Summer, at last!

Hello again. One would think that with twelve snow days there would have been a lot of time for blogging, but making up for those deceivingly tranquil days (by squeezing in weeks of missed classroom time in the remaining two months of school) proved harder than I thought.

1ST PRIZE!
First things first... Guess what the trophy below is for:

Yes... we did win a chicken wing cook-off! It was my first industrial kitchen experience since college and this time I did not have to throw away my shoes!

Heather preparing the approx. 250 wings with Chinese five-spice powder.

The marinade/sauce: soy sauce, vinegar, scallions, and some secret ingredients!

Meanwhile, at home we kept up with our cooking, especially through the use of new staples such as frozen duck breasts and crab cakes (from Whole Foods), a 10-lb. bag of jasmine rice (courtesy of Gail and Tee’s Thai dinner) and the seafood mix from Trader Joe’s, which Heather used for the chowder below.

So, here's to summer's culinary adventures, which I will discuss with increasing frequency!

WHAT TO DO WITH SOUR MILK?
We're in a week-long transition between the weekend in Sonoma (more on that in a different post) and two weeks in L.A. We decided on easy high-volume meals for lunch leftovers and freezing for when we get back.
Since we were gone so long, our milk almost went bad. Luckily, one can safely cook with sour milk, as is evidenced by both the cornbread and the seafoood chowder below:T
There are no specific directions for this meal, but here is the general idea:

1. Fry half a package of chopped bacon in a dutch oven or large pot.
2. After the bacon browns (remove bacon for now), saute carrots, onions, garlic, corn (we had some cobs left over), cubed potatoes in fat for a few minutes; add dried thyme
3. Pour in milk (I don't remember how much we had... two cups?), about 1/2 cup of heavy cream, and a liter of broth (keep in mind Heather eyeballed all of this); add cooked bacon
4. Simmer for 10 minutes, then add half a bag of frozen peas; 5 minutes later, add frozen seafood (1 lb. mix)
5. Depending on what broth you use, you may need salt; pepper for sure
Serve with cornbread in a bowl.

This is an excellent meal during the workweek because it yields a lot of leftovers. I'll post pics from Sonoma next time.
It's nice to be back!

Snow Days...

It snowed a foot in New York today, which makes me feel less guilty for being at home once again, due to the dusting Sumner County got two nights ago. To justify canceling school, the district's web site posted evidence of dangerous roads. The best photo was of this municipal truck in Portland, Tennessee, the county's northernmost community, up on the Cumberland Plateau ("The Ridge") near the Kentucky state line:

What does one do on such days? I've done some work, read two novels (Light Years by James Salter and That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis), watched (or re-watched) a few movies (including "The King's Speech," "On the Waterfront," and "Manhattan Murder Mystery"), and tried in vain to find a detailed history of boeuf bourguignon (more on that below).

I have lost track of how many snow days we have had this month, but I think it may be 8. Here are some pics I took earlier in January, on the fourth day of our "snow week."

The Parthenon. This looks pretty but it was an extremely cold (Omaha-like) morning.

Our parking lot. Before last February's "blizzard," this was a rather unusual sight.

Snow days are good for drawn-out activities like organizing one's bookshelf, catching up on old New Yorker articles from last summer, and making stock. The secret to a good, hearty, winter-y stock is using root vegetables (parsnips, celery root), a piece of "sacrifical meat" in addition to leftover roasted chicken (bones and all), and as we have discovered in the past year, cloves. This new secret ingredient leads to a barely perceptible numbness of the tongue and throat when the stock (soup, etc.) is consumed. The most recent place I've seen this ingredient in a recipe is, coincidentally, this past weekend's FT. Here is a link to their recipe: Golden bouillon. Some minor differences. I guess the brisket makes that broth more pot-au-feu-ish, but I have not tried to make it yet. Also, I haven't seen leeks in three months.

The initial straining.

Eight hours later, a beautiful silky stock. (If you don't have at least six hours, don't bother).

The parking lot ices over.

We used part of the stock as an ingredient for one of the first dishes we cooked from our venerable, eleven year-old copy of The Joy of Cooking: Boeuf Bourguignon.

Weekends or snow days are good for this dish, because it requires some preparation, at least time-wise. I had the luxury of marinating the beef, onions, carrots, garlic, herbs, etc. in a mixture of red wine and stock overnight.

Browned beef.

Caramelized.

Thickening the sauce with flour.

This dish is usually eaten with egg noodles or potatoes, but we had a dipping baguette with it instead.

