Hatch Corn

Probably our favorite summer vegetable has been fresh corn off the cob with hatch green chile's. It couldn't be easier. Amounts aren't measured, just sensible. Dice some onion and green chile and saute in a little butter and olive oil. Cut the corn off the cob and add when onions start to become translucent and saute until done. It cooks fairly quickly. Toss with some chopped fresh basil or cilantro. Optional ingredient would be a diced zucchini added to the onions and cooked for a few minutes before the corn is added.

Hatch Pasta

A day or two ago I received a care package from home consisting of a small book (Floor Games, by H. G. Wells), some junk mail from St. Mark's, and a pretty hefty plastic bag of Hatch green chiles. I was in the middle of a "long day" at the office - about a 48 hour junket - so I spent a couple of meals eating canned tuna fish and bad bread with that bag looming in my thoughts like the light at the end of a very long tunnel. As such, when I finally made it home tonight I was determined to use some of those chiles for my dinner.

The larder was pretty bare, and it was late enough that I'd have had to go into Manhattan to find an open grocery store (and I was DONE travelling). Fortunately, I had just enough material to prepare a pasta dish that's been a pretty common meal at my apartment over the last couple of months. I incorporated the chiles into it, and now I get to brag, because the result was AWESOME.

I diced most of an onion and about 4 chiles, leaving in the skin and most of the seeds (I left out a little of the onion so that the diced chiles out-volumed the onion by about 4 to 3). The veggies went in a pot along with all of my remaining olive oil (not much - a tablespoon or 4) and a tiny bit of shortening to supplement the insufficient oil (somewhere in the back of my mind, I seem to remember a reliable source using shortening in their green chile, but that could be pure fiction). Oh, and a pinch or two of salt. I covered it and let it sweat over low heat for a while, until the onions were translucent, then dumped about half a box (8 oz) of dry tri-color rotini on top, covered it back up, and sweated it a little more just for good measure. After a minute or two, I added a can of low-sodium chicken broth and enough extra water to just cover the pasta, brought the liquid to a simmer, put the heat on low, and covered it for about 10 minutes while I called home to thank my parents for the chiles. Then I remembered that maybe the pasta was supposed to cook uncovered, so I uncovered the pot; the pasta was almost done and there was still plenty of liquid. So I upped the heat a bit and stirred constantly until the liquid had pretty much become a thin paste coating the pasta. I folded in a pretty hefty amount of freshly grated parmigian and some black pepper, poured it into a salad bowl, grabbed a bottle of seltzer and some Angostura bitters to drink, and settled in to watch some Dr. Who.

Anyway, the Dr. Who is paused right now, because I finished eating and I was so proud that I had to enter this on the Food Blog right away. TOTAL SUCCESS. The pasta was a tiny bit overcooked because of leaving the lid on, but not really, and the sauce had that same vegetal milkiness that the best green chile has, which dovetailed perfectly with the creaminess from the cheese and starch. The heat was a little less than I'd have liked (next time, more seeds), but the flavor was sensational. I'm supposed to see a man about a pizza tomorrow evening, but I'm definitely cooking this dish again next time I cook a meal at home. Better go fill that larder...

I should give credit where credit is due - the basic cooking technique for this dish, where the pasta in insufficient liquid makes its own sauce, comes from a recipe that the New York Times attributed to Alain Ducasse. The only innovation I'm taking credit for is interpreting "aromatic vegetables" to mean "hatch green chiles", which I don't think is quite what he had in mind. Oh, and just in case it turns out to be the key that makes this whole thing work, that teaspoon or two of shortening, which I'm SURE wasn't part of the original.

It's all part of the Lattice of Coincidence...

Here's what I just learned:

"The name 'U-Bet' dates from the late-'20s, when Fox's grandfather got wildcatting fever and headed to Texas to drill for oil. 'You bet' was a friendly term the oilmen used. His oil venture a failure, he returned to the old firm, changing Fox's Chocolate Syrup to Fox's U-Bet. He said, 'I came back broke but with a good name for the syrup,' his grandson relates."

The source cited is a conversation between David Fox and the authors of "The Brooklyn Cookbook", if anyone cares enough to check it. Frankly, I'm perfectly content to believe this without more rigorous proof.

Some Sodas

Just wanted to mention a few sodas that have been on my mind recently.

