Anger Burger

Let us politely skirt around the subject of you being unable to make pie crust from scratch and instead focus on the positive: there are alternative methods to getting pie into your piehole.

Mike the Viking’s mom gave me a copy of a recipe from the April 2009 issue of Cuisine at Home magazine, a magazine I thought I’d really hate but I’ve snagged some surprisingly good ideas from.  It can be a little tiny bit Remedial Math at times, but it’s heart seems to be in the right place, and occasionally they bust out total show-stoppers like this one or the peanut butter bread.

Anyway: phyllo dough pie crust.  Oh man, this is a corker of an idea.  Astonishing!  It’s so ridiculously easy I’m ashamed of it and turned on by it all at the same time.  It was a slow burn, too.  At first I was all, meh, okay.  Sure.  And then the true gravity of the idea pressed down on me.

It really is nothing more than:

• Don’t even bother with a bottom crust, just dump the filling into a pie pan.
• For the crust, brush sheets of phyllo dough with butter, sprinkle them with sugar and then roll them into sloppy tubes.  Sprial these tubes around in circles to cover the top of the pie.
• The circle part isn’t important, you can do whatever structure you want — lattice maybe?!
• Brush top with more butter and sugar, bake for an hour.
• Revel at the madness of it all.

The result is everything you want in a pie, minus the part where you have to make pie crust.  It’s buttery, crispy and flaky and the worst part of the whole process is having to wash butter out of your pastry brush afterward.  A box of phyllo should never run more than $5 and makes four pies.  The total fat content is 1/4 of a normal pie crust.  The phyllo cannot be ruined by heat or humidity.

Do you see where I’m going with this?  I’m not saying it’s better than traditional pie, but fucking hell, you guys.  I mean, honestly the single downside is that the phyllo gets soft by the next day.  I mean, I guess it’s a downside; I just told you you’d have to eat the whole thing in one day.

Phyllo-Crust Pie
any fruit filling will work for this pie, though the recipe from the magazine is for a rhubarb-apple pie.  i’ve listed my version of that recipe below, but really: replace it with any fruit pie recipe of your choice.  a note about phyllo: if you’ve never worked with it, be prepared to be amazed and horrified.  it is thinner than tissue paper and somewhat of a bitch to work with, but as long as you keep a sheet of plastic wrap securely over your working pile (they suggest a damp towel, but in my experience unless the towel is BARELY DAMP AT ALL you’ll end up with the top sheet of phyllo dough ruined and stuck to the towel) and remember that it doesn’t really matter what it looks like, then you’ll do fine.  oh!  and phyllo is found in the freezer section of your grocery store, next to the frozen pie crusts.

for the filling:
6 cups (about 1 3/4 lb.) chopped rhubarb
2 granny smith apples, peeled, cored and diced
1 cup brown sugar
3 Tbsp. instant tapioca pearls
2 Tbsp orange juice (or any fruit juice you have in the fridge)

for the phyllo:
10 sheets phyllo
6 Tbsp butter, melted
granulated sugar

• About an hour or so before you begin, remove one sleeve of phyllo dough from the freezer and set it on the counter to thaw.

• In a large bowl, mix together the rhubarb, apples, brown sugar and tapioca.  Let it sit for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally to redistribute the sugar and juices.  When the 15 minutes are up, dump the fruit into a 9- or 10-inch pie pan.

• Heat oven to 325°.

• Unroll the phyllo on it’s sheet of plastic, but don’t remove it from it.  Have a sheet of plastic wrap standing by to drape over the top of the phyllo when you’re not directly pulling a sheet off.  Don’t let the stack be exposed to air any longer than necessary – it will suddenly and irreversibly dry out if you do.  Brush the sheets of phyllo, one at a time, with a little butter.  Not a lot, just enough to more-or-less get it all over.  It’s better to have too little than too much butter on it.  Sprinkle each sheet with sugar (about a spoonful, no more) and then roll the phyllo up into a fairly loose tube.  Do not worry about appearances, it really doesn’t matter.

• Place these tubes as you make them onto the pie filling, in whatever pattern you’d like.  Spiraling them around seems easiest.  When done, brush the top of the phyllo business with any remaining butter and then sprinkle with another few spoonfuls of sugar.

• Bake pie until bubbling around the edges and when the phyllo has turned a deep, lovely golden brown, about 1 hour.

• Eat all of it within 24 hours or you’ll turn into a Gremlin.

Because I’ve spent the last week eating nothing but frozen grapes and sparkling red wine, and also because I’ve blown all my body’s sodium out my eye-holes, it was time to eat something salty and full of coconut milk.

One of my favorite things ever is the Thai dish tom kha gai, or a chicken and coconut-broth soup heavily scented with the root herb galangal.  The soup simply cannot be made without galangal, so this is yet another of my food rants that will torture everyone not within a reasonable distance of a well-stocked Asian market.

Galangal looks almost exactly like ginger root, but tastes nothing like it.  Where ginger is sharp and spicy, galangal is floral, resinous and arcane.  There’s nothing like it in the world.  The good news is that like ginger, galangal freezes well — just slice it up first for easy use later — so if you find it, stock up.

