Tapioca Triumphs

Why is tapioca so damned awesome?

Well, tapioca is the only food that has ever caused a ship to sink. And I would call that triumphant. So basically, it happened like this. A giant cargo ship carrying tons of tapioca caught fire in a harbor. Of course you don't want a ship on fire, so the harbor fire crew started dousing the flames. Everything was cool…right? Well, hot water and tapioca…that makes pudding (for the record, I don't like pronouncing the "g" in pudding so from here on I shall be typing puddin').

Yes, tons and tons of non-flavored puddin' erupted from the hull of the ship. The tapioca swelled enough to rupture the steel hull and it overflowed into the sea. Now isn't that awesome! Snopes.com has the whole story just to prove I didn't make this up.

So for this Easter, the official feast of the Chocolate Bunny, Zombie Religious Figures, and Destruction of Peeps in Microwaves, I have decided to buy a bulk pallet of tapioca from Costco and fill up my bath tub with it. 

With a tub full of tapioca, I simply sit in it. 

And while sitting in my tub of tapioca, I will dream of being on a Venusian landscape. 

It will be like those old films where they show women dancing in bubble rooms. But the bubbles won't pop. And the tapioca will be real. Because puddin' lasts forever in my world. My Venusian world of tapioca filled delights. No sunken ships, no ruptured hulls, just tiny bubbles that last forever. 

Culinary Delights…

There are many mysteries of cooking out there but some can be answered with this book. Imagine what can be done with this book. Leftovers will never be the same.

Foraging Fun

It's morel season in parts of Montana. Unfortunately, not any of the parts that I have been scouring the past weekend.

However, before my trek to Bozeman, I did have a successful hunt with my friends.

Having encountered the slightly toxic False Morels in my initial search, and little else, I was about to give up. But fortunately, we stumbled upon one in a small patch of scrabble and pebbles away from where we had previously trained our eyes. The thing with hunting mushrooms, once you spot one, you typically can't stop seeing them. 

In the end, we ended up with just under a half-pound of nice sized morels. Not too bad for searching over four different spots, and figuring we were about to get skunked. 

So here is my little recipe for a quick and tasty morel treat.

• Half an apple
• 2 cloves garlic
• Butter
• 1/2 pound morels, cleaned and split in half length wise
• Freshly cracked black pepper
• Salt

Chop the apple into a small dice and mince the garlic. Saute both in butter until the apples begin to brown. I would only use a small amount of butter maybe small pat. And the morels and let cook. Very quickly, the moisture from the mushrooms will begin to cook out and the morels will begin to soften. Once the liquid begins to bubble, drain it off the liquid and save it for later (you might want to use a strainer or something to keep the morel/apple mixture separate). Return the mushrooms to the pan on high heat add a bit more butter and re-saute the mushrooms until they brown up a bit.  Add freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste. Serve as a side.

Mushrooms contain a ton of water. If you try to cook them in oil right away, they just get soggy from essentially stewing in their juices and oil. Removing and saving the liquid that comes off from cooking not only allows you to concentrate the mushroom's flavor, it provides you with the base of a good mushroom broth you can use to flavor stocks and sauces at a later point in time.

If all goes well, I will be finding a new batch next weekend and coming up with some kick ass recipes for y'all.

This is Not Toothpaste

And while this may not be toothpaste, it is apparently Creamed Smoked Roe. Ahem...

Kalles is not to be mistaken with the squeeze tubes of mayonnaise that could be found in the cooler case right next to this strange Aryan-homo-erotic snack product. 

Nothing says delicious like creamed smoked roe...

Your Savage Cabbage Leaves

Last weekend was the Scappoose Sauerkraut Festival. I love sauerkraut, but dedicating a festival to the what amounts to rotting cabbage that, by some fluke of nature and macrobiotics, tastes good is just one of those things that is just special. 

Although I believe the advent of isn't like my imaginings, here is how I picture town elders deciding how to put together a Sauerkraut Festival.

