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Wednesday, March 12
BEER
by
Lloydville
on Wed 12 Mar 2008 10:15 PM PDT
Benjamin
Franklin said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be
happy." You probably know this already, and may know the famous
advertising line for Guinness Stout -- "Guinness Is Good For
You." In fact it is -- incredibly good for you. A moderate
daily intake of beer has long been known to reduce stress and the risk
of heart attack but there are ingredients in beer that work many other
wonders besides lowering cholesterol, including reducing the risk of
cancer and cognitive decline (drink beer, stay smart forever!) and fighting off viruses. Beer also increases the
metabolism of protein, which is useful if the consumption of beer
causes you to neglect regular meals. (Hey, it can happen.)
And you thought your love of beer was based purely on moral
depravity. Not so, my friend! Far from it! A beer belly is the unmistakable sign of
a lifelong commitment to personal health.
Some anthropologists believe that grain was first cultivated by the human race not as a food source but
for fermentation into beer -- bread was a happy by-product of the
activity. (The figures above are ancient Egyptians making beer.) This would mean that the entire advance of human
civilization, which was founded on the cultivation of grain, proceeds
from the desire to toss back some suds. The next time you're
enjoying a Bach Cantata or a play by Shakespeare or the sculptures of
the Parthenon, raise a glass to the good old boys and girls of 10,000 B. C., who got the party going.
Check out the good news here:
Men's Health
. . . and cheers!
Thursday, December 6
NO LIMIT
by
Lloydville
on Thu 06 Dec 2007 12:43 AM PST
My friend John Sosnovsky was just in town and brought as a gift a copy of Just Enough Liebling,
a collection of A. J. Liebling's writing about food, boxing and
war. In one of the articles about food Liebling offers an
extended paean to Tavel, the rosé wine from the Rhône region of France. It brought back many
memories. Tavel is a wine often served in the South Of France
with seafood (although Liebling insists it's so good it can go with
anything) and I've drunk it with many fine meals in that part of the world,
usually in restaurants or on the terraces of restaurants with a view of
the sea.
On John's last night in Vegas I tracked him down in the card room at
Caesars around 9pm. He'd been playing poker all day, with mixed
results, and said he was pokered out, so we decided to meet at Mon Ami
Gabi, a terrific French bistro in the Paris, Las Vegas casino.
Once installed on its very pleasant terrace I discovered that they had
a Tavel on their wine list, and John and I decided to drink a bottle in
honor of Mr. Liebling. And we decided to drink it with steak, to
test Mr. Liebling's assertion that it can go with anything.
It went exceptionally well with the steak, with the brisk night air and
with our conversation, which kept circling back to the upcoming fight
between Ricky Hatton and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. next Saturday in Las Vegas. John
is a member of the Fancy and very knowledgeable about boxing, but even
he seemed baffled by the question of who was likely to prevail in this
contest -- Hatton, the brawler with heart, or Mayweather, the scientist
with lightning-fast but hardly lethal hands and canny instincts for
defense (or unseemly evasion, as some consider it.)
The best we could surmise was that Hatton had a chance only if he got
inside and ripped Mayweather apart with body shots, shocking him and
breaking his will. That didn't seem likely, but it seemed
possible. Such imponderables are what have made this fight one of
the most anticipated in ages. Mr. Liebling, long since deceased,
would have had much to say on the subject and we missed his wisdom
keenly.
After the Tavel and the beef, John decided that perhaps he wasn't
pokered out after all. We set off to see what tables might be
going in the Paris' card room.
The night before, at the Palms, John had cajoled me into
sitting down at my first no-limit Hold-'em game in a casino. (I'd
played a few hands at a no-limit game in the old card room at the
Rancho Fiesta, but it had broken up almost as soon as I arrived at the table.) I
was terrified of playing at the Palms -- not least because Phil Helmuth
(below, playing in a tournament) and Layne Flack, two high-profile
high-limit poker pros, were hanging
around my table to watch a couple of their friends play. It's
tough to make your debut at a no-limit table under the eyes of a winner
of the Main Event at the World Series Of Poker. (Helmuth won it in 1989 at the age
of 24, the youngest player who's ever done so.)
No limit Hold-'em is intrinsically terrifying. Any amount of
money can be bet on a hand at any time, which means you can lose every
chip in front of you if you call an "all-in" bet with the
wrong cards in the wrong situation. On the other hand, you can
use big bets to push your fellow players around -- to make them fold
better cards than you have, for example. It's a wild and
exceedingly complex endeavor.
Miraculously, as soon as I sat down at the table I felt cool and
perfectly in command of things. I've played endless hands of
no-limit poker for fake money online and I understand the dynamics of
the game -- far better than I've ever understood the dynamics of limit
Hold-'em, where you can bet only certain fixed amounts. I've
always played limit Hold-em because it seemed on the face of it less
risky.
