This is one culinary experiment gone horribly awry.

In an intentionally plain bag, which Tim had picked up at the grocery store, sat the Doritos X-13D experimental flavor tortilla chips. The label claimed that the new flavor was an all-time American classic, and the four of us sat around the coffee table on a Friday afternoon staring at the mystery with which he presented us.

We each popped a chip into our mouths and almost everyone reacted in the same way – instant recognition followed immediately by horror and then confusion. We each knew that we knew the flavor, but couldn’t name it. Everyone that is, except for The Sexy Blonde. Known for her fantastically accurate palate, she had determined the intended flavor and broken down its components before I had even gotten one chip past my lips, and it was torturing her to wait for the rest of us to figure it out or give up.

She held her tongue while the rest of us pondered and grimaced, but was chomping at the bit to declare her findings. One by one we gave up and chugged anything within reach that would wash the flavor from our tongues and finally she announced it, “McDonalds Cheeseburger! You can taste the onions, pickles, cheese and beef.” She was absolutely correct although we all wished that it had remained a mystery. I immediately asked The Sexy Blonde if she would accompany me to Sonoma next week, because I could surely use a super-taster like her on my wine tasting excursion.

The classic Swedish holiday cookie involves two of my all-time favorite ingredients, neither of which I usually associate with cookies, or each other. The appearances, flavors, aromas and textures of ginger and bacon fat seem so diametrically opposed that I was both horrified and intrigued by the thought of combining them into one sticky biscuit.

It works. It works as well as I imagined it possibly could, and the flavor and texture of these cookies is hard to rival, but I thought I might be able to come up with a little trick to make it work even better, a twist to put it over the top, and that got me thinking about other favorite fats and ginger dishes, and it all fell right into place.

Rendered duck fat is probably the most amazing thing on Earth, up there with Bose-Einstein Condensate as a substance that both perplexes and amazes me, so impossible to wrap my head around how it can do what it does. I have found that in the kitchen, anything that benefits from a richly flavored fat like bacon grease can become ten times more tantalizing when substituted with rendered duck fat. Ginger duck dishes also work very well in Asian cuisine, so I think I might just have devised a winner.

Experiments will follow soon and I will update with a recipe and results in an impending posting.

I had the lowest scores out of four competitors at the Iron Chef (sorry about the trademark infringement) Battle Mango in Glen Park last week.

Things to remember for next time:
(1) Read the rules on the evite before you start cooking or at least before you go to the competition/dinner.
(2) Don’t be like that girl who started cooking after everyone else arrived and their food was getting cold. Even if she did win.
(3) The judges care about presentation (seemingly far more than taste), so make it pretty.
(4) They will not care if you make 4 dishes instead of the assigned 2.
(5) They will not consider the world’s most kick-ass frozen ginger mango-rita to be a “dish” no matter how much they love it. Fools.
(6) Just make buffalo wings in lettuce cups. They will be content.

What I learned:

(1) My frozen ginger mango-rita is a crowd-pleaser, but would be even better with more ginger (maybe roasted rather than raw), should be made in obscenely large batches, and the leftovers make a good granita when forgotten in the freezer. Cayenne and sugar on the rim was a great last-minute addition, but better to wet the rim with a lime wedge than in a bowl of mango juice, because the rim ends up slithering its way down to the stem in a matter of minutes.

(2) My classic crab rangoon is fantastic, replacing the crab with mango and keeping the other spicy and savory ingredients is also good, and calling it “mangoon” is funny, but adding the mango while retaining the crab and having a fruity dipping sauce (duck sauce or sweet chili sauce) would have been sublime.

(3) Serving mangoon to the judges while still hot and crispy would have been good as well.

(4) It is really hard to find Asian staples in my new neighborhood, and when I can, they are absurdly overpriced ($8 for a packet of agar agar flakes, which cost $1.39 at Asian markets in the Sunset District or Chinatown for a bag at least 8 times the size).

(5) Organic corn syrup serves no purpose and has no place in this world. The things that call for corn syrup are not for the organic grocery buyer, and the stuff is so thick, chewy and odd that it doesn’t function in a recipe the way conventional corn syrup does. It literally took 45 minutes with the bottle tilted at a 45-degree angle to pour a half-cup, and the mouth of the bottle was too narrow to fit even a butter knife inside in order to promote flow.