Finding out the history of the dish, unfortunately, is much harder than cooking it. It turns out that it is mentioned by Escoffier, and probably goes back much farther than that, but an intense searched has yet to yield anything, except peripheral trivia, such as the dish's migration to Belgium, where it is known as Carbonnade a la Flamande, with beer taking the place of wine (another great stew which will soon re-enter the rotation).
The only interesting thing worth noting comes from the Toronto Financial Post of April 25, 1988 (yes, I even did a LexisNexis search!), which yields some very interesting etymological information regarding Burgundy's other specialty:

Most of all, however, Dijon is known for its mustard. Fifteenth-century rulers had their chefs create a sauce to disguise the rancid taste and smell of meat that had been kept too long. The French name for this sauce, moutarde, is a corruption of the language of the time, moulte ma tarde, meaning ''a long time I delay my meat.''

What was it called before Napoleon's time, then?
Regardless, if anyone reading this (if anyone is reading this, that is) can find concrete information about boeuf bourguignon's origins, please let me know.

While the beef was marinating, I went out in the snow:

After leaving Centennial Park, I took a drive to Bowling Avenue, assuming that West End Middle School would look nice in the snow...

And now, with "warm" weather on the way (40s) for many days, the Long Christmas Vacation of 2010-2011 might be truly over. In all, there have been only six days of school this semester, between January 6 and today. My highly anticipated experiment in making sauerbraten (I think it's at least a three-day process) will have to wait until Spring Break.

Happy New Year!

Hello, all, and Happy New Year!

In accordance with my resolution of establishing a more reasonable balance between work and hobbies, I am reviving this blog, for the third time. After not posting for five months, I'll begin with a 2010 retrospective tomorrow, and continue with more of the usual postings about food and travel throughout the year.

Thanks to all of the people who have signed up as followers! I'll try to update the site with items more riveting than what I am about to say about New Year's Day 2011...

Aside from food and music (more on that below), Heather and I looked forward to an exciting spate of close football games between well-matched teams on January 1.
Courtesy of Manuel, I wore my new Michigan State apron tonight despite the Spartans' embarrassing loss to Alabama in the Citrus Bowl. Heather and I were anticipating several lead changes in a game that might even end in overtime, especially since Alabama did not do as well as expected in the regular season and could not hold on in the Iron Bowl. How naive we were.... an 11-1 record in the Big Ten can be a dangerous thing! (See here).

Regardless, at least our two other New Year's Day traditions were enjoyable. Pictured above is this years' version of pork and sauerkraut with potatoes, a dish popular wherever Germans settled in North America, especially Pennsylvania. I made this with a three-pound pork butt roast, apples, onions, ale, brown sugar, and canned sauerkraut seasoned with caraway seed (Whole Foods was out of the jarred kraut, and also out of black-eyed peas and collard greens, part of the traditional Southern New Year's meal). This is a delicious treat, but not the best Pittsburgh New Year's tradition. That has got to be the banging of pots and pans on one's front porch on New Year's Eve. Sadly, fireworks and television have greatly led to that rite's demise, which I only experienced once, on the night of December 31, 1999. The next day, Y2K, was the last time Michigan State defeated an SEC team in a bowl game (Florida).

The wine we had with our dinner was a Gruner Veltliner (I splurged on the Kartaurserhof because it was for New Year's), which goes very well with German/Central European cuisine, especially pork. The most commonly found Gruner in the US and Canada is Hopler, which is quite good despite its mass production. It is also the wine served on Austrian Airlines, which I was surprised to find out when I flew to Vienna three years ago. Most countries' airlines do not serve passable wine. Then again, the difference between flying overseas on an airline like Austrian and, let's say, Delta, is like the difference between riding on a modern chartered coach and a yellow school bus. But, I digress.
The picture above is a shot of today's concert in Vienna. Not being very technologically adept, it is my version of a screengrab (I took a picture of my TV). For those of you who do not watch PBS's broadcast of the concert, it is features long takes of the Vienna Philharmonic playing in the Musikverein interspersed with ballet dancers performing historical reenactments of Habsburg-era flirtatious fun. Obviously, some of these scenes are just as ridiculous as football announcers in over-sized suits reenacting plays on Astroturf in a TV studio. But, as Austrian culture seems to vacillate between self-important gloom (Haneke's movies, Bernhard's novels) and dorky humor (Schwarzenegger's off-the-cuff's comments), one might expect that a concert consisting mostly of waltzes, watched by 50 million people in 72 countries, would have some exaggerated moments. But those are few in comparison with the really cool stuff, like the Lipizzaner horses and the inside shots of the opera house and various palaces and monuments and locations related to different composers (Franz Liszt this year). Here is a link to Radio 3's broadcast of the concert.

Well, I think I've written too much, but it has been five months. More pictures and less writing tomorrow!