No-limit Hold-'em for money, however, is a far more logical game,
far less dependent on the random fall of the cards, though the logic is
sometimes the logic of ruthlessness and terror.
I played for three or four hours in this heady atmosphere and walked
away about a hundred dollars down. Not good -- but not
devastating, either. You can pay more for a good meal or a rock
concert and not enjoy either half as much or for half as long.
There were no poker pros hanging around the Paris' card room (above) -- just a
lot of genial players who seemed like people on vacation
looking for a good time . . . and to say they'd played poker in Las
Vegas. They weren't bad players but they played too many hands,
eager for action. I waited for my chances, bet hard when they
came and walked away three hundred and thirty dollars ahead -- by far the most money I've ever won at any poker table. More importantly, it left me over two hundred dollars ahead for my first two nights of no-limit poker.
John did even better, walking away over seven hundred dollars ahead -- covering the cost of all his poker playing in Las Vegas and his hotel room and
his flight here, with a little left over for celebratory drinks
afterwards. To say that we raised our glasses joyfully would be
putting it
mildly.
[The snapshot of the Paris poker room above is from a useful web site, vegasrex,
which describes and reviews the various card rooms in Las Vegas and has a lot of other stuff about what's going on in town.]
Saturday, December 1
PARIS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 01 Dec 2007 12:43 AM PST
I
have no memory whatsoever of my first view of Paris -- what I must have
seen of it on a cab ride from the airport to my Left Bank hotel in the
winter of 1983. I have a vague memory of the view from the hotel
room, a charming chamber up under the eaves of a small, venerable and recently
refurbished establishment near the École des Beaux Arts. I
looked out over the rooftops of Paris, which reminded me of Paris in
the movies, but I'm not sure what else I saw, besides possibilities.
I arrived at the hotel late at night but my companion, who'd been to
Paris before, knew a restaurant
that was open 24/7, one she was fond of, and we went there. It
was at the edge of Les Halles, the site of the legendary produce
market. The market had long since been moved to the outskirts of
Paris and was then
just a ghost of itself, but the restaurant, Au Pied de Cochon,
which had been there in the glory days of Les Halles, remained. It opened in 1946 and has not closed its doors
since. Once, obviously, it served the all-night workers and
truckers of Les Halles when it was a functioning market but people
still made their way to it at all hours of the night. There was a
small crowd there when we arrived sometime after midnight. I had
a sense that many of them were musicians grabbing some food after an
evening's gig, though I'm not sure at this remove what made me think so. Perhaps
one of them was carrying an instrument in a case. Perhaps one of
them pulled out a guitar and sang some snatches of a song.
The restaurant was rather plain in those days, even shabby, reflecting
its original working-class milieu. It has been remodeled at least
a couple of times since then -- it has an unfortunate faux-Belle Époque
décor now (see above) but still isn't particularly fancy.
It specializes, as its name suggests, in pig's feet and other rustic
fare, and also in shellfish, which seems to be de rigeur for all-night
restaurants in Paris.
It had a wide selection of raw oysters, and I ordered a dozen Belons,
the small, tangy oysters of the Breton coast that have a considerable
reputation. When the round tray of them arrived at the table,
they created my first intense visual memory of Paris. The opened
oysters and some cut lemons were nestled on a bed of ice decorated with sprigs of
seaweed. The tray was placed on a
wire rack directly in front of me, giving me a good view of and
easy access to the oysters. On a plate in a holder built into the wire rack beneath the tray was a
small bowl of red wine vinegar and finely chopped
onions, some slices of brown bread and some butter. The oysters
in the picture below are not Belons -- I offer it just to show the
general set-up.
I revere oysters extravagantly. To see them served in such an
exalted way stirred my deepest admiration. (I had never seen such
a presentation in an American restaurant, though now it's fairly common
in upscale French eateries.) They were the
tastiest, most mysterious oysters I had ever eaten. I ordered
twelve
more.
Several times in the preceding few hours I had thought to myself, "I'm in
Paris!" But I didn't quite believe it. Halfway through the
second tray of oysters, I believed it.
Next February, it will no longer be possible to smoke in Parisian
restaurants, so I will most likely never go back to Au Pied de
Cochon. This is not altogether a bad thing. The places you
love that you can never return to are also places you can never
leave. They become part of your own small portion of eternity.
Saturday, November 24
AFTER ACTION REPORT
by
Lloydville
on Sat 24 Nov 2007 12:42 AM PST
My
friend Jae and I supplemented our modest cooking skills with large
doses of improvisation and luck to concoct a truly splendid
Thanksgiving meal.