Town Elder A: "We have a might harvest of cabbage this year."

Town Elder B: "That we do."

Town Elder A: "We should have a 'Harvest Festival' to celebrate God's bounty."

Town Elder B: "But we are in Oregon and you know we won't get our act together for a harvest festival in time. All our cabbages will rot and ferment."

Town Elder A: "Perhaps that is our solution, we shall celebrate our laziness and fermented cabbage."

Town Elder B: Will you do the planning?

Of note is the book, Sauerkraut's Incredible Fascinations.  I am not certain if this refers to a certain type of sauerkraut that has gained sentience and now has set its limited intelligence on being intrigued with the world or whether sauerkraut is just a fascinating object.

But who cares. There was a giant, goddamned trout. Seriously, big ass trout! That was enough to make the Sauerkraut Festival cool.

Squab: The Tastier Flying Rat

Old government pamphlets amaze me for their dedication to boring and archaic topics. For example, the lost art of squab husbandry. While a select few foodies might pine for pigeon on a menu at some fancy French restaurant menu, finding squab anywhere raised commercially is pretty much a lost cause...probably because they were bored to death after reading this educational missive.

People, more than likely, tired of the ever present rat-with-wings-that-wasn't-a-bat found in every city. They spread disease, poop on your car and on the occasional rock band, and they take over your parks and city streets like that one Hitchcock movie, Jaws.

However, I found the damned thing amusing. And so, just to preserve the proud tradition of raising pigeons to take to market. So here, everything you wanted to know about squab but were afraid to ask.

Spoils of the Ocean

This one can be filed under the "local effort" category, as I continue posting the ventures of my early meanderings into my thirty-first year. ABC Seafood is a pleasant Portland discovery for all of your live seafood needs. Even though Portland is about an hour away from the coast and great fisheries, the majority of all that is caught off shore is shipped out of state, primarily to the East Coast and to International proprietors. So it is rare that you can find a market that has a variety of seafood such as this little shop. Even more rare is that they have so much live seafood in stock. Lobster, crab, tilapia, catfish, prawns, cockles, clams, oysters, and more; it is like walking into an aquarium that you can eat. Which actually sounds like a really great marketing idea that I should pitch to some wealthy millionaires.

I can see it now: Picture this, you take an escalator down a giant plexi-glass tube to the dining room which is actually submerged under twenty feet of salt water. Crabs feed on the floor, fish swim around. There are decorative ones, and then there are your stock fish for dinner. Your waiter brings you a menu of the variety of live fish and their preparation, and via com system, a diver already in the tank is sent to catch your live prey. Maybe he just picks out a great looking crab from the aquarium floor, maybe he has to spear a fish, but the fun is watching the chase. Think of it like those restaurants where they do live jousting, but MORE AWESOME because it is underwater and actual hunting is involved.

Now I just need to find some extremely wealthy eccentric willing to fund such a folly. We could be on the front page of Travel and Leisure...or GQ...or Highlights or something.

But in the meantime, until I open my underwater restaurant, you can purchase live fish, or fish heads at ABC Seafood all of the time.

Hell, they even had live crawfish! Sure you could set up a trap in almost any stream outside of town and get just as many for free, but if you don't want to work or spend a day in the wood, this is your place.

My folks and I got lobster. Two of them, in fact, for a really good price.

Damned That Sandwich

Today was a day of cooking experimentation and the end result was what I am considering my own variation on the Vietnamese Bánh mì sandwich. To be honest, I had no idea what I was going to make, but I found a giant slab of pork belly in the freezer and figured, "what the hell...might as well do something with this."


I have no real professional training in the kitchen, but I love to experiment. Luckily, I have friends who work at some of the best restaurants in the city, so this goes out to them. Oh and if you're wondering about proportions, aside from the rough guess of the swine weight, I have no idea how much of what I used.


