What do I want to be able to do?

As I continue to learn about cooking I have to ask myself what it is I want to be able to do that I can't already do.  After some consideration I want to be able to go to the grocery store, look around for whatever looks good, take it home and make something delicious from it.

There is a chasm of ignorance between where I am right now and being able to do that.

Some of the highlights of that chasm are as follows:

1. I don't know what produce is in season when.  (Winter here in Michigan means there isn't much local produce at all.)
   
2. I don't know how to identify the things that look good
   
3. I rarely know what to do with an ingredient until I have a cookbook in my hand.  Not very useful when I'm at the grocery store.
   
4. When I do find something that looks good and I get it home, I'm often without a requisite ingredient I need for the recipe.
   

Let's start with what's in season in the way of produce.  This is actually two questions.  The first is what is grown locally and available, and the other is what is available market-wide.

The first question is easy.  Virtually nothing is available from local growers.  The wind chill outside today is -25 and the snow is 12 inches deep.  Produce is imported at this time of year.  I could use long storing root vegatables for every meal, but that's not living or eating well no matter what the locavores say.  So here is what you can find in the grocery store that will be worth eating.

Vegetables

• Brussel Sprouts
  
• Cabbage
  
• Carrots
  
• Celery
  
• Onions
  
• Leeks
  
• Potatoes
  
• Pumpkins
  
• Peppers
• Radishes
  
• Greens (Spinach, Arugula, Lettuce, Kale, Swiss Chard, Collards) 
  
• Turnips
  
• Winter Squash
  
• Sweet Potatoes

Fruit

• Bananas
  
• Pears
  
• Grapes
• Blood oranges
  
• Persimmons
  
• Clementines
  
• Pomegranates
• Pummelos
  
• Limes
• Grapefruit
• Kiwi
  
• Satsuma oranges
  
• Kumquats
  
• Passion fruit
  
• Tangerines
  

So, I'll take a look at these and see what looks good, which gets us to question #2.

For that, I recommend How To Pick A Peach.  It's a good guide to picking decent produce.  The one rule of thumb I use for fruit is "If it has no smell, it will have no taste."  It has served me very well.

I am going to punt on Question #3 for now.  I am just going to assume that there is a way for me to prepare it once I get home.  This leaves a hole in my shopping, but hopefully a small one.

Lastly, the question of having the ingredients at home that I need.  This has gotten better over times as I have increased the number of things in my pantry and learned what some the standard ingredients to have on hand are and what substitutions I can make.  Here are some observations.

1. Pick one regional cuisine at a time.  Each one will have it's own set of staples.  I you want to be able to do Mexican, Indian, French, Japanese and Italian, you will need a LOT of ingredients on hand.  If you just pick one, it's pretty easy to have a sufficient set of ingredients.  In some future post I will put together a list of those ingredients.
   
2. There are some standard things you should always have on hand.  --- Salt, pepper, canola oil, olive oil, chicken stock, heavy cream, butter, onion, sugar, flour, garlic, garlic, garlic, lemon, rice.
3. It's good to know what herbs and flavors you can substitute for.  I've gotten better at adjusting for taste and experimenting when I'm missing an ingredient.  With practice you can learn to distill a recipe down to it's most basic components and procedures.  Once you have that down, improvising on that because much easier.
4. Be open minded about what you are making.  If you don't have the ingredients for one dish, make another.  There are countless different dishes that can be made with any ingredient.

Braising

Braising isn't something I have done very often.  The selling point for braising is that you can make a delicious meal from a very inexpensive cut of meat.  The down side is that it is not quick and if you mess it up, you get a dry inedible chunk of meat and wasted time.

So, let's cut to the chase.

1) Buy a cheap cut of red meat.

2) Spice the meat (salt and pepper at least)

3) Start on the top of the stove with a hot pan.  Add some oil and sear the meat until you get a nice crust on the outside.  

4) Cut the heat, add enough stock to cover half the meat and cover the pot almost all of the way.

5) Put it in a cold oven and turn the heat to 250F (121C) and leave it in the oven for 2-3 hours.

6) When the temperature reaches between 170F-180F (77C-82C) degrees, turn the temperature down to about 200F and leave it there for another hour or so.

7) Enjoy

You can also add vegetables and other flavorings while cooking to give you a full meal at the end.  Potatoes, carrots, mushrooms and onions work well.

You can use almost any kind of liquid, wine, broth, stock, water.  

You can use almost any spices you like.

If you add a bit of flour to the oil and meat as you cook them, it will thicken up the liquid to make something closer to a gravy than an au jus.

How long you cook the meat is less important that it not get over 180F (82C).  

Don't fully cover the pot in the oven.  The evaporation of the liquid is important to regulating the temperature of the meat.