Jae, in an impulse of reckless ambition, decided he would make mashed
potatoes. "I'm going French with them," he said, but would not
explain what he meant by this.
In the end he made stupendously
good mashed potatoes and only after they'd been tasted would he reveal
his ingredients. Half-and-half for creaminess, a large but not
overpowering amount of finely chopped garlic, one single, large
shallot, a small amount of freshly grated Romano cheese and a pinch of
cayenne pepper. I can't say
what's French about any of this but I can say that the results were
delicious.
Jae made stuffing but added to it at my request some oysters and, on
his own initiative, as likely to complement the taste of the oysters
well, some crumbled fried bacon. Again . . . delicious.
Our large turkey for some reason did not produce much in the way of fat
drippings, so that late in the cooking of it we despaired of having
enough liquid in the pan to make gravy. On another inspired
impulse, Jae poured some pumpkin ale into the pan, which made for a
very fine gravy in the end -- an improvisation that could well become a
Thanksgiving tradition.
I confess I couldn't savor the meal as slowly and carefully as I might
have, because I started drinking too early in the day, and too many
different things. A rosé wine, then some of the pumpkin ale,
which had a cheerful, festive taste to it, then some Chimay ale and finally a
Merlot with the dinner. I was past consciousness even before I
got to the pumpkin pie, which served as a fine breakfast the next day.
Friday was a bit of a blur, sharply focused only by a turkey sandwich and by a viewing of Vertigo, which still yields up treasures after countless viewings in the past.
And so the time of leftovers begins. From the look of things this should last quite a while.
Thursday, November 1
LOUP GRILLE AU FENOUIL
by
Lloydville
on Thu 01 Nov 2007 02:21 AM PDT
Loup
grillé au fenouil, translated precisely from the French, means wolf
grilled with fennel. Those familiar with Mediterranean cooking will
recognize, however, that the wolf, the loup, referred to here is loup
de mer, the wolf of the sea, or sea bass. Sea bass grilled with fennel
is one of the glories of southern French cuisine.
I
first encountered it in one of the restaurants facing onto the harbor
of Villefranche, a small town just east of Nice -- a restaurant called
Mère Germaine. There are several restaurants just like it facing the
harbor, and loup grillé au fenouil is not prepared better in Mère
Germaine than in any of the others, but Mère Germaine is where I first
had it, and so that must remain the center of my nostalgia for the
dish.
It has
certainly never tasted better anywhere else -- except perhaps on a
terrace barbecue in Seattle once. A friend living there had discovered
wild fennel growing near him in a vacant lot, and used its seeds to
season the fish, its stalks to fuel the fire beneath, resulting in a
wholly satisfying sensory experience.
Nostalgia
is a potent spur to culinary ambition. One day while peeking into
the tiny seafood selection at my local supermarket I noticed a
tempting fillet of Chilean sea bass. I bought it, along with some dried
fennel seeds from the spice racks, and decided to see how close I could
come to recapturing the taste of those long ago nights on the Côte
d'Azur.
I
coated a small pan with olive oil, salted and peppered the bottom of
the pan, then covered it with fennel seeds. I placed the fillet of sea
bass in the pan and made two slits in the fillet. I coated the top of
the fillet with olive oil, salted and peppered it, and covered it with
fennel seeds, filling up the slits with extra seeds.
I set it under the broiler in my oven until the fennel seeds
were brown and thoroughly roasted, at which point the fish was cooked through but still moist.
I ate
it with a respectable Chardonnay from the Coppola vineyards, and the
wine was fine, but a drier one would have suited the taste of the fish
better. The taste of the fish was miraculous -- light but flavorful --
and the toasted fennel seeds gave a pleasant reminder of the dish as
it's prepared on the shores of the Mediterranean.
It was not by any means loup grillé au fenouil as you'd encounter it there, cooked on a real charcoal fire, seasoned with
fresh fennel. But it was poignantly close.
Tuesday, October 2
THE WORLD'S GREATEST SALSA
by
Lloydville
on Tue 02 Oct 2007 11:16 AM PDT
I'm not kidding -- you've never
tasted better salsa than this, and it's so easy to make . . . there's
really no excuse not to have a supply of it on hand at all times.
What you need to make it is four medium-sized tomatillos, three or
four cloves of garlic, two canned chipotle chilies in adobo sauce, some
water and some salt. Take the husks off the tomatillos, wash them
and cut them in half. Place them in a non-stick skillet, cut side
down, over medium heat, along with the unpeeled garlic cloves.
Roast them all for about four minutes, then flip them over for another
four minutes, or until the tomatillos are soft all the way through.
Put a quarter cup of water into a blender, place the roasted tomatillos
and the peeled roasted garlic into the blender along with the chilies
and a couple of pinches of salt. Two chilies makes for a very
spicy but not overwhelming salsa. Just add one if you want something
a little milder but still very tangy. If you want to knock your
socks off, add three or more -- but don't say I didn't warn you.