But I’m not in the mood to draft an exegesis on tom kha gai for you.  If you’re really curious, Leela at She Simmers can tell you all about it.  My recipe is based heavily on hers, though I’m not sure she’d want my screwed up Caucasian-American version associated with hers.  What I’ll tell you is that my favorite version of tom kha gai was from a Thai restaurant in Olympia that they themselves no longer even make as good since they changed ownership in 2010.  It was so deeply layered, so complex and impossibly exotic, but it also had something that no other tom kha gai had: an orange oil floating on top.  Not a lot, just little orange spots where the oil floated.  I asked the restaurant and they said “spices.”  No further help.  And I gave up trying to recreate it.  Until I read She Simmers.

There on her post about tom kha gai was a photo – and not even the first photo, but halfway down the page – of the soup.  Orange-colored oil!  And offhandedly she mentions that adding nam prik pao, or Thai roasted chili paste, is the orange oil culprit.  She advises that it isn’t traditional, but I didn’t even shut my computer down or close the door behind me as I ran to the subway to ride down to Los Angeles’ Thai Town.

NAM PRIK PAO!  It helps if you yell it.

This stuff is a fucking miracle.  This is the condiment I’ve been missing all my life: unctuous, burny, sweet, salty, fishy, oniony, everything that is good about the world.  That’s it, that’s what it is.  Nam prik pao is an affirmation of life.  And don’t get scared off it if you’re not crazy about fishy and/or oniony things – the product transcends the sum of the parts.  It’s basically a jar full of FLAVOR.  In fact, I’d say the first thing you’d taste is salty-sweet.  This particular brand isn’t very spicy by my tastes, but the chili, anchovy, shrimp and shallot makes for this well-balanced and sort of unidentifiable savory foundation.

Added to my tom kha gai, it was the single secret ingredient that for years I had feared unfindable.

At She Simmers’ suggestion, the next day I had it spread on a grilled cheese sandwich (consumed with the leftover tom kha gai) and it was another epiphany.  I hadn’t realized that grilled cheese was missing something.  But it is.

Bear with me while I spend the next week Googling what else nam prik pao is used in.

Whitey Tom Kha Gai
there are no substitutions in this recipe.  lemon juice cannot be subbed for lime.  ginger cannot be subbed for galangal.  i’d maybe allow for white meat chicken instead of dark, but just don’t tell me about it.  anyway, though the ingredients may be elusive, the recipe itself is dead simple.

2 14oz. cans sodium-free chicken broth
1 knob of fresh galangal (about the size of a large lime) sliced thin
1 stalk fresh lemongrass, chopped into 1/4 inch slices
6 keffir lime leaves, each torn in half
handful of fresh mushrooms, preferably oyster or chanterelle, sliced
2 carrots, sliced thin
1/2lb. (about 3 or 4) boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into bite-size pieces
2 Tbsp. sugar
2 Tbsp. fish sauce
juice of 1 lime
2 Tbsp. nam prik pao
1 14oz can high-quality coconut milk (“Chaokoh” brand is best in my experience)

fresh hot chilis (Thai bird’s eye or whatever, who cares) (optional)
chopped fresh cilantro (optional)
cooked rice to serve with

• In a medium saucepan, reduce the chicken stock by almost half.  Do this by brining it to a simmer and then allowing it to evaporate down for about 10 – 20 minutes (how long it takes depends on the shape of your saucepan).  While this is reducing, add the galangal and lemongrass, both sliced thin (they won’t be eaten, so ignore how they look), and the lime leaves.

• Meanwhile, prepare the mushroom, carrot and chicken.  Slice them however you’d like.  You can use any mushroom you like, and while it’s traditional to use straw mushrooms, they’re only available canned in the U.S. and I find the texture and flavor to be appalling.  I found fresh mushrooms at my local Thai market called “King Oyster” and they were great, really meaty.

• When the chicken broth has visibly reduced in volume (don’t stress about it being exactly half), turn the heat down to medium-low and using a slotted spoon or small sieve, remove the galangal, lemongrass and lime leaves.  Discard them.  To the broth add the can of coconut milk – take care to get all the good thick stuff out of the can and into your soup! – and the carrot, mushroom, chicken, sugar, lime juice, nam prik pao and fish sauce.  Keep the temperature of the soup just barely and not quite at a simmer.  We’re basically poaching the chicken at a low temperature.  If it begins to bubble, nudge the heat down a little.  Depending on how large your pieces are, it could take anywhere from 7 to 15 minutes for the chicken, mushrooms and carrots to cook.  Just keep the heat at barely a simmer and check pieces regularly for doneness.  Because of the low heat, it’s pretty forgiving if they cook a few minutes too long.

• When everything is cooked, taste one last time for seasoning.  It should be a perfect balance of salty and sour with an ever-so-faint whisper of sweet.  If it seems maybe too rich, add more lime juice.  The level of spiciness is up to you: if you like it very spicy, add the optional fresh hot chilis at this stage.

• Serve with a garnish of fresh cilantro.  I really, really like to plop a big scoop of fresh hot rice into my bowl of tom kha gai just before eating, but you (like the Viking) may not like soggy rice.  You’re on your own.

From my standpoint, the only problem with baking is that it lacks austerity.  The desire for “a chocolate chip cookie” will land you with two dozen chocolate chip cookies, all demanding to be eaten while still warm from the oven.  These are of course not the problems of large families, but for a lonely slave girl and her Viking captor, there’s little room for entire frosted cakes or vats of banana pudding.  I actually save recipes for the hope that someday there will be enough people to warrant cooking them.  If that doesn’t deseve a sad trombone, I don’t know what does.

