Nermo

Shrimp and pork potstickers
Crab Mangoon
Vietnamese spring rolls
Steamed BBQ duck buns
BBQ ribs

Noodles: glass, rice, egg
Broth: vegetable, chicken
Sauces: peanut, curry…
Veggies: snap peas, cucumber, beet, carrot, jicama, broccoli, pumpkin, tofu, cabbage, peppers, sprouts, carrot, spinach, mushrooms…
Seasoning: Sriracha, soy, hoisin, chili paste, rice vinegar, mirin, sesame oil…
Toppings: sesame seeds, scallion, lime wedges, cilantro, mint, peanuts…
Meat: chicken, beef…

Oranges
Wonton Cannolis filled with fruit, nuts, something creamy
Steamed lotus nut buns

Here’s what I have discovered since my first experiment:

• Carrot Juice requires less sodium alginate. I could have gone with ½ teaspoon per cup.

• Rather than pour water back and forth between bowls through a strainer, I added another cup of water to the bowl and set the strainer inside, so that once I had dripped in enough juice, I simply lifted the strainer and rinsed the pearls within.

• With a smaller tipped syringe, I can drain the “noodle” and then refill it with something else, potentially making a many-layered tube.

• You can make larger “ravioli” by pouring a big glob of juice in a little bowl and then pouring calcium water over it.

• The ravioli can be drained, inflated and resealed, making balloons of carrot juice jelly. They don’t stretch particularly well, but can be inflated at least to their original size. Yeah, I have no idea what practical purpose this could serve, but hell, I had fun figuring it out. I was like a 12 year-old kid with a chemistry set.

• Once the pearls gelled all the way through, they reminded me of Orbitz, a fad soft drink from the late 90s that had little gel balls suspended in it. I think that it may have been the same thing, but wikipedia says it contained gellan and a Perdue chemistry class page said it was xantham gum.

• Carrot Pearls mixed with mango juice and Veev makes for a cocktail that is neither particularly good nor particularly bad. I think that goes for Veev on it’s own as well.

I expected the process to be highly exacting and scientifical, but my first attempt at fake-it-‘til-you-make-it molecular gastronomy was spot on. Should I have hyphenated “spot-on”? It seems like the sentence already has too many little lines.

I mixed a cup of mango juice with a teaspoon of sodium alginate (not as scary as it sounds. It comes from seaweed… well, maybe that sounds scary too), turned on the heat and whisked the hell out of it. Once it started to boil, I let it go for a minute, strained it and dripped it into a bowl of water and calcium carbonate (it’s the main ingredient in Tums and a calcium supplement often added to soymilk). The result was a mound of shiny little pearls composed of a thin gummy layer surrounding a core of juice that popped when bitten into.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with my new creation. I think it’s time to make some funky cocktails.

Seeing the chemistry sets at Blue Bottle yesterday has inspired my first foray into molecular gastronomy. I was reading a blog about how hard it is to come by the chemicals needed to make carrot juice caviar, and it turns out that the writer’s mail-order supplier is only a couple blocks from my office, so I will be checking out Le Sanctuaire this weekend. Khymos seems to be a good starting point for some fun experiment ideas.

I’m hoping to host a Chinese New Year dinner party in a couple of weeks, so perhaps by then I will have devised something fun and strange to add to a couple of the dishes.

I’m hosting a dinner party in a few weeks and currently trying to decide what to serve. Based on how this event went three years ago, I will need copious amounts of food, most of which to be prepared ahead of time, and a main course that can assembled individually to taste.

I think I will start with dumplings and rolls and then lay out a spread based around noodles, so each person can assemble a bowl of noodles and sauce or make a bowl of noodle soup, pho-style, with a huge assortment of fixin’s from which to choose. Dessert needs to be simple because I want to be completely out of the kitchen before the apps have been devoured.

Here are my thoughts for the menu so far. Any suggestions?