Grind this all up into a slightly coarse blend, transfer it to a bowl and add more salt to taste, if necessary.
In this salsa the flavors of the roasted tomatillos and the roasted
garlic are a perfect complement to the smoky fire of the redoubtable
chipotle. It's good with tortilla chips of course, and on any
kind of taco. Mexican food guru Rick Bayless, in his book Mexican
Everyday, where I found this recipe, says he likes it on everything but
ice cream -- and I'm not sure I'd rule out ice cream entirely.
It's sublime stuff.
Wednesday, September 19
THE ULTIMATE CUBA LIBRE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 19 Sep 2007 03:03 AM PDT
The cuba libre,
rum and Coke, always seemed like a pop cocktail to me. I guess I
associated it with early drinking in college, when it was the only
mixed drink anyone knew how to make and seemed like a painless way
to ingest a lot of alcohol.
But that was before I tried Ernest Hemingway's recipe for a cuba libre,
which is something else again. The key to this recipe is getting
hold of a Mexican Coke, which is still made with sugar, as it was in
Hemingway's day. You want to taste the rum and its parent
cane sugar all at once. (If you can't find Mexican Coke, forget I ever mentioned the cuba libre -- corn syrup has no place in it.)
Squeeze half a lime into a cocktail glass. Pour in a jigger of
Bacardi white rum, add the remains of the squeezed lime and plenty of
ice and pour the Coke over it.
The result is not too sweet and not too sour and it has an exhilarating
freshness. After a couple of these you'll be imagining
you're on a tropical beach somewhere . . . and after a few more you'll
be
convinced you really are on a tropical beach somewhere.
At that point, just relax and listen to the sounds of the surf and the wind rustling the palm fronds.
Wednesday, September 5
CARNE ASADA TACOS
by
Lloydville
on Wed 05 Sep 2007 11:27 AM PDT
The
next time you feel like fixing yourself a hamburger, try a carne asada
taco instead, which is sort of the equivalent of a hamburger south of the border,
fast, ubiquitous and comforting.
Here's how to make the ultimate carne asada taco, courtesy of Rick Bayless' indispensable Mexican Everyday:
Get yourself some skirt steak, a 7-ounce can of chipotle chiles in
adobo sauce, a few medium white onions, some flour or corn tortillas
and some olive oil. (A bottle of hot sauce is optional.)
Put the chipotle chiles and their sauce into a blender and purée
them Remove the fat and white membranes from the meat and then
brush the chipotle purée over both sides of it. Let this sit for
a while. (You will have lots of the purée left, but it will keep
for weeks in the fridge.)
Eventually . . . turn your oven on at its lowest setting. Cut up
an onion into quarter-inch thick slices. Heat two tablespoons of
the oil in a skillet over medium to high heat and sauté the onions
until they're lightly browned but still crunchy. (Takes about
five minutes.) Transfer them to an oven-safe container, leaving
as much of the oil in the skillet as possible, and place the container
in the oven. Return the skillet to the burner at the same heat
setting, add another tablespoon of oil and cook the chipotle-smeared
steak until it's well done.
Cut up the steak into thin slices,
mix it with the onions from the oven, salt it to taste, add some hot
sauce if you want (the chipotle sauce is fairly spicy to begin with)
and roll it all up in a tortilla. Eat it with a cold beer or a
Mexican Coca-Cola (which is still made with real sugar and can be found
at many of the smaller Latin markets in the U. S.)
This is just about as easy to make as a hamburger with grilled onions
and way more interesting -- Mexican food at its most basic and most
delicious.
Friday, August 31
FOOD IN LA PAZ
by
Lloydville
on Fri 31 Aug 2007 03:43 AM PDT
It's
hard to have a bad meal in La Paz, especially if you stick to
seafood. In fact, if you stick to seafood (and avoid the Burger
King and Applebee's) it's hard not to stumble upon some of the best
meals of your life, just about anywhere.
The fanciest place we ate at in La Paz was the Bermejo, the restaurant
at Los Arcos, our hotel, but we didn't pay fancy prices there because
we dined on fish we'd caught ourselves (an experience I'll write about
in a later post.) The hotel, which caters to fishermen, is happy
to prepare fish you supply yourself, and to freeze any of it you want
to carry home with you.
The simplest place we ate at was the Super Tacos de Baja California
Hermanos Gonzáles, an outdoor stand with a big terrace that's an
outgrowth of a sidewalk stand that got so popular it had to
expand. My sister Lee had some stupendous fish ceviche there,
Harry and I shared some equally stupendous octopus and clam
tacos. (Nora isn't a seafood fanatic and often had quesadillas of
one sort or another.) We never ate better or cheaper food
anywhere in Baja
California. One wall of the place had cool murals (above.)