Cookbooks

I have accumulated, over the years, a great many cookbooks.  I have gotten much better at picking out cookbooks---but by and large they have not really helped me become a better cook. 

A friend once told me that non-fiction books fall in to one of two categories, informational and inspirational.  (I am paraphrasing.)  I find I can put cookbooks in to these two categories.  I do, however, break informational cookbooks down in to two different categories, recipe books, and educational books.

Here is my breakdown and comments on several of my favorite cookbooks.

Informational - Recipes

Recipe books usually do almost nothing to teach you how to cook.  They are just lists of recipes to follow mechanically to get the expected result.  Some small few are better than the others.

• Right at the top of my list is How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
  

This is an exhaustive tome of recipes.  These are well written, as simple as any recipe ought to be, and presented with a variety of variations.  This is good if there is a specific dish you would like to make.  This will give you a good, reliable, recipe that will produce good results with a minimum of trouble.  Highly recommended.

• Next is The Improvisational Cook by Sally Schnieder

This is a book of variations on a theme.  She gives a nice small number of recipes and many interesting and creative alterations and enough background on the variations to make some of your own.  If you use this book and work through many of the recipes and variations, you will learn how to cook better that you could before.

• Lastly for this category I have The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook by America's Test Kitchen

These recipes were created in a test kitchen through many, many, many revisions to produce the best results for the given recipes.  that being said, the recipes are often more complicated than I would like and I don't get consistently good results for their recipes.  I also hate the form of the book...a three ring binder.  It's a bad flashback to middle-school and the pages started falling out on day one and they haven't stopped.

• I have many other recipe books.  I would discourage people from getting any of them.  Aside from the formentioned books, the only reason I have come up with to buy other recipe books is for international cuisine.  I have a couple of good books on Japanese cuisine, one or two on mexican cooking and an italian cookbook.

Informational - Educational

These are books the at designed to teach you how to cook.  These are the books that have done the most to help me become a better cook---not that they have done so much.

• I'm Just Here for the Food, by Alton Brown

This is a noteworthy book in that it sets out to teach you how to cook using a variety of techniques and offers some sample recipes for each technique.  He shows you the basics of roasting, grilling, poaching, frying, etc.  This is a fantastic book to read, easy to understand and fun.  If I have a complaint about this book, it is that I don't seem to have made use of what it has taught me very often.

• The Professional Chef by the CIA (Culinary Institute of America)

This is an exhaustive tome that is the textbook used by some of the most talented and eduated chefs being created today.  If you can master everything in this book, you would be ahead of 99.9% of people preparing food today.  That being said, this is a dense tome that is designed to go along with their coursework, not so much a stand-alone text.  It is also written by and for chefs, not home cooks.  The quantities are often very large and it assumes that you are already fairly experienced.

•  How to Boil Water by Food Network Kitchens and Jennifer Darling
  

This book surprised me in how good a job it does at teaching someone who knows very very little about cooking how to prepare a nice variety of very useful dishes.  This could almost be considered a recipe book, but I think it does a better job of teaching that providing recipes, so I put it here.

• Cookwise by Shirley Corriher

This is an entry level food science book.  It has lots of good recipes and explanations of the science behind each of them.  If you want to know why a recipe went wrong and how to fix it, this is a great place to look.  I don't know of a more accessible book on the basic science of cooking (perhaps...I'm Just Here For the Food)

Inspirational

This category is made up the of the books that makes me want to go out and cook a delicious meal right now.  I often make nothing from these books, but they do provide inspiration.

• Tangy, Tart Hot and Sweet by Padma Lakshmi

This is a fun book by someone who clearly loves to cook nearly as much as she loves to eat.

• The French Laundary Cookbook by Thomas Keller

This is food porn at it's finest.  If this doesn't make you want to give up your career and go become a professional chef, nothing will.

On Cooking and Tasting

There seems to be a step missing in virtually every recipe I have ever read. The step should read:

• Taste It! And adjust to what you like.
  

I have rarely found a recipe that is equally suited to everyone who eats it. One of the joys and benefits of cooking is that you can adjust recipes to your own personal taste.

When you really start to understand cooking, you learn to adjust recipes as you cook them to your own personal taste. At first this will mostly be adjusting the amounts of the ingredients already in the dish. After you are comfortable doing that, you can start adding things to change the taste. This is best done with a lot of practice. There are a few guidelines I can offer.

• Salt enhances taste up to the point where things start tasting salty, then it hides them.
• If your dish is too spicy, you can add something creamy.
• If your dish is too salty of sweet, add a sour taste.
• If your dish is too bitter or sour, add a bit of sweetness.
• If your dish is too bitter you can also add salt.
  
