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Never believe food bloggers are all successful in the kitchen…
I think I jinxed myself with that last post about the fantastic black beans. Since then, I’ve had a week of… not disasters, per se, but a string of foods that were eh at best.
Case #1: the blandest salsa ever
Based on this recipe from Epicurious, I added extra cilantro and some chili-garlic paste, and it was okay… for about 3 minutes. Most salsas gets better when the flavors can meld together for an hour or two or even longer, right? Ugh, not this one. Almost immediately, the cucumber started leeching out water and within 30 minutes, it was watered down to completely blandness. There’s a “this is what I get for following a recipe from Mariah Carey’s chef” joke to be made in here somewhere, but this stuff really isn’t even worth the effort.
Case #2: if there’s no basil, is it really pesto?
Basically pesto made with spinach instead of basil leaveszzzzzzz… whoa, hey, what happened? Oh, that’s right. I was talking about the most boring pesto ever. Without the spicy-anisey-clovey goodness that is basil, the pesto was a snore. A garlicky snore.
Case #3: coffee first THEN cooking
Friday afternoon, I was just completely knackered. While my husband went out to get me an iced coffee that would hopefully revive me for the afternoon, I decided to make a couscous salad, like the one pictured above… except my tired brain was so addled, I cooked at least twice as much couscous as I really needed, and in an effort to balance out all the other components, I ended up with EIGHT POUNDS OF SALAD. Seriously. The bowl weighed more than an average newborn. Even if it was the best salad ever (which, in case you didn’t pick up on the pattern by now, it assuredly was not), there was no way we would ever finish that much food.
So… yeah. Send some good cooking mojo my way, guys, because I could really use it.
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Oh beans, I done you wrong and now I’m sorry.
I have never been keen on the humble bean.
I cook them because they’re cheap, they’re a good source of protein, they’re better for the environment, et cetera — but I’ve never cooked them because I like them. They’re either mealy or mushy and always completely bland.
Oh, how wrong I have been.
Until recently, I was firmly under the impression that adding salt to beans as they cooked made them soften slower and therefore need to be cooked longer. As it turns out, cooking the beans in salted water makes them cook faster, and more importantly, it makes them taste better. I also found this batch was the first time I’d cooked beans that kept their skins on and didn’t disintegrate before they were cooked all the way through. Each bean remained its own discrete jewel of cumin-scented goodness.
The recipe is based on the Cuban Black Beans recipe on CookForGood.com:
1 pound of (picked over, washed and soaked) dried black beans
8 cups water
1 tablespoon salt
5 bay leaves
5-8 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced in half
3/4 teaspoon cayenne powder
2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon dried oreganoI never remember to soak beans the night before so I boil them for about 2 minutes, then let them sit for 1-2 hours before cooking. After soaking, drain the beans and add all remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, then simmer until done (usually about 2 hours, but depending on how long you soaked them and the age of the beans, it could vary).
After eating them over rice and tossed in a salad, I took what was left and made it into black bean soup.
This was just one of those “throw stuff in from the fridge and hope it works out” soups, which could have been okay at best, but the beans… MY GOD, THE BEANS. I had added some garlic and some tomato paste into the soup pot and I wasn’t that impressed with the result, but as soon as I got the stick blender in there, all the flavor inside the beans came out — the cumin, the garlic — everything came out into the taste of the soup. I already wish I had more.
Beans, can you ever forgive me for treating you so bad?
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This post pretty much ensures I’ll never get free stuff from PR people again.
About a month ago, I got an email from a PR person at POM Wonderful, the pomegranate juice company, asking if I was interested in a promotional pack of their juice. I thought it kind of odd, as they’ve been around for at least a couple years now, but, y’know, free stuff. I emailed them back my usual ass-covering response — basically saying, “sure, so long as you understand I don’t have to write about it or if I do, I don’t have to say anything nice about it.” I didn’t hear back; I just got a box filled with 16-ounce bottles of juice with a bunch of press releases about the company and the results of studies the potential health benefits of pomegranate juice.
The health information was a little overly-hyped, but a few of the studies were actually quite interesting. (I was looking forward to talking about the one regarding erectile function improvement because I’m a 12-year-old like that.) Still, nothing there really seemed especially newsworthy. Nothing was new or improved about this juice. Nothing had changed recently about the way people thought about pomegranate juice.
I was still thinking about what to write about this juice, when I saw another food blogger mention she also got a box of POM. And then another blogger said the same. And then another.
Any pressing need to write about POM completely evaporated. As the days went by, the bottles of juice receded further and further into the back of the fridge and when they did catch my eye, I’d think, oh, I should write about that, I guess… But between there being no actual news to report and the evidently huge distribution of their product to food bloggers, the answer to that thought became but why bother?
Still, I suppose I still feel obligated in some way to write about it. So…
POM Wonderful: some not-very-new juice that tastes pretty much like cranberry. Scientists say drinking it a lot gives you 50% more boners?
And let this be a lesson to other food PR people — everyone likes to get free stuff, but if you expect bloggers to write about your product, send something new or improved or, at the very least, don’t send it to every single food blogger you can find. Otherwise, all you get is a blog post about your rubbish PR.
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Cheese is the new wine: Snøfrisk
A week ago, when it was suddenly a gorgeous 80° spring day (compared to the 55° days earlier the same week), my husband, kid, and I took my visiting mother-in-law on a picnic in Central Park. First, though, we stopped into Zabar’s to pick up some things for an outdoor lunch.