First Course: Dim Sum Starters
Shrimp and pork dumplings
Crab Mangoon
Veggie spring rolls
Vietnamese spring rolls
Steamed buns filled with something (BBQ duck maybe?)

Second Course: Noodle/Soup Bar
Noodles- glass noodles (mung or sweet potato), rice noodles, egg noodles
Broth- beef, chicken, fish, pork, veggie
Veggies- snap peas, cucumber, carrot, broccoli, pumpkin, green beans,
Seasoning- Sriracha, soy, hoisin, chili paste, vinegar, mirin, sesame oil
Sauces- peanut sauce
Toppings- sesame seeds, scallion,
Meat- chicken, pork, beef, crab, fish shrimp, duck, tofu

Dessert
Oranges and pomegranates
Cannoli made with wontons filled with fruit, nuts, something creamy
Steamed buns filled with something (lotus nut paste maybe?)

Cocktails
I’ll be picking a few drink recipes to go with the menu, but like the “Flaming Mao” and “Cultural Rev-O- Licious” of ’05, I would like to throw together something unique and give it a fun, topical title.

I’ve been playing with recipes for the MAOjito, MAOgarita, CosMAOpolitan, TiananMINT [ ] Julep, Beijing (variation on the Manhattan) and the Acupuncture Needle. I’m thinking of dropping a shot of plum wine into a beer and calling it a Belgrade Embassy Bomb.

Ever since I made my first great batch of gnocchi, I have been trying to develop a sweet potato variation, but baked sweet potatoes are so much wetter and stickier than potatoes that it has been a struggle.

The ratio for my regular gnocchi is:
4 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes
2 large eggs
1 cup flour
1/2 cup grated cheese

Simply substituting sweet potato for Yukon Gold yielded nothing recognizable as gnocchi.

Substituting sweet potato for half the Yukon Gold was a step in the right direction, but required 4 times as much flour to achieve the same dough consistency, which yielded extremely dense dumplings.

I did a little research and found recipes that used comparably large amounts of flour, but were critiqued for their brick-like density and I feel strongly that gnocchi should be light and fluffy. Other recipes used as much flour but added other moist ingredients such as ricotta, a direction I did not want to take.

I found one recipe that used less flour and rather than rolling the dough it instructed the cook to put the dough into a pastry bag and squeeze it into the boiling water. Last week I attempted this with the ratio listed above (but half of the potatoes were sweet potatoes and the other half was russets) and the result was delicious and light but did not hold together well. When fried, they resembled sweet potato pancakes but the inside was still the consistency of mashed potatoes.

For last night’s batch, I doubled the flour and once boiled, they were precisely the consistency and flavor I desired. Oddly, when fried, the middle again became a bit looser, nearly as much like mashed potato as pasta in texture, but I think this is as close to perfect as I have the patience to reach, so I will post the recipe now.

I was chatting up my new roommate over beers in the kitchen, and without really thinking, I grabbed a chef knife from its magnetic wall-mount and chopped into eighths the little organic pie pumpkin I had picked up on a whim. I mused, “What I am going to do with this pumpkin?” and my roommate offered only “I love pumpkin seeds!” before she scuttled off to get ready for a date and I continued to ponder the pumpkin as I scooped the gunk from the slices and separated the seeds.

I roasted the seeds on an oiled baking pan with a quick shot of olive oil-flavored cooking spray, sea salt and Garam Masala spice mix (cinnamon, cumin, cloves, nutmeg and cardamom) which I added at the half-way shake, as it tends to scorch. Toasty and tasty! Lindsay, if you are reading this, there is a bowl of seeds for you on “the white thing” by the stove (she’ll know where I mean).

Still unsure of what to make with it, I tossed the pumpkin into the oven in a covered Pyrex dish with a half inch of water and some maple syrup and put it in the oven while I looked around the kitchen. It was a cool night so I decided on soup. I had a carrot, celery and shallots left over from a gravy experiment and I was hoping to find a box of broth or some stock in the freezer, but there was none. Always the innovator, I decided to substitute a bullion cube and a Knorr Herbes de Provence cube that a friend picked up in France and left for me when she moved to Switzerland.