I'm not sure exactly what the deal is with Bundaberg, but it seems that they have a sarsaparilla made for Australian consumption as well as a root beer made for export. I haven't tasted the two side by side, but I'm pretty sure that they are quite distinct from one another. I have been told by many Australians how sweet everything non-Australian seems to them, and this lines up with my impression that the root beer was sweeter than the sarsaparilla. I also feel like the licorice and vanilla were more noticeable in the root beer than they were in the sarsaparilla, creating a really nice balance of flavors. Unfortunately, I failed to take the opportunity to taste the Aussie-market sarsaparilla side-by-side with the export root beer, and now I don't know how I'll be able to arrange it...

Anyway, assuming my impressions were accurate, neither of the two is a really great sarsaparilla - too much other stuff going on. The sarsaparilla is a pretty good beverage, though, and the root beer ranks right up there amongst my very favorite root beers. Not quite Virgil's, maybe, but I bet it'd make a damn good float.

The other soda I want to talk about is Cricket Cola. Twice now I've been stuck in Chicago Midway long enough to eat, twice I've decided that Potbelly's was probably my best bet, and twice I've gotten a Cricket Cola to wash down my roast beef sandwich. It really is a pretty hefty silver lining to being stuck in an airport. It's made with kola nut, sugar, and green tea, and while I don't necessarily agree with their neo-snake-oil "it's good for you" philosophy, it's a top notch beverage.

For those in Dallas, all of the beverages I mentioned in this post seem to be available at The Soda Gallery, which rose from the ashes of Ifs, Ands, and Buts. It seems like they should be available somewhere in New York, but until I track them down, I'll just have to go back to egg creams.

and now from Beijing....DUCK!!!

Hello again from the Far East.

We went up to Beijing last weekend, and I took the opportunity to learn about Imperial cuisine, and to do a quick survey of Peking Duck.

Imperial cuisine doesn't have the same unifying characteristics as the other cuisines, because its core values seem to be variety and exoticism. A typical meal for the Emperor consisted of around 100 different dishes, which all had to be different. The Emperor and his wife would each take a single bite, and then move on; one imperial recipe is very famous because the emperor actually ate the whole dish one time. At any rate, the kitchen couldn't keep repeating the same dishes from night to night, so the cuisine necessarily features all sorts of wacky and unusual combinations of obscure or exotic ingredients. It also appropriates highlights from all the other various cuisines across China. We had "8 treasure tea", for instance, 3 of whose treasures are walnuts, dates, and wolfberries, and an eggplant dish with about 3 times more kinds of seeds and nuts thrown in than I could possibly identify. The "Mongolian Lamb" was essentially an upscale version of the Xinjiang meat sticks I mentioned earlier, but carefully prepared with high-quality ingredients and with some sesame seeds added for good measure. We also had some venison strips fried in a sesame seed crust, which I really liked, and a crab-and-pork "Lion's Head" meatball, a Shanghainese specialty that some Emperor liked enough to claim for Imperial cuisine.

The highlight of Imperial cuisine, as far as I'm concerned, is Peking Duck. We were in Beijing for 3 days, and sampled 3 fairly similar ducks in 3 wildly different settings. The first duck, which we ate just after checking into the hotel, came from Quanjude, a huge, bustling duck palace filled with Chinese families. The place we ate was actually an expansion of the old Quanjude restaurant, which has been serving duck since 1864, but which is closed right now for pre-Olympic renovation (this may have been a good thing, because Dev and Summer agree that the duck we ate was better than the ones they've gotten from the old place). The duck we were served was the 400,118th duck they've ever served. I know, because they gave us a certificate of authenticity. It was pretty much perfect: crispy, golden skin; thin, fresh, un-sticky, flavorful pancakes; good scallions and hoisin sauce (you wouldn't think this would be an issue, but it was); a thin but noticeable layer of rich duck fat; and, most importantly, tender, moist, extremely flavorful meat. We were also served boiling-hot cups of opaque, watery duck broth, of which I took a single sip and which Dev and Summer, more experienced than I in such things, avoided altogether.

