it.  Not like “Oh I’m a giant baby” burning, but a noticeable, low-grade warmth.  Spicy!  I was enchanted.  And kind of heartburny.

The second time around I remembered that most coffee cups actually hold 6oz of fluid and halved the powdered spices down to a half a teaspoon.  Xanadu!

And that, my friends, is the best cup of chai I’ve ever had.  Half soy, half water, a single teaspoon of sugar, lots of lingering peppercorn heat, and a sludge of pure evil at the bottom of the cup.  It truly makes mornings slightly less horrific.

¹ That reminds me of a story!  Many years ago my housemate worked at Starbucks. She wasn’t looking forward to the job, but we were all pleased to see in the following weeks that she not only lost weight, but seemed much peppier than usual. I didn’t notice, at first, that she always came home with the largest size of chai they served. I did start noticing that on her days off, she’d be incredibly irritable and eventually she even started going into work on mornings off to buy a chai. So, that’s weird. And then it came out that the chai had ephedrine in it. HA!  Whoops.

I was recently pointed toward Thursday Night Smackdown, which I had never read before and thus had my sense of awe renewed.  Not because the blog is that good (it is that good but, I mean — how is this post going so badly so quickly?) but because each time I feel that I’ve fully and diligently mapped the internet, it turns out there is a whole new section of dungeon I failed to explore.

Anyway, I suspect that a lot of my regulars will adore Thursday Night Smackdown as much as I now do, even if she makes a few too many soups for me to be happy¹.

¹ Why the sadness? Because I love soup. I love it, I do. And the Viking Heathen I have chosen to align myself with does not like the soup. Like, berserker rage does not like it.  So that even if I just make some for myself, he starts to panic and smash things before I can assure him that I’ve made an entirely separate dinner for him that consists of only partially frozen deer meat and the livers of his enemies.

Like you never bought a box of sugar cereal before.

When I was little we weren’t allowed sugar cereal, and we lived with my grandpa, who was allowed.  Wrap your mind around this.  Our boxes of Shredded Compost sitting next to his boxes of Frosted Flakes.  For my 5th birthday I was allowed a sugar cereal of my choosing¹, a memory that remains in my mind as the definition of perfect happiness.  So basically: deny your kids a $2 luxury and then occasionally “splurge” and your poor little waif babies will think you are a god.

I have a not-exactly guilty pleasure of cake-flavored things that aren’t cakes.  So, cake batter icecream?  Yes.  Cake batter jellybeans?  Good in theory, bad in practice².  Which leads me to the obvious mitigating factor that the flavor has to be good, and there are some bad artificially-cake-flavored items out there — mostly when just so mild that the primary flavor is merely vanillin, but also the rare coconut end of the spectrum, which is just weird.

Post’s Cupcake Pebbles are excellent.  A true milky, vanilla, egg-yolky cake-batter flavor, and plenty strong.  Of course, it’s made with like triple-hydrogenated oils, baby seal fat, BPAs and mercury, but shit, dog.  Sometimes a girl needs a giant bowl of cupcake-flavored cereal for dinner.

¹ I chose Smurf-Berry Crunch.
² They taste like coconut.

What if I told you I thought I found my male internet doppelganger?

I wonder which one of us should be more offended.

The upside¹ of the hipstery food revolution taking place in America is that our produce is getting better.  Sort of.  I can’t walk into my local Ralph’s and find anything but fluffy, tasteless Chiquita Cavendish bananas.  I can, however, get 400 varieties of melon.  I can get grass-fed beef (and even bison!) but the pork still looks like fake meat sculpted from perfectly even, flesh-toned putty.

I think I pushed an old lady out of my way when I saw this at the Japanese market:

That, friends, is a Berkshire pork.  Until recently, no one but maybe a few British farmers knew what Berkshire pork was, and those farmers didn’t much care.  It was an old pig breed (apparently the oldest domesticated variety?) that slipped drastically out of favor.  It was too fatty!  Too fatty, my god.  The horror.  People are snapping out of it (in particular the Japanese) and recognizing that fattier meat means tastier meat.  I grabbed a package of pork belly and my god, was it delicious.  But as we stood in the kitchen prepping dinner, Mike looked at the above logo and said to me, “There’s something about that pig that makes me uncomfortable.”  It was a while before we realized why.

Oh no.

Yep, that’s it.

¹ Downside: the farmer’s market is way too fucking crowded with double-wide strollers and screaming toddlers reaching for $6 punnets of organic strawberries.

You guys.  These hot cakes.

I’m not fucking around.  Well, let’s back up: so, I’m walking through the Japanese market and I do an actual double-take (seriously, I’d like to see the security footage) at this box of hot cake mix.  I never before until that precise moment understood that I had an unrealized hot cake fantasy wherein inch-thick, supernaturally golden brown stacks appear before me on the wings of angels. And it’s not just me: a five year-old post at Brown Bread Ice Cream is all the proof I need to know I’m not insane.  I mean, about the beauty of Japanese hot cakes.

I’m not interested in their little included packets of single-serve artificial maple syrup, but I appreciate the gesture.  And classically, a complete lack of English matters not at all when the infographics are useful enough:

Apparently you vibrate a whisk with 100ccs of something white and an egg until your bowl shouts in Japanese, and then you add the powder mix.    I have to tell you, I was mesmerized and titillated from the start.  With an egg and a little under 1/2 C. of milk (100ccs is something like .42 fluid cups) the batter was the texture of frosting.  I added a few more tablespoons of milk until I could at least form a hot cake with it, even though I realize a lot of that magical loft comes from the thickness of the batter.  And the smell!  No kidding: vanilla cake batter.  Cake batter!  Even Mike had a lightbulb appear over his head.  Why haven’t we tried to make pancakes out of cake batter before?