One evening we took a lengthy walk along the marinas to the south of the malecón
to a medium-priced restaurant called the La Costa, palapa-roofed, right
next to the water. We had super-fresh seafood there and Harry
felt moved to record the crab dinner he ate. "A lot of work," he
said, "but worth it."
The Bismark is a rarity -- an indoor seafood restaurant back several blocks from the malecón.
The seafood was terrific and the decor was even better:
Harry and
I had dinner one evening at the Bismark II, which the clerk at our
hotel recommended. It's right across the street from the malecón,
with seating on a terrace or back under a high palapa roof. A
charming place with the same great seafood as its parent establishment.
The only bad experience we had dining out in La Paz was at a place right on the malecón, the Kiwi. Lee and I had fine smoked marlin tacos and Harry had a wonderful pescado entero
-- a whole fish fried quickly in super-hot oil and then served whole
(but with olives replacing the fried eyes), which Harry also felt moved to
record (see the images at the beginning and end of this post.) But Nora ordered fish and chips and the fish had gone bad
-- very bad. There's just no excuse for this in a restaurant
within spitting distance of the ocean, in a town where fresh seafood is
so ubiquitous and so cheap. Foisting a small bit of bad fish on a
child might have saved the restaurant as much as fifty cents, I
suspect, but it lost our goodwill forever.
La Paz is a seafood lover's paradise, not just because there's so much
and such a great variety of it, and not just because it's so fresh, but because of the simple, perfect
ways it's cooked and served. You feel you're eating the same food
the chef would make for himself or herself, or for their families,
prepared with the same unpretentious care and respect.
For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.
[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]
Saturday, August 18
CAMARONES
by
Lloydville
on Sat 18 Aug 2007 12:14 AM PDT
The
best way to cook shrimp is just to boil it in beer, in the shell, until
it turns bright pink and fills your kitchen with that distinctive
boiled shrimp aroma. Then you drain it, dump it out on some
newspapers spread on your table, salt it heavily in the shell and get to work -- with drawn butter or spicy cocktail
sauce for dipping and plenty of cold beer to wash it down with. A
better meal than this cannot be had anywhere, at any price.
But if you're looking for something a bit more exotic, or if you're
stuck somewhere dreaming about Mexico and wishing you were there, try
this amazing dish from Rick Bayless, the Mexican food guru -- camarones enchipotlados, shrimp in chipotle sauce. (Bayless' excellent book Mexican Everyday can be found here.)
You need a 15-ounce can of Muir Glen organic, fire-roasted diced
tomatoes. (This is worth tracking down.) You need a can of
chipotle chiles en adobo --
the La Morena brand is easy to find and excellent.
You need one
chayote, a kind of Mexican squash -- zucchini will also do. Make
sure you have some fresh cilantro, garlic and olive oil on hand -- and
about a pound of fresh shrimp, peeled and veined. (Some fancy
grocery stores sell uncooked shrimp that's been peeled and veined for
you, with the tails left on, and that's worth the slightly extra cost,
since peeling and veining uncooked shrimp is exceedingly boring.)
Put three tablespoons of olive oil into a large skillet. Peel and
chop up the chayote into small chunks and sauté it lightly over medium heat in
the oil. Drain the diced tomatoes, saving the liquid, and put
them into a blender. Add one or two chipotle peppers and a
tablespoon of their canning sauce and blend until smooth. Finely
chop or press three garlic cloves and add them to the skillet -- wait
about a minute until the garlic is brownish and fragrant, then add the
sauce from the blender, with the liquid from the tomato can. Cook
this for about five minutes, to let the flavors blend, seasoning it
with salt to taste. Then add the shrimp.
Cook the shrimp in the sauce, stirring constantly, until it's as done
as you like. After about four minutes the shrimp will no
longer be translucent and so ready to eat, but I like my shrimp better done
than that. You have to keep checking by taste to get it just
right. Add water or chicken (or fish) broth if the sauce gets too
thick and pasty.
Eat the shrimp, with some roughly chopped cilantro on top for a
garnish. It's good with rice or just by itself, and great with a
strong beer, like Negra Modelo, served ice-cold.
You'll be astonished at how easy and delicious this dish is -- it brings the sea and Mexico to you, wherever you are.
[Original photos © 2007 Lloyd Fonvielle and Harry Rossi]
Thursday, June 28
ELVIS FOOD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 28 Jun 2007 06:59 AM PDT
Admit
it -- sometimes you just get a taste for Elvis food, for the stuff he
really loved, like banana cream pie. Tucking into an oversized
slice of banana cream pie you can almost feel what it must have been
like to be a bloated, drug-addled cultural icon and genius on the road
to destruction, and sense Elvis's own childlike bewilderment at it
all.