• If your dish tastes flat, you many need more spice varieties and add them earlier in the cooking of the dish. You can also try adding a bit of acid...vinegar, citrus juice, wine, etc.

There are some flavor groupings that are worth mentioning. These are tastes that go well together. If you find one, you can often substitute or add another one of these. Keep in mind, just because basic goes with rosemary, and rosemary goes with fennel doesn't necessarily mean that basic and rosemary go together. Although, using all three could be very interesting.

Here are some groups.

• Vanilla, cardamom, nutmeg, mint
  
• Lavender, honey, pear
• Cinnamon, cloves, allspice
• Fennel, cardamom
• Basic, sage, coriander
• Rosemary, cumin
• Orange, anise
• Cumin, spearmint
• Cinnamon, cocoa, cayenne pepper
• Cayenne pepper, paprika, chili powder
• Rosemary Thyme
• Sweet paprika, allspice, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, thyme, ginger
• Cumin, oregano, coriander, garlic, onion, black pepper, allspice, cilantro, cloves
  

You should also pay attention when you do look at recipes to see what kind of pairings they include. Remember them, you can use them later.

The Wonders of Marinara

I love pasta with tomato sauce and I was surprised when I discovered how fast and easy it is. Making a delicious tomato sauce can be done is about the same amount of time it takes to make the pasta...less than 15 minutes.


Here is the outline of a marinara sauce.

Start the noodles while preparing the sauce. They should cook for 10-12 minutes in boiling water depending on the type of pasta. Taste to decide if the noodles are done.

1) Saute aromatics in oil until done
2) Add canned tomatoes and cook for 10-30 minutes
3) Taste and adjust seasonings
4) Optionally puree some or all of the sauce
5) Add good stuff
6) Eat

Now for some details.

The aromatics typically include onion and garlic, but anything is game. I like a hint of ginger myself. See this for more details on aromatics.

Just about any canned tomatoes will do, but if you use whole tomatoes and don't puree, it will be a very chunky sauce. If that is what you like, go for it. I use diced tomatoes, usually organic, but I've tried several kinds.

I cannot stress enough that tasting is important. Tasting for salt is important, the food should taste good, but it should not taste salty--as odd as that sounds. There are many different flavors and spices you can add to a marinara sauce, There are the obvious ones:
1) Oregano
2) Basil
3) Pepper
4) Sage
5) Mushrooms
6) Salt

And some much less obvious ones
1) Cumin
2) Olives
3) Anchovies
4) Fish Sauce
5) Cilantro
6) Hot Peppers
7) Cinnamon
8) Lavendar
9) Mint
10) Sugar or Honey

On to the Stuff


You can add lots of yummy stuff to the marinara sauce. Add it to the sauce at whatever point leaves it enough time to cook and share flavors with the rest of the sauce. Here are some ideas.

1) Shrimp
2) Meatballs
3) Ricotta
4) Capers
5) Peppers
6) Spinach
7) Parmesan/Romano/Asiago Cheese
8) Fish
9) Apple

It's a big wild world of marinara sauces, they can be made in to just about anything you can dream of. They can be sweet, savory, mild, hot. They can taste Italian, Indian, Japanese or Thai depending on what you are looking for. People get trapped in to thinking that every spaghetti sauce should taste like tomatoes, garlic, basil and oregano.

Lastly, marinara sauce should not be relegated only to pasta, it can go well on fish, chicken or rice. It goes great on a nice man and cheese sandwich or as a dipping sauce. It can be used hot or cold...it's all good.

Bon Appetit

Why Recipes Are Evil!

Evil might be a bit strong, but unless you understand how to cook, following recipes is a path to nowhere. When I decided I really wanted to learn to cook I started out by buying a couple of good cookbooks and working my way through the recipes. I must have prepared hundreds of recipes and learned nothing.

A recipe tell you how to approximate a dish that someone else has put together. It does not tell you why you are doing what you are doing and they rarely give you any clue as to what you should be expecting. When you are done it is not even possible to know if what you have created tastes at all the same as what the person who created the recipe created.

The way a skilled home cook and an amateur look at a recipe is completely different. A novice looks at a recipe as a set of instruction used to recreate a dish. A skilled home cook looks at a recipe as a source of ideas, perhaps a set of suggestions for something new; occasionally as a means of recollecting some of the specifics of a dish. If you looks at recipes written down by skilled cooks, they look nothing at all like you would find in a cookbook. It may list a couple of key ingredients or perhaps a twist on the recipe, a cooking temperature and time. It will also likely list the different results of repeated trials of the recipe with slight changes each time it is made. A recipe does not have to be written in stone, it should live and breathe, change and develop over time.

