Simple Comfort Food

I just downloaded some photos from my camera and found this shot from a few weeks ago. I think I was a bit beat and didn't feel up to going to the store, and improvised with what I had.

Luckily I had butter. These are boiled little tiny baby potatoes with butter and S&P, blanched green beans sauteed in butter with garlic and lemon juice (probably basil too), and some slices of salami. I tend to want meat with my meals, and these little morsels did the job. Overall, some simple just-north-of-Mediterranean farmhouse fare. I felt pretty good after this meal.

Fu Cheng Yih Noodles Lost In Translation

After my food poisoning episode the other day, I dropped into Dragon Land to pick up some fermented bean curd, some daikon, and some different noodles than I had at home. Noodle soup makes me happy. I like Dragon Land because it is a narrow one-aisle shop in a crappy half-deserted strip mall, and is conveniently located next to a state "wine and spirits" store. They have heaps of obscure produce, duck feet and a selection of mostly (I think) Taiwanese items that allow a segment of East Asian students to bear central PA for a few years. Unpretentious and delivers the goods.

So I got some Yih noodles, maybe also called Guan Miau noodles.

I didn't know what these really were, they just looked good, so when I got home I checked the back of the package to see if there was anything specific about cooking them. I know less now than I did before. There's a product description and then possibly three cooking methods(?) in a whack translation. To wit:

The specific dry Guan Miau Noodle in the sun manner is started from this idea. The original idea to dry the noodle was maintained them at a long time. Un-thought used the specific dried the noodle in the sun manner can be became the noodle Q-tastier and delicious. The technical is growing now, there are a lot of roasting machines, we did not find any roasting machine can be replaced the taste of the specific dry the noodle in the sun.

Obviously I infer that this is a sun-dried noodle made in an old style whose taste cannot be replicated by roasting machines. It's relatively easy for me to translate this into standard English since this is how most American undergraduates form sentences these days. How to cook it:

Braises fries: Use enough water, Heating after complete ebullition of by the fire maintenance of water, Puts in the boiling water the noodles, Disturbs slightly, Approximately 3-4 minutes, Fishes the noodles drainings does, Joins needs the seasoning, Braises fries then uses.

Gollum and Yoda seem to be free-lancing in translation services in-between major films. In The Empire Strikes Back there is the scene in Yoda's hut where he fixes a stew for Luke and himself: they deleted the part where Yoda intones "Fishes the noodles drainings does" right before the impatient Luke lashes out.

On to Recipe #2:

Flour: Use enough water, Heating after complete ebullition, Ebullition of by the fire maintenance water, Pute The in boiling water the noodles, Disturbs slightly, Approximately 3-4 minutes, Fishes the noodles drainings does, Joins needs the sauce material(the soy sauce, Onion, Garlic Oil trifle & hellip; Pours according to various human of taste adds),After the agitation then uses.

I do consider myself a "human of taste". So clearly they are tailoring their product to my caliber of customer. Very good. Recipe #3:

Noodles [Alright! I was looking for directions for noodles, since they are noodles.]: Use enough water, Heating after complete ebullition, Joins thought the seasoning blends flavors,After and so on reboils, In transferring to the fire still maintains the ebullition, Puts in the noodles, Boils to 3-4 minutes then.

"Joins thought the seasoning blends flavors". That is some obscure cooking advice. If I were really high that's the sort of phrase that I would struggle with for hours. It must mean something ... it feels like there's a deeper riddle to be unlocked.

Result: I finally made my soup with daikon, zucchini, kim chi of madness, garlic, sesame oil, soy sauce, dulse flakes and fermented bean curd. The noodles were very nice and had a good texture. Hit the spot after the food poisoning.

Beer That Couldn't Even Hurt A Fly

I went to Otto's brewpub last week for a drink with a friend, and got the kind of slap in the face that is so typical of eating or drinking out in State College. You try to give things a chance here rather than to become preemptively embittered, and then you get hit with the mediocre. (Full disclosure: I am writing this after a mild food poisoning episode from eating an ill-advised "Gator and Pork Burger" at Rathskeller -- I was trying to give it a chance.)

They had a Green Hop Ale #1 on cask-pull, so my friend and I decided to try that out. Possibly interesting. But it sucked. Had almost no hops at all. Presumably they ONLY used green hops and no dried hops, and as Joy Of Cooking will tell you, dried herbs are 4-5 times stronger than fresh by volume. Anyway, it was bland beer, indistinct, not much fun to drink. Should have been dumped down the drain, all 1000 gallons of it. I ordered a Slab Cabin IPA to wash it away, which is reliably good. When my friend went back to the last 1/3 of her beer, she found a little fly in it and just gave up. The penultimate insult.