For the pork:
2 lbs pork belly, with skin.
Fresh rosemary
Whole peppercorn
Kosher Salt
Fennel Seed
Garlic
Chicken Broth
Dry Sherry


For the Sandwich:
A damn good hoagie roll or french roll
Thinly sliced fennel
Thinly sliced cucumber
Thinly sliced red onion
cilantro


Sauce:
The reserve liquid from braising
two limes
sweet chili sauce
Fish Sauce
Sriracha chili sauce.


Cut the pork into four equal length strips, kind of bacon slab length. Roughly chop fresh rosemary and place into a small ziplock bag with a couple of spoonfuls of peppercorns, add salt, a big spoonful of fennel seed, and 6 big cloves of garlic. Use a mallet or hammer to pound the crap out of it all so the peppercorns break up and the garlic mashes up. You will have a rough paste like thing at the end. Smear that on all sides of the pork belly pieces. Heat oil in a large dutch over, and brown the meat. 


Once the meat is browned, add stock and sherry. I am not entirely savvy to braising techniques, but I added enough broth and sherry to cover about half of the meat. Cover and place in an oven preheated to 275. Then go to laundry, maybe read, I don't know. I checked on the meat  two hours later to see how it was doing. It had cooked through pretty much and there was still a ton of liquid left. 


When the meat is cooked through and extremely tender, take it out of the oven and out of the pot. transfer it to an oven tray with the pork skin side up. Turn the oven to broil. At this point, you are going to crisp up the skin on all sides of the pork belly, or maybe just the skin side. It depends on what you like. I let the broiler do its magic. 


Next I went on to preparing my greens for my sandwich. Carrots are typical for most Bánh mì, but I hate carrots and find them to be an insidious vegetable, so i skip them. I wanted something with crunch to contrast the tenderness of the pork. But hell put in whatever you like.


As for the sauce for the sandwich, I saved the broth that the pork had braised in and skimmed off the excess fat. From there I added the other elements to taste to give savory-tart dressing to compliment the vegetables and pork. 


Overall, it turned out damned good. Even if making a sandwich took the better part of four damned hours!


I would give you a picture of this feat of culinary experimentation, but to be honest, I ate the damned sandwich and made up a second stuck in in the fridge for tomorrow before it would have even crossed my mind to share it with people. But alas, I did share, so there.

Never Forget...

Today I present bad menu design...

Now if these sushi rolls were presented somewhat upright, but tumbling over, then this would be completely unforgivable.

Okay...Joke's over...Everyone go home.

Shrimp Wiggle

The ocean is a bountiful feast if you don't mind picking at rocks, digging in mud and sand, or sifting through various detritus that washes up on shore after a sea storm. That is what makes this pamphlet so amusing. I found Edible? Incredible! at a local vintage shop and could not pass up the opportunity to purchase this 70s era book about wild forgeable foods. And as a lover of the ocean and seafood, it was a double bonus.

Most of the information was quite practical. Geoducks look like giant phalluses, kelp looks like kelp, crabs look like crab. You should cook these things before eating them, but sometimes raw oysters are good. See, practical information.

Less practical are the recipes. Or, I should say, the names of the recipes. While overall, they don't seem bad in principle, I think naming something "Shrimp Wiggle" just sounds odd, and well, a little off-putting.

Also of note-- If you plan to cook octopus, don't get one that looks like the one on the cover of the book. Try to find a live one, kill it, and then cook it. Seriously, that thing looks like it has been through a couple of dehydrators and mad scientist movies.

While cookbooks are great, there is something to be said for the cooking pamphlet. It just seems a bit more authentic and down-home in nature. Maybe because they were the give-aways with the blender, mixer, or microwave oven. The recipes in these pamphlets are completely impractical and often quite terrible, but someone must have really tried to highlight their new marvelous invention. If you can find these, they are often only a dollar a piece at most antique stores or junk shops, give them a glance. You will be amazed.