Holidays

Tonights' family dinner will be Fondue Chinoise, featuring a broth from the turkey stock I made from our Thanksgiving bird. A fitting bookend to the holidays.

archive photo: evidence of fondue-chinoise dating back to January 2003

The holidays have been very relaxing. And why shouldn't they be? About ten years ago we decided we were going to do precisely nothing for the holidays except stay at home and relax. We never seem to have houseguests, although we certainly wouldn't mind them. But removing ourselves from the mad scramble to Spend Time With Family has turned out to be an incredibly gratifying and wise decision. Many parents complain a bit about the holidays, but if they're not something relaxing to look forward to, change the routine. Cancel the road trips and stay at home and kick back a bit. The kids love it, we're not stressed, it's all in all a wonderful break.

Confit-ver

I've got it. Four goose legs [or is that "geese legs", since more than one goose contributed legs to the endeavor?] done. Now the hardest part is not eating them right away. They will last for many months longer than my willpower. The house smells of bay leaf. And I've got a full litre of clear, golden goose fat in addition to that covering the legs. Will be hard not to duck into the butcher to see what's on offer to put that to use.

Boxing Day: Coffee on the Cheap

Two of my favorite and most cost-effective ways to make coffee:

1. cafetiere (aka "french press")
2. Italian stove-top maker
   

The cafetiere could not be simpler, and makes really good coffee, especially a big pot to share in the morning. The press is much cheaper than an automatic drip machine, and makes better coffee.

The Italian stove-top maker does not really make espresso, but makes really good similar coffee -- thick and syrupy, similar to Greek/Turkish coffee. It's a little bit like the old percolator coffee pots that my grandparents used to have. Very quick, easy, and cheap. I find it a perfectly good substitute for espresso, and you save hundreds of dollars on the hardware.

The only problem with having both is that you should use different grinds for each -- finer for the stovetop and coarser for the press. A quality grinder + these two things is a much better allocation of coffee-themed resources than an all-in-one machine.

I can't think of a boxing day tie-in yet. Need more coffee.

Beeb Xmas Programming

BBC1: a nifty Doctor Who special, a cute new Wallace & Gromit, and some East Enders.
BBC2: replay of the infamous Florida-->New Orleans TopGear special. Kind of an odd choice for feel-good cheer, but hopefully it will become an annual and much-cherished family holiday classic.

How To Get Good Food In London

Here we go, both Krugman and Freakonomics blogging about how bad London food is. Lazy. Let's agree upfront that there are many awful restaurants in London. I think it's simply due to low standards. High standards are why the odds of finding good food in any random restaurant are so high in, say, New Orleans. But London suffers from low standards, as often as not on the part of the tourists themselves. Sheesh. Try dropping one of those godawful "Aberdeen Steakhouse" monstrousities into a non-touristy neighborhood and see how quickly it will go out of business.

Getting good restaurant food in London is pretty easy if you're not a complete dumbass. If you don't know any locals with a taste for decent food, at least pickup the Timeout London Eating & Drinking Guide. Will be available at many newsagents. You should also, and this is true of any city, get out of the touristy areas and see how people live a little. The decent non-posh restaurants will be scattered throughout neighborhoods where people actually live. Finally, visit the markets and enjoy a little street food, too. London is not one of the great restaurant cities of the world, but still, if you can't find good food in London, you're really not trying.

Fridgeful of Goose

Picked up my pair of geese from the butcher today. Christmas cooking close to commencing. And I'm even already looking forward to traditional springtime brit-mex goose tacos.

Year In Review

I hate the year-in-review crap we're subjected to by lazy media this time of year. Maybe it seemed like less of waste of time when I was 20 and the preceding year was a full 5% of my life, but now it's just tedious and dull. We're already subjected to an overload of analysis and a dearth of hard reporting during the normal course of the year. Now it just gets worse. Too bad Chris Farley's not still with us. I'd watch his 2008 retrospective. "Remember that thing that happened? Back in, uh, april? Yeah. That was awesome."

Slicing Roasts

My rule of thumb: hot meat should be sliced thickly, cold meat thinly. Carving a roast in thick slices keeps it from cooling too quickly and keeps it from drying out. Carving cold meats thinly maximizes flavor by exposing more surface area and creates tenderness.

Think thick-sliced roast pork tenderloin vs. shaved ham. It's also possible, for some cuts, to have the best of both worlds. The best cuts of beef do well under quick, high-heat roasting, but some cuts (e.g. silverside) do better cooked longer at a much lower temperature. I bake silverside roasts pretty slowly, on a bed of sliced onions, leave it to cool completely after cooked, even to the point of fridging it after it cools to room temperature, then slicing it thinly once chilled. It's easier to cut then, too. It's good cold at this point but I prefer to mix the slices with the onions and reheat. Take it out of the oven when it's extra-rare to allow the slices to be reheated without overcooking them, or less rare to use the thing as cold lunchmeat.