For those of you who’ve never been there, Zabar’s cheese selection is absolutely overwhelming. Packed into one corner of the store, there’s a fully-staffed sizable cheese counter (where my Dutch mother-in-law was able to buy a piece of Leyden cheese — a Dutch cheese spiked with cumin seeds), as well as several more refrigerated sections of packaged cheeses… which is where I saw Snøfrisk selling for a mere $0.99.
Can you remember ever seeing halfway decent cheese being sold for a buck? Neither can I.
Still, my cheapness won out over my misgivings and I bought one.
Two days later, I went back and bought another.
It’s that good.
Snøfrisk (meaning “snow-fresh”) is a bit like chèvre and a bit like cream cheese, but less “goaty” as the former and less bland than the latter. The Snøfrisk site offers dozens of recipes for using Snøfrisk (I løve making the “ø”) — many of which, such as their cheesecake recipe, are recipes in which you would have easily used chèvre or cream cheese. I, however, first ate it on a baguette, then on crackers, and quickly realized would have eaten it on virtually anything had I not polished it off so handily.
Made by the people who brought the world Jarlsberg cheese, Snøfrisk was launched at the Olympic Games at Lillehammer in 1994 and has been sold ever since (which is more than you can say for most Olympics-themed products). According to their site, it also comes in dill, forest mushroom and juniper berry varieties. I didn’t see these, but I’ll now definitely seek them out.
Ingredients: 80% goat’s milk, 20% cow’s cream, salt, cultures
Country of origin: Norway
Aged: No. According to their site, the “length of time between milking to finished product is rarely more than two-three days.”
Price: $0.99 (on sale) for a 4.4 oz. container
Final verdict: Versatile and delightful. -
It’s surprisingly hard to get a good photo of yogurt.
That’s the third batch of drained yogurt I’ve made this week. I can’t stop myself. It’s so easy and it’s so crazy good. I take three or four coffee filters, wet them (it makes them more pliable), squeeze out the extra water and line the bottom and sides of a small colander with it. Pour the yogurt in, layer one last filter on top so it doesn’t dry out, then stick a bowl under the colander to catch the drips. A couple hours (or overnight) in the fridge and it’s turned into something fantastic.
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It must be almost spring…
…because I actually want to cook interesting things again and not just live off frozen food and take out.
A week or so ago, while I was out enjoying a shockingly 60-plus degree day, I picked up a loaf of Eli’s sourdough. The first half of the loaf was spectacular; the second half, sadly, went rock-hard overnight. What to do with half a loaf of stale bread? As I thought about what to do, something kept tickling the back of my brain. Some kind of soup… recipe posted by someone I like… has bread in it…? After several fruitless searches, I finally found it:
Titled, obviously enough, have stale bread? make bread soup! over at the perennially rad Everyone Likes Sandwiches, I quickly adapted the recipe to what I had on hand — most notably, I replaced the stock with water and a crusty old rind of Parmesan I had hanging around, which gave the broth a meatiness I think it would have lacked otherwise. It was fantastic.
(One caveat to this soup: don’t make more than you can eat in one go. This soup defies the First Law of Soup Alchemy [soup is always better the next day] and made for a really bland, squashy lunch the following day.)
After making something actually really good, I was so delighted, I promptly went online and ordered a slew of cookbooks from the library. Some of them have been disappointments (too complex and/or too many unusual ingredients I will use once and then let quietly expire at the back of a cupboard), but two of them have had me reading long after I should have gone to bed: Mediterranean Harvest and Olive Trees and Honey.
As I was reading Mediterranean Harvest last night, I leapt up from the couch, grabbed some yogurt, some coffee filters and a colander and made some strained yogurt.
I have not leapt up to do anything since Daylight Savings Time ended.
I think this is a sure sign of spring.
(Photo credit: Everyone Likes Sandwiches)
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Cheese is the new wine: Hans’ All Natural Cheddar Horseradish
Yesterday, I was in the interminable line at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods, trying to mentally calculate just how much I was about to drop, when, placed in a tray of crushed ice next to line in an oh-don’t-mind-me-I’m-just-a-sad-little-sale-item-left-over-from-the-holidays manner, there it was. Cheese spread! And not just just cheese spread: ALL NATURAL CHEESE SPREAD. These are words I have been waiting to read for my entire life without ever realizing it.
As much I love all sorts of swanky, stinky imported cheeses, I also really love cheese spreads. The most unnatural, unswanky cheese of them all, usually on a par with Cheez Whiz and Velveeta, but oh, I love them.
I quickly grabbed a tub of the Cheddar Horseradish, hoping no one would recognize me and rescind my food blogger status on the spot. As soon as the rest of the groceries were put away, I headed for the cheese spread with a knife and a slice of sourdough Wasa.
“Well?” my husband asked as I took the first bite.
“Moh ma gof, itsh so fuffing goof,” I managed to say while still cramming more in.
It’s creamy and about as salty as most other cheese spreads, but with a better, sharper Cheddar taste. And the horseradish is perfect, enough to give it a nice bite without singeing your nosehairs out. Basically, if you’re okay with buying cheese spreads in the first place, this is probably one of the best ones ever.
Ingredients: WI Grade A cheddar cheese aged nine months or more (pasteurized milk, cheese culture, uniodized salt, enzyme), reduced lactose whey, water, cream, horseradish, annatto (color). No antibiotics, added hormones, preservatives, or nitrates/nitrites added. Sustainably farmed, humanely raised, and 100% vegetarian fed.
Country of origin: USA (Wisconsin)
Aged: Nine months (at least in part).
Price: $2.99 (on sale) for an 8 oz. container
Final verdict: No one needs to know if you buy it and eat it all.