I minced the veggies and sautéed them in a stir-fry pan with butter, salt, pepper and eventually a splash of my 4^th beer. Once everything was soft, I added water and the cubes and while it worked its way up to a boil, I sliced the pumpkin flesh from its shell, diced it quickly and added it to the simmering soup. When everything seemed well integrated, I added heavy cream, finished it with a dollop of butter and pulled the whole thing off the stove about a minute after it returned to boiling. Everything went into the food processor (where I should have started it with those veggies) and I pulsed it until the chunks were gone, but the bisque still had some texture.

Results: Nearly amazing. The texture was ideal and while the cubes were crucial to the flavor, since I didn’t have broth or know how to season it, I didn’t consider the overall salt content, so the end result was delicious except for an overpowering saltiness.

Not literally burned. The results came out last night. I knew before we left that bar that I didn’t come in top three, but at least I finished 5th. The real heart-breaker came when I got a misdirected email from the organizer Monday asking me, as one of the winners, for my recipe [see transcript below]. I was proud of my creation, it came out how I wanted it to, and I received some compliments, so no complaints.

On 10/29/07, Timothy Walker wrote:

Hey, nice work, winner!

As part of the follow up to your victory, I need to get a description of your sammich so that we can let the world know what led you to victory.

Please get back to me as soon as you can, as the Oakland Tribune wants to run a story and they need a description of all the winners.

Yours in Bread, Butter, Cheese and Victory,

Tim Walker
Chief Instigator
Grilled Cheese Invitational

On Oct 29, 2007, I wrote:

Hi Tim,

My sandwich, The Ol’ Vermonter, was apple pie filling made with Macintosh apples, Vermont maple syrup and crushed pecans, encased in sharp Cabot cheddar between slices of cheap white bread slathered in maple butter and grilled until crusty.

As I recall though, I didn’t win.

Best,
Quinn

On 10/29/07, Timothy Walker wrote:

Jesus, you’re right, my apologies. That sammich sounds awesome, though.

I’ll be publishing the scores later today/tomorrow.

However, just to let you know, your score was 25.60, which is a great score. The difference between 1st, 2nd and 3rd was 1.54 points, so it was an awfully close race.

-=t=-

On Oct 29, 2007, I wrote:

Way to get my hopes up, just to destroy them. Thanks for hosting such
a ridiculously fun event. We had a blast.

On 10/29/07, Timothy Walker wrote:

It’s my specialty, actually!

Thanks for participating. It’s great to see how such a crazy thing is enjoyed all over the place.

Tonight is the GCI in Oakland. I’m entered in the Honey Pot category, featuring dessert grilled cheese sandwiches.

I’m grilling up the Ol’ Vermonter. I made an apple pie filling with Macintosh apples, finely chopped pecans and lots of maple syrup, which will be encased by two kinds of cheddar pressed between two slices of standard white bread and grilled in maple butter.

Crusty maple apple cheddar = The Ol’ Vermonter

They’re bad for your kitchen, your wallet and the environment.

Someone once gave me a Spätzle maker. I used to live in Austria and love to cook, so it made for a lovely and thoughtful gift. I was excited. I even used it…once. I feel bad, but how often does anyone make Spätzle and can’t one do the same thing with a box grater and a little ingenuity?

There are a million ads offering the next best thing for your kitchen, and most of those items get tossed in a drawer and forgotten. Chances are, there is a long-established device that will meet your needs and more. Most often, this device is an 8-inch chef’s knife or your oven.

Here is a simple test:

1. How many tasks can this gizmo take on? If less than three from your usual repertoire, fuggedabowdit.

2. Will another tool do the job, and better and other chores to boot, and do you already own it? Probably, and if you don’t own one, you might want to get that multitalented tool instead of the brass-plated lychee peeler or the battery-powered Arbor Day cookie extruder.