I’ve been using a lot of this “white whole wheat” flour business lately, and with mixed results.  I think the flour I got from Trader Joe’s is not finely milled enough and the results sometimes suffer from the same ponderous dryness that standard whole wheat flour produces.  Still, I like the flavor of the white whole wheat a lot, and it helps make these feel like muffins and not cupcakes.

Though I mean, you know, let’s not fool ourselves here.  It’s a big, soft chocolate chip cookie.  Luckily I am a giant woman-baby, and if I want to feed myself dessert for breakfast, fuck it.  My only responsibility is to document it so I can take you down with me.

Six Lonesome Chocolate Chip Muffins
the original recipe is from King Arthur Flour – normally i don’t reprint a recipe jacked so verbatim, but i figured you might be sleepy like me and not want to do the math for this easily halved recipe.  i also add 1/8th teaspoon each of cardamom and cinnamon, which is not enough spice to make them “spice muffins” but instead adds a pleasant commercial-bakery-scent flavor to them.  for an even more delightfully fake-ass commercial bakery flavor, find “vanilla butternut” artificial flavoring at your local grocery store.

1/4 cup (1/2 stick or 2 oz) softened butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 heaping tsp. salt
1/8 tsp each cinnamon and ground cardamom (optional)
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract (or “vanilla butternut”)
1 egg
1/4 cup milk
1 cup white whole wheat flour
1/2 heaping cup chocolate chips

• Heat oven to 350°.

• In a mixing bowl and using a hand-held whisk, beat the shit out of the butter and sugar together until they turn pale and almost white and start looking vaguely fluffy.  Add the baking powder, salt, spices if you’re using them and vanilla extract.  Add the egg and beat until smooth.  Add the milk and again beat to combine (mixture may look slightly curdled – ignore it).

• Add the flour and stir with a spatula just to combine, then add the chocolate chips and again stir just to combine.

• Spoon the batter into six paper-lined muffin tin hole things.  The batter will come to the tops of the paper but don’e be alarmed, they won’t overflow.  Bake for 25 – 30 minutes or just until lightly golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out without any damp crumbs attached.

I encourage you to Google recipes for banh mi burgers because they are many and varied, but this one is mine.  It’s also probably going to err on the side of frustrating, because that’s where I live.  Err side, Frustration Street, America.  But this reason is: there aren’t many ingredients in this burger that a normal person has sitting around in their fridge.  The upside is: but you can soon, and for cheap.

Much about my burgers are a preference thing, as you might imagine.  For example, I used all beef, but mostly because the stupid asshat grocery store near my house was sold out of ground pork (this isn’t surprising, as they are regularly out of at least 25% of whatever I go there to purchase – the checkers have stopped asking me “Did you find everything you were looking for today?” because I started furnishing them with actual lists).

The toppings have a fairly inarguable list of traditional banh mi ingredients: cucumber, cilantro, sliced jalapeno, mayonnaise and some pickled carrot and radish (I like the recipe from The Ravenous Couple the best, but if there is a Vietnamese market nearby they almost always sell prepared tubs of this stuff in the refrigerated section).  The jalapeno I bought for our burgers had actually ZERO heat – it tasted like a particularly bland, weird green bell pepper – so I jettisoned it in favor of a fairly thick glob of Sriracha sauce.

In fact, I’m not even sure you have to season the burger patty at all, the toppings are really where the action is.  I ate my burger in about 45 seconds flat, so I guess it was pretty scrumptious.  In all honesty, this is one of my favorite flavor combinations in all the world, either as a real straight-up banh mi, or like this as a burger — I’m certain I could eat a patty of horse manure if it were done up so.

Banh Mi Burgers
the inclusion of Vietnamese fish sauce-sauce (nuoc cham) in the burgers is delicious and advised, but then again I keep a big mason jar of the sauce in my fridge because I really like it spooned over cooked rice.  if you don’t have it it’s okay – but consider it.

burger patties:
1 lb ground beef OR 1/2 lb each beef and pork
2 Tbsp nuoc cham (again, The Ravenous Couple’s version is my go-to)
1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro

if not using nuoc cham, also add:
1 Tbsp. fish sauce
1 Tbsp. lime juice (about 1 small lime)
1 finely grated or chopped clove of garlic
1 tsp. sugar

or
do nothing but salt and pepper and it will still be awesome

toppings:
cucumber, preferably Persian or English since they are firmer
fresh cilantro
pickled daikon and carrot
finely sliced jalapeno
mayonnaise

optional:
Sriracha hot sauce
more nuoc cham
sweet Thai chili sauce

• Prepare all the toppings before you prepare the meat or begin to cook.  Slice the cucumbers and jalepenos thin, wash and dry the cilantro, have the pickled veg ready, and so on and so forth.

• Just before ready to cook, in a bowl and using your hands, very quickly mix together the ingredients for the burgers.  Just barely mix them – if meat gets overworked the texture will be unpleasant.  Form them into patties the size and shape of your preference.  Remember that ground meat will shrink by one-third when cooking.  I prefer thin patties and like to pat them out on squares of wax paper, flipping them straight onto the hot pan or grill and then lifting the paper off the top.  If you prefer fat patties, they probably don’t require this technique.  Cook the burgers to your desired doneness.

• Assemble the burgers by giving the buns a liberal coating of mayo and/or whatever other sauce you like – I actually spoon an extra dose of nuoc cham on my bun before applying mayonnaise, allowing the sauce to soak into the bread.  Top with the jalapeno, cucumber, cilantro and pickled vegetables.

• Consume immediately before someone else does.