Incidentally, if you live near a Marie Callendar's, as I do, try their
banana cream pie, which tastes old-fashioned somehow, like a pie you'd
get served at a 50s-era lunch counter or school cafeteria. I just
know Elvis would have approved.
Monday, June 25
BLUE TROUT
by
Lloydville
on Mon 25 Jun 2007 02:57 AM PDT
Sometimes after a long day of writing my mind is gripped by strange ideas about food -- strange in the sense that they
don't involve Swiss cheese and crackers or peanut butter sandwiches or frozen meatloaf dinners.
One
day, as it happened, I was reading a piece by Mr. Ernest Hemingway
about trout fishing in Europe. In it he described a method of cooking
trout he had encountered in Switzerland at rural inns. It involved
boiling the trout until it turned blue in a liquor made of water, white
wine vinegar, bay leaves and red pepper -- not too much of any
ingredient in the water, says Mr. Hemingway, without further
elaboration.
This is not the blue trout described by M. F. K. Fisher, which involves placing the trout live into boiling water, unless
the Swiss innkeepers were holding out on Mr. Hemingway, but it sounded fine.
I
remembered that my local supermarket sometimes offers fresh
rainbow trout, so I headed over there late at night and found one
handsome specimen in the fish department. I brought it home, filled up
a large pot with water -- it was a large trout -- emptied about six
ounces of white wine vinegar into the water, added six fragrant bay
leaves and a light sprinkling of cayenne pepper, and set it all to
boil. When it was bubbling I slipped the fish in.
I turned the heat down and simmered the trout for about fifteen minutes. In
fully boiling water, ten or less would have been more than sufficient. I
tested the fish using a method recommended by an old edition of The
Joy Of Cooking -- which is to separate the meat from the bone of the
spine at the thickest middle section of the fish. When the meat there
is tender but no longer translucent, the fish is done.
I ate
the fish with drawn butter, as Mr. Hemingway says the Swiss did. "They
drink the clear Sion wine when they eat it," adds Mr. Hemingway, but they
don't depend on the beverage department of a
supermarket for their wine. I made do with a perfectly respectable
Pinot Grigio by Bolla, cheap, dry and light. I keep looking for
the clear Sion wine, though -- Sion, pictured below, is the primary
wine-producing region of Switzerland:
Even without the Swiss wine, the
result was a meal of almost unimaginable delicacy. Trout is delicate
anyway, and the light seasonings in the water only emphasized the
subtlety of its taste. It all resonated on the tongue like a memory of
food -- insubstantial and fleeting.
Tuesday, May 22
EL TACO FRESCO
by
Lloydville
on Tue 22 May 2007 12:22 AM PDT
About a five minute walk from my house is a little mini-mall with a
taco shop that serves the best tacos in Vegas, by far -- the best
carnitas tacos I've ever had anywhere. The carnitas is tender but
has crispy, charcoal-flavored edges -- the fried fish in the fish tacos
is fresh and moist but crunchy on the outside. The tacos are two
bucks apiece and two
of them make a fine meal.
The shop opens onto a dingy dive bar next door where they'll serve the
food and where you can smoke and drink. The bar and the shop are
both open 24/7. The weirdest people in the world go there, so I
feel right at home.
It's my new favorite joint in Vegas.
Saturday, March 17
CREAMY QUESO ANEJO SALAD DRESSING
by
Lloydville
on Sat 17 Mar 2007 07:52 AM PDT
If you're like me and get glassy-eyed at the thought of vegetables, if you basically hate the whole idea
of salad, yet still think it would be a good idea to eat these things
from time to time, the key to everything is sauces and dressings.
The strategy is to come up with a sauce or dressing so good that the
concept of vegetables and greens as food is eliminated -- they become simply the means of conveying some sort of tasty topping into the mouth.
For salads, you can't just buy some Paul Newman's gourmet dressing and
think that will do the trick. This stuff tastes like salad
dressing -- salad
dressing. It's there to "dress", to tart up, something you don't
want to deal with in the first place. You need to be
creative. You need to make something yourself which doesn't
resemble anything you've ever encountered at the dressing station of a
salad bar.
Here's a recipe from Rick Bayless, that guy on PBS who does shows about
Mexican cooking, for creamy queso añejo dressing. Queso añejo is
a flavorful aged Mexican cheese which tastes a bit like Romano.
You can find it at just about any Mexican market (look for the kind
that's actually made in Mexico) but Romano, which you can find
anywhere, works just as well.
Start with 3/4 of a cup of olive oil in a mixing bowl or blender.