The second duck we had was at Made In China, a very modern, upscale Imperial restaurant with a distributed open-kitchen design, so that we walked by the duck-kiln on our way to the table, which was wedged between the woks on my left (spectacular flame-ups punctuated the evening), the noodle-chef in front of me, and a full-wall window with a beautiful view of an underlit willow and an old tile roof to my immediate right. The place was incredibly pleasant, and all the food was quite good, cooked with a modern sensibility. But the duck, though good, was probably the worst of the three ducks I had. The main problem was that the meat was neither as flavorful nor as tender and succulent as at the other places, but it didn't help that the pancakes were doughy and that the duck had been cooked until there was very little fat left between the (very) crispy skin and the meat. They served the duck in what I believe is the more traditional Imperial style, which allows a single dish to be eaten in many different ways (presumably, this way the Emperor could eat more than one bite of a given duck). There was one plate of duck slices with skin, one plate of duck slices without skin, and one plate of slices of just skin. Our waitress recommended dipping the skin in a bowl of sugar provided for that purpose; it tasted kind of like eating a slice of butter dusted with sugar, only with an unnerving ducky taste, which is to say way worse. Really, while the skin might be "the best part", eating it without meat just wasn't very good. And, of course, the skinless duck wasn't as good, so I ended up combining the skin and the skinless duck in a number of my pancakes. The Imperial tradition did have a huge upside, though. Apparently, there were traditionally 2 sauces served with Peking duck: hoisin sauce for the women, and a pureed garlic sauce for the men. Hoisin sauce with duck is very good, but the garlic sauce (which I think really was just pureed garlic) fits perfectly together with the fattiness of the duck, combining to form a flavor very reminiscent of the garlic sauce at Zankou Chicken (which I think is pureed garlic with a little butter). In fact, the garlic sauce was so good that it made up for the inferiority of the duck, and the final wrapped pancakes that I had at Made In China may have been the best I had in Beijing.

The third place we went, LiQun, was located in a maze of grey, dusty, run-down shacks, on a street inaccessible to cars. We would have had an impossible time finding it, but Summer fooled a crooked rickshaw driver into thinking that Dev (who was giving me the a lightning tour of the Forbidden City) was an important Chinese factory owner who would call the Beijing police and have him arrested unless he took her there. It was 2PM, and we were the only ones eating there, in an un-airconditioned room next to an open refrigerator full of ducks, while a sullen Chinese girl alternately mopped the floor and swatted at flies. The duck meat itself was very good - moist, tender, and flavorful, not at all chewy. The pancakes reminded me of the thin, flexible rice paper that you sometimes see surrounding vietnamese spring rolls - they weren't quite as good as the ones at Quanjude, but I liked the little bit of stretch and chew that they had, and they certainly weren't doughy like the ones at Made In China. Unfortunately, the duck skin wasn't as crispy as I would have liked, and the thick layer of fat between the skin and the meat overwhelmed the meat and skin. And, shockingly, the hoisin sauce (which I would have assumed would be constant across the board) was kind of grainy and acrid, noticeably inferior to the hoisin sauces at the other two places. We tried to order garlic sauce and ended up with a paste of garlic and sugar, but it was only about 25 cents down the drain.

Now, I'm not one to be put off by a little fat, so for me the duck at LiQun was #2 because the meat was so much better than at Made In China; Dev agreed. Summer, who is one to be put off by a little fat, found the duck at LiQun downright difficult to eat, and far preferred Made in China. But we all agreed that the duck at Quanjude was #1.

In other news, the Hey Song Sarsaparilla was undrinkably foul. The Bundaberg products (root beer, ginger beer, and bitter lemon-lime) were all very good. The root beer has sarsaparilla root and licorice root, as well as actual vanilla and cane sugar, and ranks right up near the top of the root beer list (though I wouldn't really classify it with the traditional sarsaparillas). Today I found Bundaberg sarsaparilla at a different store, and I'm looking forward to trying it and comparing the two. The ginger beer was excellent, with a serious bite to it, but not as strong as, say, Blenheim. The lemon-lime was OK, and combined very nicely with ice-cold gin. Tonight we ate at Bubba's, a BBQ restaurant owned and operated by an expatriate Texan. The brisket was as good as Dickey's on a good day, which makes the place a damn sight better than any BBQ restaurant I've been to in NYC.

This is probably my last post from China; I'll get back to you about the Bundaberg Sarsaparilla when I get back to the States. I know you'll be dying with the suspense.

HPC Re-Opens!!!

The Highland Park Cafeteria, formerly known as the Casa Linda Cafeteria (and before that the Highland Park Cafeteria), is once again open for business at the Casa Linda location, and so far that business is booming. Many younger customers (between, say, forty and seventy) have added to the loyal following of older clientele. People in line reminisce about old favorites, and many of them are still available unchanged. The chicken fried steak with cream gravy is excellent – hand cut and battered, crispy on the outside, tender inside, and tasty. Selected veggies (spinach salad, black-eyed peas, corn) were satisfying, especially if you are nostalgic about home-cooking. Jalapeno cornbread and zucchini muffins were delicious as ever. A yummy-looking sugar-free pie was, in David’s words, “resistible”, and his favorite sour slaw was not among the salad choices. More importantly, the chocolate layer cake that has been a family birthday tradition has NOT been among the dessert choices. Otherwise, Dallas’s cafeteria gold standard was up to par and very welcome.