Originally I wrote one of the longest posts I’ve ever written, and all to explain why I am not crazy about Heidi Swanson’s cookbook Super Natural Cooking.  Then, to explain why tofu pudding is old hat  – every vegan worth their nutritional yeast knows that silken tofu + chocolate = pudding.  And at some point during the editing process, I realized that I’d just written the most boring piece of garbage ever.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about the pudding itself.  Heidi Swanson’s recipe in Super Natural Cooking reminded me that tofu pudding – and lord knows I love me some dairy – is not only delicious, but offensively easy to make and motherfucking cheap.  A box of silken tofu routinely goes on sale for $1, and the only other real cost is chocolate.

gross

If you’ve never had tofu pudding, I have two main points to make about it: the first is that if you are determined to taste the tofu in it, you’re going to taste it.  There’s a clearly detectable note of soy.  On the other hand, I find it pleasant – if you like soy milk at all, or can even just tolerate it, you’ll probably love the tofu pudding.  Mike the Viking – MIKE, we’re talking, the great hater of things made unnecessarily vegan – loves the tofu pudding, and he dislikes soymilk.

The second point is that the texture is amazing.  There is genuinely, absolutely no other way to achieve this texture without tempering egg yolks and gelatin, a process that takes attention and skill and let’s be honest here:  comfort food should be effortless.  The tofu pudding is made by dumping everything into a blender, blending it, and then pouring it into cups. THAT IS IT.

No thickeners.  No additional sugar is needed (particularly if you use either milk chocolate or a sugary liqueur).  It can be made plain or tarted up with any of a dozen amazing flavor combinations – what combinations are good with chocolate?  Then they’ll be good in the pudding.  If you’re at all timid about trying this because the idea of tofu turns you off, I beg you to try it just the once – it’s like a $5 blowjob; for that price, how disappointed could you possibly be?

Laziest Chocolate Pudding
the inclusion of alcohol into the recipe is not necessary, but it’s worth noting that it does change the final texture of the pudding.  without the alcohol it is very firm, easily thick enough to be the filling of a chocolate pie.  with the alcohol it is slightly more mousse-like, and while it would still be slice-able for a pie, has a noticeably softer texture. also take note that the tofu should say the word “silken” somewhere on the label – mostly commonly, this tofu is sold under the brand Mori-Nu and comes in a cardboardy little shelf-stable box, but there are also many brands of fresh tofu (that comes in a plastic tray filled with water) that make a silken variety.  either kind is good.

1/2 cup milk (soy, rice, cow, almond, human, coconut)
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips, or 9 – 12 oz of chocolate of your choice*
1 brick soft silken tofu (about 12 – 14 oz)
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp. kosher salt

optional flavorings:
1/4 cup flavored liqueur (amaretto, Grand Marnier, Malibu, Kahlua, peppermint schnapps etc.)
and/or
1/2 tsp. flavoring extract (almond, orange, peppermint, rum, coconut, coffee, etc.)
or
1/4 cup peanut butter or Nutella

*Note: the weight of a cup of chocolate chips can be anywhere from 6 to 8 ounces, hence the variation in weights should you choose to use bar chocolate instead of chocolate chips.  More will be more chocolatey, less will be less.  I tend to use semi-sweet, but everything from milk (which will be sweet and mild) to dark will work.  I don’t know about white, you’re on your own with that.

• If you want to use a microwave, place the chocolate in a microwave safe bowl and heat on high for 30 seconds, or until the chips are just starting to melt.  Give it a stir.  Microwave in additional 15-second bursts, stirring after each time, until the chips are more-or-less melted.  They don’t have to be completely melted; the lumps will blend out in the blender.  If you do not want to use a microwave, bring the milk to a simmer in a small saucepan over low heat.  Remove from heat and add the chocolate, stirring to blend.  When it is more-or-less melted, continue to the next step.

• Put everything into a blender or food processor.

• Blend until totally smooth, taking care to scrape down the sides once during the blending process.  This should take only 1 or 2 minutes of blending time.  The pudding will be quite liquid, but don’t fear: it sets up all on its own, and quickly.  Also take a moment to give it a taste – if you used just liqueur, you may find the flavor is too mild and wish to add an additional extract to boost it.  For example, the almond flavor in amaretto liqueur might need an additional dash of almond extract.  Don’t despair if it tastes rather soy-y at this stage – the tofu flavor decreases when the pudding is chilled.

• Pour into serving dishes or into a cold, cooked pie crust.  Cover the surface directly with a piece of plastic wrap and refrigerate.  Pudding will be set enough to eat after 1 hour, and good and solid after several hours.

TOFU UPDATE (7/24/11): I had a strange experience with House brand Organic Silken tofu.  I bought two containers from Whole Foods, and both of them made granular-textured tofu pudding.  The first one I thought I’d done something wrong, but what is there to do wrong with the recipe?  The second one I knew it was the tofu.  So the question is, what happened to the tofu?  It was the first time I bought the organic version, and the first time I’d purchased it from Whole Foods.  I suspect maybe the tofu got frozen in transport?  Because why would the organic version be grainy?  It makes no sense.  So, just do you know: if the texture ends up strange, it may not be your fault.

My bra is sticking to my armpits, and I can’t begin to tell you how angry that makes me.  Also: following the advice of the electrical people, we have the AC set to turn on “only” at 78°, which is supposed to save you power.  However: the AC has been running nonstop for the last 6 hours, trying desperately to maintain that 78°.  I feel like I’m a day away from being that old woman found dead in her 110° apartment with her cupboards stocked full of dogfood that she herself was eating.