Add 1/4 of a cup of rice vinegar. Add 3 tablespoons of
mayonnaise. Add 3 generous tablespoons of grated (freshly grated!)
queso añejo or Romano. Add slightly less than a tablespoon of
salt. Add 2 to 4 cloves of roasted garlic.
Attention!
Here's the simple way to roast garlic. Put the unpeeled cloves in
a dry skillet over medium heat. Roast the cloves, turning them
often, until they're soft and splotchy brown. It takes about 15
minutes. Remove them from the skillet and when they're cool
enough to handle, remove the skins. Put the 2 to 4 cloves into
the mixing bowl or blender -- if you're
going to be mixing the dressing by hand, run the garlic through a garlic press before you add
it to the bowl. (Be sure to roast a good number of
extra garlic cloves to eat while they're still warm -- few things are more
delicious . . . mild, nutty and slightly sweet.)
Add some chopped-up cilantro or parsley if you feel like it.
Mechanically blend or mix (with a whisk) the contents of the
bowl. Add a little more salt to the dressing if needed then
pour it over Romaine or butter lettuce for a most delightful
dish. Save what's
left in a sealed glass jar in the refrigerator -- but trust me, it
won't last long. It's just too good. You'll wonder why you
didn't buy more lettuce.
Monday, February 26
MEXICAN COKE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 26 Feb 2007 01:37 PM PST
Mexican
Coca-Cola, like Coke in most parts of the world, is still made with
sugar, instead of vile-tasting and hard-to-digest corn syrup. Real
sugar in a Coke makes for a different drink altogether, and one
delightfully familiar to anyone who grew up in the Fifties or Sixties,
before government-subsidized corn crops made fructose the more
economical sweetener for soda makers in the U. S.
Mexican
Coca-Cola costs about twice what regular neo-faux Coke costs, but it's
more than twice as good. It can be tracked down in most areas of the U.
S. which have any significant Latino population -- which is to say that
it can be tracked down most anywhere. Well worth the effort.
Friday, February 23
FRENCH ONION SOUP
by
Lloydville
on Fri 23 Feb 2007 12:35 AM PST
Everybody
talks about French onion soup -- it comes to mind unbidden on cold
winter nights, or in the middle of a bad case of the flu -- but almost
nobody does anything about it. My sister Lee is a notable exception.
One day after much wheedling and outright begging I got her to pass
along her recipe, modified from a rule in The Joy Of Cooking with her
own refinements. She would not actually send me the recipe, thus
committing it to writing, but gave it over the phone while I took
notes.
Then I did something about it.
To
make this soup you first slice up three moderately large brown onions,
as thinly as possible -- don't chop the slices up. (Now is the time for
your tears.) Put three quarters of a stick of butter into a big pot
that can hold six cups of liquor, plus the onions, and melt it.
Now,
as my sister explained, in hushed tones, a terrifying game of chicken
with the onions begins. Your goal is to sauté them slowly, patiently in
the butter until they turn a dark, a very dark brown. When they have
turned the darkest brown possible they will be just seconds away from
burning and turning black -- at which point all your slicing, all your
tears, will have been in vain. The onions will try to fool you, by
leaving black deposits on the side of the pot, so you will think they
are as brown as they can possibly get -- but they aren't. Not yet -- not
quite yet! Bonne chance, mon vieux!
When
the onions are browned to perfection, remove them from the heat and add
into the pot six cups of beef broth. Beef broth can be over-salty,
especially the cubed kind, so it's good to use a mixture of low-sodium
broth with the regular stuff. I used two cans of low sodium and one of
regular broth. Grind some fresh pepper into the pot.
Simmer this slowly for about half an hour, adding a dash of sherry at the very last moment if you want.
To
serve, place the soup in an oven-safe bowl. Take thickish slices from a
baguette of French bread, toast them lightly and then float them on top
of the soup, grate Gruyère generously over the surface of all this and
bake it in the oven until the cheese melts.
Eat it
with a strong, simple red wine and feel the flu, the chill of the
night, the melancholy of the day recede. Rejoice in the fact that, by
following this recipe, you will have plenty of soup left for the days
and nights ahead, when it will only taste better.
Saturday, January 13
CAULIFLOWER AND GRUYERE
by
Lloydville
on Sat 13 Jan 2007 04:56 AM PST
How often do we take a moment from our busy lives to think about Gruyere? Not very often, I suspect. And yet it is a cheese
of deep philosophical interest, simple, distinctive and useful.
There
was a time when I thought of it only in connection with French onion
soup, for without the Gruyere that's melted on the piece of thick toast that
floats on top of the soup, it is not French onion soup at all. It's
just brown stuff made out of onions.
I
began thinking about Gruyere seriously and appropriately due to a
chance remark by Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, speaking of dining alone.