This realization was an important step for me in learning my way around food. A recipe is no more than an idea for a dish, waiting to be made your own.

Soup Is Good

Soup is one of the most surprisingly avoided dishes I have run across. In case you were not aware, here are some soup facts:

1. It is easy
2. It can be very fast
3. There are probably at least a dozen different things in your cupboard right now that could be used to make a delicious soup
4. It is inexpensive
   
5. It is easy to make soup for 2-12
6. It makes great leftovers
7. There is no need to make your own stock
8. It can be hot or cold, it's all good
9. It gets better over time
   

Here is the basic process for making soup.

Liquid + Flavor + Filler

Simple, huh?

If you take boiling water, add some miso and throw in some tofu cubes, you have a passable bowl of miso soup, all in about the time it takes to boil water.

Let's have a brief discussion of each of these

Liquid
Most often this is a stock of some kind. Chicken, beef, vegetable, pork, veal, fish, etc. Water can be used, but most often it is one of these stocks. They all bring a wonderful flavor that doesn't overwhelm the other ingredients. The liquid should bring something to the party, but no single thing should take over the taste of the soup. A soup is a balancing act, and the liquid is no exception. You can also use a blend of liquids, including: wine, beer, whipping cream, vinegar, lemon juice.

Flavor
Flavors can be added in a variety of ways, here are some examples.

1. Aromatics - Onion, Celery, Carrot, Garlic, Shallots, Peppers, Leeks, Turnips, Parsnips, Ginger
2. Flavor Concentrates - Bouillon, Miso, Tomato Paste
3. Herbs - Bay, Basic, Tarragon, Sage, Rosemary, Pepper, Fennel, Cilantro, Mustard Powder, Chili Powder, Turmeric
   

These flavors are also usually added in different ways. Aromatics are usually cooked over medium-high heat in oil as the first step. Just about any oil would do here. Flavor concentrates get added after the liquid gets added.

Powdered herbs are added whenever. They can be toasted as the first step, they can be added with the aromatics, they can be added when the liquid is added. They can even be added at the very end. Fresh herbs should be added toward the end of cooking because they are delicate and their flavorful oils can be destroyed be heat and long cooking. Bay leaves are a popular addition that work a bit differently than most others. They are added with the liquid and removed either at the end of cooking, or when the soup tastes "bay-like" enough.

Filler
This is the good stuff. Here are some examples:

• Meat - Beef, chicken, fish, shrimp, lamb,
  
• Vegetables - Name it
• Beans - Name it
• Pasta - Penne, tubeli, ditili, anellini, conchigliette, cous cous, orzo (just about any kind of pasta except the long thin ones.)
• Dairy - Parmesan, Cheddar

Process
So, here is the basic process.

1. Cook the aromatics in oil (This includes the always delicious rendered bacon or sausage fat)
   
2. Add the liquid
3. Bring to a simmer
4. Add the flavoring and wait until it tastes good
   
5. Add the filler and wait until it is cooked/sufficiently warm
   
6. Eat
   

This is all a decent pot of soup requires and it can take as little as half an hour. It can also be made and left on the stove for hours simmering (it may be best to leave anything that gets mush with long cooking until you are nearly ready to eat.)

Here are some simple recipes to try. You will notice that I don't specify quantities for anything. The reason is...it mostly doesn't matter. Here is how the measuring should take place.

Use as much liquid as you want to make soup.
Taste the soup often as you add flavorings. If you are leaving flavorings in the soup as you cook, taste it every 5-10 minutes and remove them when it tastes how you want it to.
The more filler you add, the more it changes from being soup like to chowder or stew like. Add until it's the consistency you like.

There really aren't "wrong" answers here, you just make it how you want it.

Miso Soup
Liquid: Dashi (easist stock to make, but the ingredients aren't all that common) or water
Flavorings: Miso Paste (Any kind at all, red, white, other...)
Filler: Wakame (optional, it's the green seaweed you usually find in miso), Soba noodles, mushrooms, tofu and scallions.

Chicken Noodle Soup
Liquid: Chicken Stock
Flavorings: Onion, carrot and garlic cooked in bacon-fat (about four sliced worth) Remove the bacon before you add the liquid and add it back in the serving bowl as a garnish. Add the carrot first, then the onion, then the garlic last because it burns the easiest. This whole process should take about five minutes or so. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add a bay leaf or two if you like.
Filler: White Beans, Penne, Chunks of Chicken and some frozen corn

Corn Chowder
Liquid: Chicken Stock
Flavorings: Garlic, onion, carrot, turmeric, salt, pepper, thyme, bay
Filler: Corn, potatos, cheddar cheese (at the very end, only cook for 5-10 minutes)