Let’s talk about this pasta salad instead.  I touched on it about two years ago, but I’m compelled to tell you that this really is one of my all-time go-to recipes.  I’m mean truly: it’s all I will eat for the next three days.  Once again, the idea is basically that you construct an overdressed, low-pasta-ratio pasta salad, and then serve it over fresh greens.  It’s fucking brilliant.  I make a huge bowl of this and store it in the fridge and it gets us through some seriously rough heatwaves, lemme tell you.

Last time I discussed this recipe, I didn’t give an actual recipe, and I now understand that most of you dislike this greatly. In penance, I’ve written down precisely how I made this batch.

Oh man, it’s so good you guys.  Maybe it’s the heat talking, but there’s little better than sitting down to a vegetable-heavy, cold pasta salad when it’s 97° outside and your dog decided to squeeze her nictating membrane out her eye during the highest temps of the day, forcing you to all pile into the car (WHICH DOES NOT HAVE AIR CONDITIONING) and drive to the veterinarian.  By the way, she’s fine.  Guess who miraculously healed herself on the car ride to the vet?  That didn’t stop us from a $50 office visit and $30 worth of eye medicine we have to viciously tackle her to apply to her eye, though.  Anyway, salad.

The primary advice I have is: don’t put any cheese or meat in the salad now, if you’re so inclined, but wait.  The cheese and meat will suffer from sitting in a bath of vinaigrette over the course of days, unlike the vegetables and pasta, which just get tastier.  When you serve yourself the salad, top with your favorite cheese and/or meat, and all will be right with the world.  Or this meal, at least.  The rest of the world is still fucked, sorry.

Heat Wave Pasta Salad
the vegetables listed here are suggestions – if you prefer other veg, then use them.  this recipe is great for using up stuff, so don’t be afraid to throw it in.  it’s a fair observation to say that this recipe is a little long-winded, but it’s genuinely best for making a large batch from to eat off for several days.  just get up early, make it before the heat sets in and be done with it.

vinaigrette:
zest of 1/2 lemon
juice of 1 lemon
3 Tbsp champagne vinegar (I love citrus-flavored champagne vinegars)
1 Tbsp honey
1 small shallot, grated
1 Tbsp dijon mustard
1 Tbsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 cup olive oil

salad:
1/2 Lb. pasta, cooked in salty water
1 lb (give or take) green beans, blanched (see note)
1 red bell pepper, chopped, or variet of mini bell peppers, chopped
1 red onion, sliced very fine
1 cup frozen peas or corn
2 oz / 1 packed cup of chopped, fresh basil
other herbs to taste (dill and chives are lovely)

fresh baby spinach, arugula or other baby greens

cheese and meats to taste (fresh mozzarella, grated parmesan, salami, cooked ham, etc.)

Note: blanching raw vegetables is necessary with pasta salads.  It’s very easy.  Before boiling your pasta, boil the vegetables (green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, etc) for no more than 3 minutes, or until they are lightly tender to the bite but are still vibrantly colored.  Immediately scoop them out of the boiling water and into an ice bath to stop the cooking.  You can now continue to cook your pasta in the same water.

• Blanch the green beans and set them aside, then cook the pasta until cooked to your preferred doneness.  It is my great shame that I dislike al dente pasta, so I’m not going to call any kettles black here today.

• Meanwhile, make up your vinaigrette in a big huge bowl: whisk together everything but the olive oil, and then slowly whisk the oil.  Done.

• When the vinagrette is done, add everything to it.  It’s that simple.  Dump everything in.  Wrap the bowl up and let it sit at least a few hours. The pasta itself will be best after 24 hours and will  last an easy three days.

• To serve, first taste the salad – it often needs more salt after it’s gotten cold.  Adjust seasonings as needed.  Place a small bed of fresh greens down on a plate and then top with the (well-stirred) pasta.  Top this, if so desired, with meat or cheeses.

• Eat.

I’m going to tell you that this story ends with me not being able to eat these beautiful mussels, and for no good reason.  It was the strangest thing.  I love mussels.  I love all seafood.  My mother ate buckets of oysters when she was pregnant with me and I am now part oyster.  Wait, that’s weird.  I’m a cannibal?  That doesn’t seem right.

Whatever the case, I love seafood, and I made a big ol’ pot of moules marinières (aka Fancy Frenchypants Mussels) as a sort of way of saying “Hay, summer, hope it’s a good one,” and then when I sat down to eat them, well, my stomach sort of flipped.  They smelled so good.  And they even tasted good, but my stomach basically told me it was leaving me unless I forgot about mussels.  I’m going to place the blame directly on the flu I had over a week ago, because what else could it be?

Have you ever seen a green-lipped mussel?  They’re outrageous!  They’re like the Cyndi Lauper of shellfish.

I don’t know what I mean by that either.  But moules marinières: white wine, tarragon, shallots, butter, some other garbage maybe, whatever the case, it’s fucking awesome and you end up with this pot of the most fragrant, rich broth which may or may be better than the mussels themselves.  Traditionally it’s served with french fries to soak up the broth, but I much prefer bread.  Oh, and a recipe?  As much as it shames me to say it, I use Emeril’s.  It’s pretty solid.