She observed that it's just as easy to eat a piece of Gruyere with a
loaf of crusty sourdough bread as to down some fast-food alternative,
and more nourishing to the soul, more respecting of one's dining
companion -- you.
By a simple taste test, I discovered that she was right. Rarely has a philosophical observation been so easy to prove.
I
began reading other gastronomical observations by Fisher with a keener
interest. I could not test all of them practically, since my
kitchen facilities at the time were limited -- no oven, just two electric burners and a toaster
oven.
But
then I read about the first kitchen Fisher presided over, in Dijon in
1931. It had no running water (which had to be carried in from the
landing) or ice box . . . and its stove consisted of two gas burners with a tiny cover that
could be fitted over them by way of an oven. My excuse vanished, and I decided to make
one of her specialities from that time, for which she gives no rule,
just a vague description. But it was enough.
You
take a head of cauliflower and split the fleurs apart, in clusters that
are not too small or too large -- enough of them to cover the bottom of
a baking pan. Boil them for about three minutes, no longer, drain them
and lay them in the pan. Pour heavy cream over each of the fleurs, enough so
that the cream covers the bottom of the pan to a depth at least halfway
up the sides of the fleurs, and then perhaps a little more if you feel
reckless.
Put a
lot of fresh grated Gruyere on top of the fleurs and the cream, enough
to make a somewhat less than solid layer of cheese over the whole
thing, part of it floating, part of it on the fleurs. Then grind fresh
pepper over it all.
Bake it in an oven at maybe 350° (Fisher doesn't say, because her little oven probably didn't have a thermostat.) Certainly
no lower.
When
the top of the thing is toasty brown, take it out. (Fisher wasn't quite
sure why her little oven browned the top of the dish. It must have been
because enough of the Gruyere stayed on top of the bubbling sauce to
get toasted, and it worked the same way in my toaster oven. In a
real oven you need to place the pan on a high rack to get the same effect.)
Eat it immediately, with some full-bodied red wine of whatever
simplicity. A Cahors would be cool, if you could find it.
Have some good bread to dunk in the strange, rich sauce in which the Gruyere has and has not quite merged with the cream.
This is the meal -- barring some salad or desert afterwards, if you care about those things.
When you eat this meal, the word elegant will not spring to mind. The words perfection, miraculous and inspiring will.
First of all you will have a connection with certain evenings in Fisher's long-vanished life in Dijon -- a connection which
can only be described as complex. It makes you feel sad and hopeful, all at once.
Second, you will never think about cauliflower again in quite the same way -- and I say this as someone who almost never
thinks about cauliflower at all.
Third,
you will discover a new aspect to the complicated personality of
Gruyere. As with French onion soup, its flavor will make you feel like
a virtuous old peasant. In this dish, it will make you feel like a
virtuous old peasant whose kindness has touched the lives of heroes and
saints. (This is the inspiring part.)
I am perhaps diluting the absolute virtue of the experience by sharing it here, but really, how can I keep quiet about
a thing like this? Any more than Fisher could?
Wednesday, December 27
OYSTER STEW
by
Lloydville
on Wed 27 Dec 2006 12:04 AM PST
It's
easy to make oyster stew. Here's how you do it. Get a lot of oysters,
medium sized, the sweetest and freshest you can find (hard on the West
Coast, where they're most often big and bland). It's o. k. to get them
in jars, fresh and raw, because you want them out of the shell anyway.
Put
some whole milk in a saucepan and start to heat it and when it's just
barely tepid put the clean oysters, minus their juices, into the pan.
You don't want the milk to cover the oysters -- you need to be able to
observe them.
When
the milk starts to steam just the slightest, slightest bit, sprinkle in
celery salt, a fair amount, a dose of regular salt, ground pepper,
paprika and three drops (in the name of God no more!) of Tabasco. Don't
mix all this stuff in, just sprinkle it on top, well distributed. Then
quickly put in two chunks of unsweetened butter and just when the
butter has all melted, pour the whole thing into a big bowl and let the
pouring itself do the mixing.
Eat it with a light, dry white wine and have lots of French bread handy for sopping, which is sublime.
If the oysters are rubbery, you didn't get the seasonings and butter in fast enough.
I pass this along from Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher, slightly modified, because it's a miracle that something so wonderful
is so easy to make.
The
secret, of course, is the oysters, complicated and strange, bringing
with them such tales of currents and tides and the mysteries of the not
so deep, that they want only a simple setting to recount them in, and a
hungry heart willing to listen.
Saturday, December 16
AN ELEGY FOR OYSTERS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 16 Dec 2006 02:50 AM PST
. . . by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney:
Alive and violated
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked
and scattered.
We are eating oysters again, and will be until April, the last month with an r in it until next September . . . but we must remember
that each of their alien, unfathomable lives is precious, not to be taken lightly.
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