The presidential portraits are missing. Not an aesthetic choice, but actually mysteriously missing. A sign asks for any information on the whereabouts of the former pictures or on a source for replacing them. Another non-food change: the presence of a baby grand piano apparently fitted to play the digital equivalent of piano rolls. And no more salad-and-soup bar, which counts as a non-food change in my book. Or blog.

Susan

and now from china...here's TRAVIS!!!

Hello from the Orient.

China's national firewall won't let me access Waddington Food Blog (for reasons of international security that I think are pretty clear). But I've already waited too long, and will have to collect a number of unrelated reviews and reflections (some a week old or more) into a single post, so I don't want to wait any longer. So, if you would be so good as to post this for me...

OK. First off, a brief review of all foods non-Chinese. China's cultural insularity is a well-established matter of fact, so it should have come as no surprise to me that this attitude would extend to food. Unlike, say, the Japanese, who have apparently made a fetishistic ritual out of the fast-food cheeseburger, the Chinese seem to have virtually no desire to eat anything other than Chinese food. As such, the non-Chinese restaurants here cater almost exclusively to tourists and expatriates living in the city. What surprised me was that this holds not just of Occidental food; Japanese food here is for Japanese tourists, good Vietnamese food is difficult to find, and Thai food seems, for various economic and socio-political reasons, to be geared to an American palate. Now, Shanghai is a big, bustling cosmopolis, and Dev and Summer have been living here long enough to track down very good representatives of all of these non-Chinese cuisines (Summer did it professionally for a while, and Dev has never really liked Chinese food enough to eat it more than 50% of the time), but I think Japanese is the only non-native cuisine that is any better (or even as well) represented here as it is in Dallas, to say nothing of LA or NYC.

Fortunately, there are (of course) a huge variety of cuisines within the umbrella of "Chinese food". All over the city, you can find men dressed in Middle-Eastern garb roasting skewers of heavily seasoned meat which taste like something you could get in a Lebanese restaurant, only with lots more cumin and a little more fat. This is the street-food version of Xinjiang cuisine, which comes from China's northeasternmost province, Xinjiang, which is just west of Mongolia and is sometimes referred to as Chinese Turkestan. The charcoal-fired "grills" that are used to roast these meat sticks are pretty fantastic - they tend to be extensively decorated with stars and crescent moons of cut sheet metal, and some of the more elaborate ones have onion-domed turrets. Needless to say, these are Dev's favorite type of Chinese food.

The other night we ate at a sit-down Xinjiang restaurant. We had an appetizer of cold camel, which I can only say was kind of what you'd expect. All the main dishes were very good, but the roast lamb ribs were the clear favorite. They had been cut, in typical Chinese style, with no regard for the underlying geometry of the animal, so there were an unfortunate number of razor-sharp slivers of bone that had to be avoided. But the butcher had also left the skin and (here's the key) the ample layer of subcutaneous fat, which had basted the ribs during the roasting, and which was, we felt, probably responsible for the sort of nutty sweetness that distinguished this lamb from most that I've had. It was served with a bowl of cumin-heavy spicy dipping-powder, which balanced the unctuous globules of lamb-fat pretty well, and the result was exactly what I always want lamb to be, and what it almost never is. Keen's Mutton Chop, eat your heart out...

Speaking of ribs, the ribs were also the stand-out at the Hunan restaurant we ate at several days ago. These were crispy pork ribs, and the spicy meat, which was half crust, slid smoothly off the bone just like the ribs at Angelo's in Fort Worth. Hunan style Chinese food makes use of lots of chiles; most of our dishes were about 50% peppers by volume. But the spiciness is slow and earthy, like good Mexican food or chili, In contrast, the Szechwan style of Chinese food has a clean, high, piercing spiciness, that strikes like acid on the tongue. I don't think this is due to a difference in peppers, so much as to a difference in preparation. Szechwan cuisine seems to be characterized by fine mincing and clean, fresh flavors, where Hunan cuisine has thick sauces, with a fair amount of oil, and leaves the meat in large chunks and the peppers mostly intact. They both make you reach for your glass, though.