These particular mussels were real douchebags – so, you may or may not know that mussels tend to relax with their shells open.  So you can easily tell if they’re alive because you tap the shell, and they shut.  Well, no joke: I tapped each shell and of about 20 mussels, maybe only 5 closed.  I was livid.  I was fuming.  How dare my ghetto-ass Asian market mussels be dead! Of all the bullshit!  I stormed off to tell the Viking that he was driving me back to the Asian market so I could show them my bag of dead mussels, and when I pointed at the “dead” mussels in the sink one of them moved.  Indeed, over time, if I really, really snuck up on them, they’d close.  If I rapped them on the sink edge?  Nothing.  Oh don’t mind us, we’re just a bunch of dead shellfish.  Do us a favor and discard us in the closest convenient body of saltwater.  JOKE IS ON YOU, MUSSEL.  I murder you!

It really was the perfect summer meal, minus the part where each time I ate a mussel I wondered if I’d be able to swallow it.  I gave up after the third one.

Oh, uh.  Huh.

I can uh, see your… Uh.  You might wanna pull your shell down in the front there, ma’am.

This cake was a pain in the ass to make, and I say that with great hesitation for two reasons, the first being that I know I just scared quite a few of you off even trying to make it, and secondly, I don’t entirely dislike that it was a pain in the ass.  Perhaps it’s just the riding crop and ball gag coming out to play, but there was something deeply rewarding about the process.  Oh, and the safe word is CAKE.

Problem 1: Pandan.  Pandan will also be problems 2 and 3, so I’ll stop with this writing format forthwith.  Pandan is a giant grass from Southeast Asia – mostly Thailand, as I understand it – with a strong fragrance used to flavor sweet foods.  Describing that flavor is the strange part.  I can best describe it as though you threw the following ingredients into a blender: puffed rice cereal, green tea, popped popcorn, fresh mown grass, vanilla custard, Wonder Bread and hazelnuts.

I love it.

It’s also called “screwpine” which makes me laugh.  What doesn’t make me laugh is that it’s a little difficult to find, though any Asian market that isn’t Japanese will probably have it.  That being said: my mom went to a primarily Vietnamese market in Olympia that answered her inquiries for pandan with the vaguely offended claim of “We’ve never carried that.”  I drove to a different market in Olympia that is owned by Vietnamese people but appears to carry a wider range of Southeast Asian products and immediately found a plastic bag with a giant wad of fresh pandan leaves inside.  This after my mom got lightly spooked due to her unfortunate sniff of a bottle of artificial pandan flavoring, which smells almost exactly like jet fuel.

Anyway, the giant wad of pandan smelled fresh and lovely and we regained excitement over the project: chiffon cake.  Pandan chiffon cake is very, very popular all over Asia, and for good reason.  It’s fucking rad.  You will love it.  What you may not love is that getting fresh pandan extract is not unlike doing yard work.

The leaves are very tough but need to be finely chopped with a small amount of water in order to extract the potent, bright green juice.  Recipes online always advise using a blender, but my mom doesn’t own one.  Our first attempt involved chopping the leaves with a knife and then hand-blendering it, which was a failure.

Second attempt was the food processor, which was a success.  Then the process of squeezing the juice out.

After my entire front side, the counter and some of her kitchen cabinetry were spattered with green juice and lawn clippings, I held forth my precious elixir with the glee of a Skeksis holding a vial of Podling lifeforce.

It doesn’t look like much, and it doesn’t really smell like much either – the toasted, creamy, yeastiness of the intact leaf is transmuted (temporarily, it turns out) into the smell of pretty much pure grass-clippings. We put the juice into the fridge and looked forward to making the cake the next day.

And!  Here is where I got the flu.

Two days later my mom agreed we needed to use the pandan juice before it spoiled, whether or not I was still hallucinating and suffering from short-term memory loss, which I was.  My mom was entirely in charge of making the final cake, and I barely even remember taking these photos.

I do remember being in charge of folding in the egg whites, which I prefer to do with a whisk.  I also remember arguing with my mom over how well to fold them in.

The final cake is a delight.  The recipe includes a tiny little 1/4 teaspoon of artificial pandan flavoring to boost the natural flavor, and my mom and I disagree on this final quantity – I think it needed more, and she thought it was plenty.  The cake is very, very mildly flavored, mind you, and this is how it should be.  The flavor is just so complimentary to baked goods, a sort of slight-of-hand MSG for cake that you don’t want to overdo it.  And chiffon cake, in all it’s fluffy, tender, face-cramming glory, should never be over-flavored anyway.

Pandan Coconut Chiffon Cake
recipe by Noelle Carter, via The Olympian
i truly wouldn’t bother making this without fresh pandan, but it’s worth the effort.  i’m already planning a trip to a market I know carries fresh pandan leaves so I can make this cake again.  i have a lot of questions about fresh pandan, too, that are as of yet unanswered: can you freeze the leaves for future use?  freeze the juice?  i suspect so, and will experiment at my earliest opportunity.

8 pandan leaves, chopped
1/2 cup water

2 cups cake flour
1  1/2 cups sugar, divided
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. salt
7 eggs separated, plus 2 more egg whites (9 eggs total)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/2 tsp. artificial pandan essence
3/4 tsp. cream of tartar
1/4 cup of the extracted pandan juice from the above leaves and water

for the glaze:
1/4 cup coconut milk
2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup toasted coconut, for garnish

• Make the pandan juice: blend the chopped pandan leaves with the water in a food processor or blender until as finely ground as you can get it.  Press the pulp into a fine sieve or squeeze between several layers of cheesecloth to extract as much of the juice as possible.  Noelle Carter says you should get “almost 1/2 cup” (in other words, all the added water) but I couldn’t get more than exactly 1/4 cup.  Luckily, that’s all the recipe needs.