3. How often do you actually attempt whatever this tool does, and honestly, how often would you use it if you had one? If you really need to make an apple pie to impress the in-laws at Thanksgiving, but will likely not make another until next November, a little extra time with a knife is probably a better investment than the $30 apple corer/peeler.

There are so many great tools that pass all these tests:

Food Processor: I use a 14-cup Cuisinart, and I use it a lot. With just the blades that come standard, I can grate 3 pounds of cheese, chop all the vegetables for a vat of stew, make a couple pounds of dough, and each in less than a minute. I use it to emulsify vinaigrettes, to blend smoothies, to sift dry ingredients, to puree hot soup, to chop fresh herbs or nuts (or both at the same time for pesto), to turn a stale roll into breadcrumbs, to make sauces smooth, and for just about any job that involves bulk prep work.

Stir-Fry Pan: I use my Joyce Chen stir-fry pan for just about everything. from (potato leek) soup to (candied) nuts. I use it to make omelets, crepes, scrambles, pancakes, Hollandaise sauce, bacon, sausage, hash and boiled eggs, and that’s just breakfast. It is the most versatile pan I have ever had, and covers just about every stovetop dish you can imagine. I even made a stir fry in it once. It has a wide, flat bottom which provides ample frying surface, rounded sides for easy flip-tossing, adequate depth to hold over a gallon and all it really lacks is a metal handle for moving it from stove-top searing to oven finishing. Maybe it is time for me to get an upgrade.

Mesh Strainer (sturdy, all metal, 6-8 inch diameter): I use the $3 strainer that I bought in China Town for its intended purpose and a variety of other jobs. In place of a ricer or food mill, I rice potatoes by pushing them through with a wooden spoon, and do the same with cooked apples to make pink sauce sans skin. For a really fine straining job, I drop a coffee filter into the strainer basket and let only the liquids through. I also use it to lift and drain things from deep-fry oil and boiling water.

Note: Now that I am thinking about it, this might be the perfect replacement for my Spätzle maker, to drip the dumpling dough into boiling water.

Tongs: I use the same pair of 12-inch OXO “Good Grips” tongs for moving steaks on the grill, chicken in the frying pan, asparagus from the steamer, cooked spaghetti to the plate, biscuits around the oven, ramekins under the broiler and everything else everywhere else. Tongs are easy to use, easy to clean, serve myriad purposes and are easy to store.

Tip: in the backyard, there’s no need for BBQ a fork when you have tongs, unless you like dry, punctured meat. I improved and simplified cleaning by replacing my grill brush with a steel wool pad which I use to scour the hot grill by holding it in my tongs. I head out to the grill with only tongs, a spatula, steel wool and an instant read thermometer. That’s really all you need.

Plastic Squeeze Bottle: like the ketchup and mustard bottles you might find at diners, but clear, they are great for storing, dispensing and serving anything liquid. I infuse olive oil with woody herbs and spices right in the bottle and keep it by the stove to squirt into the hot pan. When I make a sauce to be be drizzled on fish or adorn a dessert with swirls and stripes, the sauce goes straight from pan to bottle. It won’t work as well with thick frosting, but if you are decorating a cake with ganache or jam, the bottle works better than a pastry bag, allowing more control and less mess.

Tips: I’ve had better luck with plastic squeeze bottles bought at art supply stores than kitchen stores. Test the bottle in the store by covering the tip tightly with your finger and squeezing. If air leaks out where the cap screws onto the bottle, so will the liquids you put into it. If you are making a sauce ahead of time, but intend to serve it warm, just reheat the bottle in a pan of hot water.

I would definitely say that one high-quality, versatile tool is worth the cost of a whole drawer full of gadgets, and worth making an investment. Good knives, just three or four will do everything you could want from a set of ten Ginsu Knives, except maybe cutting through a tin can, but really, who doesn’t have a can opener (with built-in bottle opener and triangular hole puncher)?