(6) Don’t try to make mango gumdrops from scratch. It’s silly and you have no idea what you are doing. Make mango pâté de fruit and then everyone will have a happier experience and be more impressed by the fancy name.

The other side of my food writing can be found here.

It’s a link to my profile on Yelp.com, a site for restaurant (and business) reviews, and my venue to elevate entirely consumptive experiences into creative acts. Truly, I would love to write that I only consume in order create, but that is more an aspiration than my current state. I’m working on it. I like the juxtaposition with the way I cook, creative acts for the purpose of consumption. It’s ephemeral art.

I chose Mock Eel as the title for my culinary blog, because it was one bite of that dish that fomented my first foray into culinary experimentation, which over the past few years has become a consistent passion and occasional obsession. It’s funny to me, thinking of how many times I tried to recreate an entity that was itself pretending to be something altogether different.

It all started when Steve Bogart opened his unique Northern Chinese restaurant, A Single Pebble, in Burlington, Vermont. The bill of fare read like a fairytale to this small town boy, and my already budding passion for Asian cooking was piqued by the delicacies on offer. Before putting a second awe-inspiring spiral into my mouth, I inquired as to the mock eel’s ingredients, embarrassedly implying a potential allergy, but to no avail. The server informed me that the recipe was a secret, leaving me with only the menu description of,

“Braised shiitake mushrooms in a ginger sauce.
A delightful, crispy flavor and texture.
9.50.”

Until that point, I had been content to obediently follow recipes scavenged from friends, family, books and the Internet, recreating each with such reverence for exact specifications that one might think they were holy scripture. I feared the mystical voodoo science involved in cooking (as I still do of baking) and had yet to embrace the art. I was young in my culinary development and I could only grasp the potential for tasting new flavors, the satisfaction of creating and the impact it had on how pretty girls perceived me.

Intrigued by this mysterious dish, a mound of sticky over crispy fake-fish ribbons, I started on my quest with nothing but the description torn from a menu and my underdeveloped palate. I knew that the “eel” was shitake and I could tell by sight and crunch that it was fried, not braised. Garlic was palpable, as were the scallions and the sauce was thick and viscous like a glaze and exceedingly sweet, yet dark and salty.

I tend to over-think things, so when I retreated to my kitchen with leftovers and a bag of fresh shitake caps, I began to scheme about the sorts of ingredients and techniques that I could employ. After fruitless web searches, numerous charred and reeking saucepans and with hands cramped into grotesque contortions from spiral-cutting mushrooms with a paring knife, I was eventually sautéing shitake strips in a citrus and tamari reduction that resembled the original in essence of flavor, but approached it neither in texture nor appearance. I continued to experiment, to tinker, to sample the original and to look for inside information on Bogart’s baby, and I thought I was gradually narrowing in on the master.

Years later, having long since moved on to other projects, I asked the sister of a dear friend, who waited tables at A Single Pebble, how mock eel was made. She told me that dried mushrooms were spiral cut with scissors, reconstituted, deep fried and then tossed in a wok with a 50-50 mix of boiling cane sugar and soy sauce along with ginger, garlic and scallions. Essentially, he was deep frying mushrooms and tossing them in soy sauce caramel!

She also informed me that the task required the sort of heat that my electric range could never provide, and since that day, I have never been willing to move into any apartment without a gas stove.

I have come to like my own evolving sauce variations more than the sickly sweet original, and it works just as well with the fundamental techniques. The sugar, although I dread to meddle with the chef of provenance, is a little too much after the first few bites and swapping some of it for fruit juice gives it a more robust character and a little more complexity of flavor.

So that is the story of the fascinating flavor that sparked my obsession with culinary experimentation and just the tip of an expanding iceberg that I hope to chip away at here. I see this blog as a chance to archive my thoughts and replace my tattered folders filled with crusty scraps of paper, recipes that have been drawn on and written over, oil-soaked articles torn from culinary magazines, illustrations for utensil designs or procedural diagrams and my logs of ongoing projects that document the many manifestations of each new trial. I suppose it may not be interesting to anyone other than myself, but on the off chance that you are reading any of this, post a comment so I know I’m not alone.