• Heat oven to 325°.  Have a 10″ angel food cake pan with a removable bottom standing by.

• In a large bowl sift together the flour, 1 1/4 cups of sugar, baking powder and salt.

• Add the 7 egg yolks, vegetable oil, coconut milk, pandan juice and pandan essence and, using a whisk, mix together until well-blended and smooth.

• In a bowl of a stand mixer or a large bowl, beat the 9 egg whites and cream of tartar until foamy – add the 1/4 cup sugar.   Continue beating until it reaches stiff peak stage.

• Fold the whites into the batter by adding 1/3 of the whites at a time, and gently using a whisk to fold, fold, fold them together.  You can use a spatula to fold them in if you’re more familiar with that technique, but I think using a whisk to do it is easier and retains more of the air.  It’s your call.  When the whites are pretty much totally folded in, use a spatula to scrape the bottom of the bowl down and fold three or four times more to make sure it’s all incorporated.

• Gently pour into cake pan and bake until golden brown, about 60 or 70 minutes.  The cake will rise alarming big, but it will fall a little as it cools.  Remove from the oven when a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.  To cool it, turn the pan upside down and place it on a wine bottle (or similar bottle) by balancing it in the center tube.  Sometimes angel food pans have little feet on them that you’re supposed to rest the pan on when it is cooling, but don’t use these – they are too close to the countertop and will steam the top of the cake.  Let cool until completely cool, about 2 hours.

• To make the glaze, mix together the coconut milk and powdered sugar until smooth and well-blended.  Adjust to your desired thickness by adding more sugar a few spoonfuls at a time.

• Remove the cool cake from the pan, place on a plate, glaze and top with toasted coconut.  To cut chiffon cakes, never press straight down with a sharp knife, always use a bread knife if possible, and saw back and forth.  Not doing so will cause the cake  to tear as you cut it.

• Cram it in your mouth.

My parents were hippies, and I don’t think I ate a chicken nugget until I was about 10 years old.  On the other hand, my Aunt Linda was not a hippie and my first introduction to hotdogs was her version, which involved splitting the dog lengthwise, inserting a folded piece of American cheese and a pat of margarine for good measure and then broiling.  So you know, it’s not like I survived on nettle paste and carob chips or anything.

Anyway, chicken nuggets.  Mike the Viking insists on calling these “Chicken Puffs” which has been confusing to me for almost a decade.  He’ll shout “CHICKEN PUFF!” and throw his glögg horn at me, leaving me to scramble into the kitchen wondering, what the fuck is a chicken puff? And then I remember: nuggets.

This is one of the rare instances where white meat works better.  Because the puffs nuggets only cook for about 10 minutes, they remain quite moist, and the flaky quality of white meat better suits the nugget-eating anyway.

I must profess a deep love for the S&B Oriental Curry Powder.   It’s not a flavor you’ll find in any Indian cuisine, and certainly not Thai either.  But when you want a very mild, non-denominational kind of curry flavor, the S&B can’t be beat for price, availability and flavor.  It can be found in almost every grocery store in America, and when mixed into ketchup or lightly sprinkled over fried fish adds just the right about of curry flavor without much heat or, well, personality.  Which is sometimes a very good thing.

In the instance of the chicken nugget, the result is a lovely piquant spiciness, nothing very challenging, and the perfect balance between eating a kid food and taking it too far into the wretched humorlessness of Foodiedom.

Somewhere along the line we started eating them with fresh cilantro in each bite, and there was no looking back.  And then somewhere further along the line, the Viking starting eating his with a creamy dipping sauce I cobbled together, and that was that.

He also likes me to make extra so he can make a hot chicken sandwich the next day, kind of a breaded chicken burger sort of thing that he smashes together between two halves of soft bread along with whatever other unlucky creature he finds in the icebox.  It isn’t crispy the next day (I never never tried it, but I suspect a quick fry in a dry pan might crisp it up) but he doesn’t care.  So I don’t care.

Chicken Puffs Nuggets
you really don’t have to use the curry powder here, but you might find it is more thematically ambiguous than you think it’s going to be – I often eat mine with BBQ sauce and find the flavors don’t clash at all.  however, if you really don’t want to use curry powder, feel free to experiment with other spice mixes, taco seasoning, old bay or any “grilling” blend.  just make sure the spices are finely ground – the grilling blends for example will need to be ground finer in a spice mill or mortar and pestle.  also, don’t fear the mayonnaise – it’s serving its purpose here merely as thick oil.

1 lb chicken tenders cut into bite-size pieces (see note)
1/4 cup good quality mayonnaise
1 – 2 tsp S&B Oriental Curry Powder
hot sauce to taste (I do 2 tsp. of Sriracha aka “Rooster Sauce”)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp. pepper

2 cups panko bread crumbs
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper

fresh cilantro

*Note: chicken in much of America can be bought in a cut called “tenders”, which are actually the tenderloin of the chicken.  They are a single muscle bundle of white meat off the side of the breast and are more tender (imagine!) than the breast meat.  If you can’t find chicken tenderloins, breast meat is just fine.

• Cut chicken into bite-size pieces – tenders can be cut into even thirds, usually.  Don’t forget that meat shrinks as it cooks, so make them a little bigger than you want them to be when eating them.

• In a bowl, mix together the mayo, curry, hot sauce, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper.  Add the raw chicken pieces, stir to coat and place in fridge for at least 30 minutes and as much as an hour.