I mean penultimate in its real sense. As we got up to leave 10 minutes later, the FINAL insult was revealed:

While we were talking, the fly managed to crawl all the way back up to the rim of the pint glass, apparently unscathed by hops, alcohol content, bad vibes, or anything else, and like us was also getting ready to go somewhere else.

Whack.

Tighten Up: Prodigal Remix At Home

REM with a Sense of Humor and Archie Bell and the Drells. For the lo-budge enthusiast such as myself, open these in two tabs, and start Archie Bell and the Drells at 0:34 into REM. Mildly psychotropic for those sensitive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlRl-70_2NE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wro3bqi4Eb8

Or try to work off these links:
REM

Original, Archie Bell and the Drells.

Now make it mellow!

Don DeLillo, Gravy, and Mashed Potatoes

In White Noise (Penguin 1986, p. 175), our protagonist describes his teen-aged son Heinrich's dinner table demeanor in the midst of a discussion about toxic waste spills:

We watched him use a spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

"This is the big new worry," he said. "Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It's the things right around you in your own house that'll get you sooner or later. It's the electrical and magnetic fields. Who in this room would believe me if I said that the suicide rate hits an all-time record among people who live near high-voltage power lines? What makes these people so sad or depressed? Just the sight of ugly wires and utility poles? Or does something happen to their brain cells  from being exposed to constant rays?"

He immersed a piece of steak in the gravy that sat in the volcanic depression, then put it in his mouth. But he did not begin chewing until he'd scooped some potatoes from the lower slopes and added it to the meat. A tension seemed to be building around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed.

An apt metaphor!

Kim Chi Madness

A few years back I got somewhat obsessed with making kim chi. I'm not sure what triggered this since I wasn't eating a lot of Korean food back then ... but now that I think of it I was watching many Korean films at the time like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and some other one with two girls at a lake house and a mean step-mother. The latter film I associate with giant jars of kim chi, fermenting underground for years. The idea of home-based mass production fills me with a particular lust. Perhaps this was the trigger.

I found a basic kim chi recipe on the website of a certain Dr. Ben Kim*. It's a simple recipe, and kim chi is an easy self-fermenting DIY type of pickle that is delicious and therefore awesome. Obsessed as I was, over the next several years I recorded the variations and results of many batches in a text file and the proportions used in an Excel spreadsheet (called Kim Chi Quest), so I could eventually standardize and replicate my ideal standard kim chi. Here's my version adapted from that recipe:

A Napa cabbage - about two pounds
Brine of 2 tsp salt (not iodized) per quart of cold water, at least 4 quarts for starters
5-6 cloves fresh garlic, minced or pressed
A thumb of fresh ginger, minced
8-10 fresh scallions, moderately chopped (incl. greens)
2 tsp dried red chili pepper flakes
2 Tbsp paprika
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt or to taste

Assume a 2 lb cabbage will fit into a quart jar and a pint jar, and a 1.5 lb cabbage may go into a quart jar. I put ~5lbs into a half-gallon jar recently.

Half gallon of Kim Chi next to a quart jar for scale.
This is how you deal with a 5lb Napa cabbage.

Separate, wash, and chop cabbage leaves as desired. Sprinkle 2 teaspoons salt evenly on this in a non-reactive (glass or ceramic) bowl and add water to cover. Weigh this down with a CLEAN plate or similar to keep the cabbage submerged. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

The next day throw all this in a colander and rinse well. Back in the bowl or whatever, add the other ingredients and mix this together to coat evenly. I typically use a slotted spoon for this -- I have one that fits into a wide-mouth Mason/Kerr jar and is very convenient for packing the mix into the CLEAN jars: which you will now do. Pack that stuff in there with force to get out any air pockets and add any liquid from the bowl as well. Ideally there's a layer of liquid submerging the kim chi.

Give yourself an inch or two of headspace, close the lid (tight but not white-knuckling tight), and let it sit in a room-temperature place for 3-4 days. Each day I check this and use the CLEAN slotted spoon to compress it and expel CO2. If it's hot and/or the lid is too tight and/or there's not enough headspace and/or you've forgotten to vent it for a few days, expect it to erupt like a warm carbonated beverage: i.e., take it to the sink FIRST and vent it slowly. I've cleaned trails of kim chi brine off my counters, cabinets and floor enough to now take this precaution seriously.

Kim chi stores well in the fridge, becoming more sour over several weeks, and the rate of fermentation slows to non-catastrophic levels. That's it. You have your own basic kim chi. I like adding kim chi to noodle soups, and I wrote a good deal of my dissertation eating ramen with a dashi stock and this kim chi on top. I have been thinking about a cabbage salad with sesame oil/rice vinegar dressing that includes a ton of kim chi as well. Kim chi is down-home, good stuff. It will probably make you happy when you make it yourself and eat it.

Rock!

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*I don't wholeheartedly endorse his site because he's always going on about superfoods and Omega-3 fatty acids and this sort of crap that I hate.