Cantonese food, on the other hand, doesn't really emphasize the pepper. Instead, the flavour it seems to go for is a sort of pure savoriness, like a good chicken broth. The Cantonese restaurant we went to, called "Secret Garden", finally gave me the menu experience I had wanted from China. Their menu is about 30 pages long, and makes liberal reference to ingredients like "snow frogs" and "fried saute" and "brassica". The Cantonese BBQ duck was very good, in idealized version of the cold duck plates available at dim sum restaurants in America. The "grainy beef" turned out to be a brown beef and tofu stew with pine nuts. The "crispy rice with fruit" consisted of a bowl of freshly-fried patties of crispy rice (so far, so good), and a soup of coarsely-chopped unidentifiable sea-life which was overturned atop the rice, producing a violent crackling, like the Devil's own rice krispies. We eventually allowed the manager to convince us that there was no shrimp, but the abstract curls of rubbery black-and-white flesh prevented me from ever really digging in with gusto, even though it tasted pretty good. We were in a hurry to get to a bar to meet some friends, so we had to skip the "osmanthus and ginger custard". We'll probably go back, and I'll try as hard as I can to get a copy of the menu.

Shanghai style Chinese food is looked down upon by other Chinese as being too sweet. Shanghai-style noodles are a good example. Basically, they are thick, irregular cylinders of rice paste tossed in a sticky savory/sweet sauce with some shreds of meat or vegetable. "Ovalets", as I know them from the Islamic Chinese place in LA, are also Shanghainese - little flat ovals of the same rice paste, cooked in a lighter sauce with cabbage and a bit of pork. But the pride of Shanghai is the Xiaolongbao, or soup dumpling (Bao, or pocket, is the term you would use to describe pretty much any food enclosed by any other food). They are small dumplings served with vinegar, and filled with a little ball of ground meat surrounded by broth. When you bite into the dumpling, the broth pours out, so they require careful eating. The traditional method is to place the dumpling in the spoon, then pierce it, maybe add some vinegar or strips of unidentified pickled vegetable, then eat it. I typically just dunk the thing in vinegar and pop the whole thing into my mouth; I like the sensation of the soup being released inside the mouth. The filling is traditionally pork, but I think you can probably get just about any meat. Crab is pretty good.

Finally, the impetus that got me to sit down and write this. Last night we ate at a Veggie Chinese restaurant (Veggie Chinese is its own separate subcuisine). Now, I've taken a fair amount of flak for the "Veggie Chinese" place that Mike Pruitt took some of us in Utah (which was probably the worst Chinese food I've ever had). I don't think I've ever seen Glen since when he hasn't reminded me of the "monkey's paw" we were served there. But Veggie Delight, in San Gabriel, was my favorite Chinese restaurant in LA (and, by extension, in America), and the meal we had last night was my favorite meal I've eaten so far in China. Veggie Chinese food makes better, more creative, and more extensive use of mushrooms than any other cuisine I've encountered, by a fairly wide margin. Most cuisines use mushrooms to augment or highlight other flavors, and they seem to stick mostly to 4 or 5 types of mushroom. But the Chinese generally make use of a far wider assortment of fungi, and Veggie Chinese food has no stronger flavors for the mushrooms to augment, so that mushrooms have been placed front and center as a primary source of flavor and texture. We had two mushroom dishes last night: broad, fried slices of King Oyster mushroom, pleasantly citric, adorned with little more than some diced chiles; and Szechwan style crispy mushrooms, long black nutty tendrils, in a slightly sweet, spicy sauce. We had Satay fake pork, Mushu fake pork, and fake steak in black pepper sauce as well, but for me the mushrooms were the highlight. I don't have enough experience yet, but this restaurant seems to be as good as Veggie Delight, and I intend to eat there lots more in my remaining week or two here.

The other day I found Four Roses Bourbon for sale for about $11 a bottle. Not the small batch or single barrel, just the basic product (which is unavailable in the US). I bought a bottle or two, and the character of the bourbon is recognizably similar to the fancier versions. A pretty great day-to-day bourbon! And it's in the old-fashioned Four Roses bottle, which I think is extremely classy. I bought a few cans of "Hey Song Sarsaparilla", and a bunch of Bundaberg root beer and ginger beer, but I haven't tried any of them yet.

Well, that's all for now. This weekend, we're headed up to Beijing, and I plan to eat a whole bunch of duck.

More to come...