• Meanwhile, prepare the panko: in a shallow dish such as a pie pan, drizzle the olive oil over the panko.  Sprinkle over 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon of pepper.  With a fork, mix and mash and fluff the panko until the oil is evenly distributed, or until you can no longer see any oily clumps.

• At this point, decide if you want to broil the nuggets (if you have a good broiler, this is the preferred option) or bake them at very high heat (also good).  If you decide to bake them, preheat your oven to 500° and give it time to really get up to heat.  Line a baking sheet with foil.

• When the chicken has finished marinading, press each piece into the panko firmly, turning and pressing each piece several times to ensure that it gets a solid, even coating of panko.  Place each nugget on the baking sheet, allowing just a little room between each piece.  I find I can easily fit a pound of chicken on a single regular baking sheet.

• Whether baking or boiling the nuggets, allow each side to cook for about 5 – 7 minutes, but without walking away from them.  When cooking anything breaded like this, it’s very dangerous to walk away as it can go from cooked to burnt in seconds.  When the tops are golden brown with darker bits starting, turn the pieces over with a pair of tongs, return to the oven and toast the other side to golden brown as well.  However long this takes, the chicken inside will be cooked through.

• Remove from the oven and allow to sit for about 3 minutes before serving.  Eat with pieces of fresh cilantro on the side – eat the stems too!  They have lots of flavor and a pleasant crunch.

The Viking’s Creamy Dipping Sauce
i only make this to serve one, so you know, if you want to make more you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.  that being said, it’s pretty delicious.

1 heaping spoonful of mayonnaise
1 heaping spoonful of low-fat or fat-free yogurt
1 heaping spoonful of Major Grey’s chutney (or any mango chutney)
very finely chopped cilantro (I use this stuff)
1/4 tsp. S&B Oriental Curry Powder
1/4 tsp salt

• Mix together.
• Eat.

Four months ago, I embarked on a piece of folly.   I wanted to try St. Louis style “gooey butter cake” and instead of making the recipe everyone and their hamster claimed was their grandmother’s recipe, I went straight for the updated New York Times version.  The result was one-dimensional, and I was pretty steamed I’d spent the better part of my day making it.  It  then became inedibly stale by the next morning, and I was fit to cut a bitch.

It’s taken me a few months, but I just now worked around to making the trailer park abomination that has captured the heart of St. Louis.  I mean that in the most flattering way, of course.  Anyway, as you see above, it’s a box of yellow cake mix that gets half a cup of melted butter and an egg.  Nothing else!  This makes a thick, cookie-like dough.

The dough becomes the bottom crust, and I worry about it.  Cake mixes already tend to brown too easily, and I’m concerned that it’s going to burn.  Whatever, what have I got to lose?  A box of Betty Crocker cake mix.  I’ll bury it under the tire-fire of heartbreak already in progress.

The top layer of the gooey butter cake is nothing more than a loose cheesecake.  Cream cheese, more egg, a pound of sugar (gurgle) and since I’m me, I added the juice of a lemon.  It’s an attempt to balance the flavors not unlike President Bush’s attempt to help the people of New Orleans after Katrina, but it’s the gesture that counts, right?

It smells like unicorn farts when cooking, make no mistake.  Sugary, milky and downright sparkly.  The resulting product is gorgeous as well, perfectly golden brown and crinkled.   And the taste?  First, a rare trait: it was much better after it came to room temperature for a few hours than it was while still warm.  Significantly so.  Straight from the oven the top layer had an unpleasantly curdy quality – have you ever ruined pastry cream by overheating it before?  It was like that.   But five hours later?

I can’t deny it, it’s abominably tasty.  An atrocious sugar bomb to be sure, offensively sweet and without character, but at the same time… The cake mix does something strange by turning a deep tan shade and tasting like the lovingly toasted sugar of a perfect campfire marshmallow.  The cream cheese topping is transparent in complexity: it’s mostly sweet, a little creamy, and distantly tart.  And together, while fodder for an instantaneous tummyache, is everything you’d love in a treat you’d get at a family reunion potluck.  Mostly embarrassing, but satisfying nevertheless.  I doubt deeply that I’d make this for myself ever again, but would I bring it to a party?  Shit yeah, I would.  And it would get eaten up.

Gooey Butter Cake
if you care to google variations on the recipe, you’ll be rewarded with a multitude of options: pumpkin, chocolate, coffee, coconut, it goes on and on.  i don’t know what else to say about it.  oh!  other than this: if i do make this again i think i could safely cut the powdered sugar in the cream cheese layer down by like 1/3.  because, damn, sister.

1 box yellow cake mix
1/2 cup (1 stick) of melted butter
3 eggs
8oz (1 box) of cream cheese
1 lb (1 box) of powdered sugar
juice of one lemon (optional and recommended)

• Heat oven to 325°.

• In a bowl, mix together the cake mix, butter, and 1 egg until it forms into a smooth dough.  Press the dough evenly into a greased 9×13 pan.

• Using the same bowl, mix together the cream cheese, 2 eggs, powdered sugar and lemon juice.  To facilitate the mixing, you can microwave the cream cheese by itself for about 30 seconds on high power, or until it’s soft but not hot.

• Pour the cream cheese mixture over the top of the cake dough and bake for 40-50 minutes or until the top of the cake is lightly browned and the edges are golden.  Let cool completely before cutting, and allow to sit for several hours for best flavor.