The only reason the hot cakes didn’t turn out exactly like on the box was from the shaking of my hands as I made them.  How illicit!  I mean, I’m the person that makes homemade  pancakes with ground flax in them for christ’s sake.  And here are these cartoonishly perfect, vanilla-cakey little patties that cooked up perfect in less than five minutes.

We ate them and chicken sausages with our fingers like we were getting away with something.  Which we were, I guess.  We ate cake with sugar syrup for dinner.

I realized then what is so terrifically charming about certain Japanese foods: this idealized version of something crafted with no preexisting expectations in mind.  What’s this “hot cake” you say?  Like a cake in a pan?  Like this?  YES, CLOSE ENOUGH.

Back in December I bragged about a batch of fudge.  Remember this?  And in the comments my friend Dan — who is also Anger Burger’s Master Tech Geek and therefore invaluable to me in a way that borders on weird, mostly in that I haven’t even updated to WordPress 2.9.2 because I don’t want to bother Dan if the site breaks –  told me that he made a mean fudge himself and that I’d have to try it.  I blasted off some comment about why didn’t he send me some.  I think I may have ruined the punchline of this post, but I’m sitting around yesterday all lah-te-dah, when the mail arrives.

What is this?  I have no idea.  Why the hell would Dan mail me something?  Is it a bill for the site?  Is the bill really so big that he needed to USPS Priority it to me?

WAIT A GODDAMN MINUTE!  I mean, actually, my very first thought was What the hell? because I didn’t remember about the fudge.  And then I actually shouted out loud (I have a witness) “I HAD A MEMORY!”  And indeed I did!  Dan said he’d mail me fudge!  And then he did!  I swear, if I didn’t already feel like I take advantage of this guy, I certainly do now.  Well, in a moment, because I’m going to make a bold claim: Dan, it’s good.  But can it go head to head with mine?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  We both know the two words that come next.

FUDGE.  BATTLE.

I don’t know when.  I don’t know how.  But Fudge Battle is coming.  It’s unavoidable.  And afterward, I hope you’ll still fix my code when I break it beyond repair.

As a thanks to Dan, I want to send him something.  A pack of gum.  But not just any gum.  I haven’t yet written a love letter to Black Black, the best gum in the world, and that’s a shame.  If you’re the kind of person that spits out an Altoid for being too hot, you’re going to hate Black Black.  It’s like having a -15° winter storm come into your room while you’re sleeping and kick you in the face.  Your eyes water uncontrollably.  People around you gasp for breath and cry out for help.  Flowers drop petals.  Cats hiss.  Planes 30,000 feet above you experience turbulence.  And you’re asking, how can this possibly get any better?  Like so:  it’s also caffeinated.

I’m sending Dan a pack of this miracle, and while I’m at it I’m going to send a pack to TWO OF YOU AS WELL!  Two lucky bastards other than Dan will have the wonderment that is Lotte’s Black Black.  You should know the drill by now, but in case you don’t:

1) You may only comment once.  If you comment more than once I will delete all but one of your comments.  To be perfectly clear: you will not be disqualified, you’ll just have all but one of your comments deleted to ensure you get the same chances as everyone else.

2) I don’t care what you say.

3) Contest closes at 8pm PST on Tuesday night – any comments made after 8pm will not qualify.

4) Anyone may enter.

That’s it!  And then off in the mail it goes.  Don’t thank me.  Thank Dan.

***CONTEST CLOSED!***

Stand by for results!

Life is rough, most of the time.  I’m predictably pessimistic, if you haven’t yet caught that.  And while I like that we each have our own beliefs about life, mine is this: there’s nothing more than this.  Nothing more than what you are feeling, experiencing right now.  I believe this to the core of myself.  Doing what makes you happy is your only obligation in life.

My friends Junko and Sean are two of a few close friends helping me through an intense part of my life right now, one where my happy place is pretty elusive.  But their calm, kindhearted presence is invaluable.  Also: Junko’s “Oh, I’m just making a little Japanese breakfast.”  Those are beautiful words.

Grilled mackerel, or saba, is slowly surpassing my other favorite fish (trout) for first place.  Unlike trout, saba is oily and rich.  I’ll always love trout, but the older I get the more my brain requires Omega-3 fatty acids in order to keep from sticking to itself.

If you’ve never had burdock, or gobo, you’re missing out.  It’s a homely, brown, long and slender root vegetable that needs to be peeled and cooked, but its flavor is something between a sweet potato and a parsnip; somewhat dry, earthy, mild and pleasantly textured.  Burdock is also pretty cheap, so if you see it you should experiment with it.  Tell your kids you’re having stick for dinner.

An egg to slide over your rice when you’re ready, and a very lightly steamed piece of broccoli topped with a squiggle of Kewpie mayonnaise – this is a flavor combination that breaks my heart with perfection.  The Kewpie isn’t like American mayo – it’s more vinegary and somehow more savory, less like a sandwich spread and more like, well, a condiment.  If that makes sense.  I’ve implored you guys before to try some Kewpie, and I am practically begging now.  A little dollop on anything from a cube of rare seared tuna to a simple black olive — okay, it’s not like I need to be encouraged to eat more mayonnaise, but, c’mon.  Right now is not the time for austerity.

My love of fish knows no boundaries.

I’m not kidding.  Well, I’m always kidding, but hopefully you know what I mean.  I love it in such a way that when I say aloud that I love it it comes out all guttural and exaggerated, I luuuuuuuuhhhv it.

Here’s a hint for what’s cookin’ tonight: it’s not this exact fish.