I Love Cities: London e.g.1

There's a decent value-for-money Chinese restaurant in Dalston on Kingsland road called Shanghai. What's really special about the place is that it occupies what was, 140+ years ago, a pie & mash shop. The interior of the front is a beautifully eel-themed tile and wood affair that seems perfectly appropriate repurposed as a Shanghai diner. Our boys' wonderful babysitter, now a pink-haired, bicycle-riding grandmother, is a life-long east-ender and remembers when that shop used to still have live(!) eels.

I love that about cities: things built to last, with a bit of panache, and density and interest enough to keep reusing and reinventing what you already have to work with.

Same Shirt?

At lunch at a slightly posh restaurant yesterday, I passed a gent wearing a shirt identical to mine. This inexplicably delighted both of us. Must be a guy thing. We stopped short of high-fiving each other.

The Worst Kitchen Gift

Surely this must be a joke: artisanal rapeseed oil! There must be enough rubes out there to fall for this, I guess, someone stupid enough to believe that rapeseed is grown for the awesome flavor. I saw some for sale, on a shelf, in a store, so it's not a web hoax. I'm struggling to come up with a worse candidate for the artisanal treatment. Hm....

frosted flakes? "hand-lacquered with late-harvest high fructose corn syrup glaze...."
hand-crafted baking powder? extra-virgin marmite? Free-range metamucil? nope, can't do it

Cookbooks

As long as we're talking gifts for the kitchen....

A pleasure to read for anyone who enjoys cooking, but an especially good choice for anyone eager but inexperienced, someone needing only a bit of help to just get on with it: Nigel Slater's Appetite. Gets right to the heart of it, encouraging improvisation, constructing simple dishes around a few quality ingredients, and puts to rest the idea of cooking as joyless-following-of-recipes. Nigel's a fantastic writer. Disastrously boring on TV, he should never have been allowed to step away from the keyboard. This is his best work.

For meat-eaters: The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fairly LongName, and Fergus Henderson's much-revered Nose-To-Tail Eating. Hugh's Meat Book is an engrossing read, from the philosophy of meat to the introductions to different animals and cuts to treatments of different cooking methods. I often forget it also includes some recipes, which are superfluous if you've absorbed the, ahem, meat of the book. Fergus's meat book is a much shorter book that is a delight even if you never cook anything from it. Although you should! I had the pleasure of eating at his restaurant in 2002 and the roast bone marrow starter is still an all-time dining highlight for me.

For reference: normally I don't like books of recipes, but The Joy of Cooking should be obligatory, at least in American kitchens. The recent revisions are mostly unfortunate, what with horribly misguided and ill-informed attempts to inject psuedo-healthiness into the enterprise. But no matter, still very handy to have at hand. Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques by, unsurprisingly, Jacques Pepin, is a compiled reissue of two of his earliest books from the 70s, documenting basic methods and techniques. Despite the black & white photos, an excellent reference for anyone who cooks a lot, or wants to.

Christmas Gifts for Kitchens

Two of the what I've found to be worthwhile and heavily used in my kitchen.

I got a thermapen a few years ago, after years of never using a thermometer while cooking, and now I use it constantly. Sometimes just for fun. I've not yet poked it into my own thigh, but it's kind of tempting.

I've gone through a lot of parmesan graters over the years but the microplane is by far my favorite.

Hey You Kids, Get Offa My Salmon!

Who's thinking of the children?? Amazon is! [Note the age limit.]

Klaatu Remaka Nikto

I know it's going to be awful, but I'm ashamed to admit I feel compelled to see it anyway.

Speaking of Life on Mars....

In order to close the city mouse/country mouse, modern cop/retro cop circle, the followup to the original series should have put Gene and Sam into Sam's world (Gene going straight there, bypassing the quattro phase and all steps in between). A complete cycle would then require both of them to inexplicably jump 30+ years into the future, a scenario which would likely be executed in appalling fashion but could be fascinating if done with a bit of panache and speculative brilliance.

The Ukulele Craze

Ukulele fever is sweeping my kids' school. Last night my oldest escalated by going to a concert by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and brought home a concert DVD. A little bit of this goes a very long way with me, but I did find their rendition of Life on Mars sweet. And yes, we do have ukuleles in the house now.

Mice vs. Me

Have killed 3 mice in the last few days. Just saw two more in the kitchen. I've gone on killing sprees before. The mice come and go. This recent infestation is bugging me, though. Right now I've got glue traps, a multiple-mouse live trap, and a couple of spring traps all set. I've had varying success with all 3 types in the past, but have not yet used them all at once. Baiting with various combinations of cashews, nutella, and tuna, so we'll see.

The SciFi Effect

Whereby any book that is considered "literature" (e.g. The Road) or is popular (e.g. Jurassic Park) is not considered to be science fiction.

This applies to "comic books" as well. In Ebert's best films of 2008 roundup, Roger says The Dark Knight "leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy". I don't think so. Christopher Nolan seemed to finally get the franchise to the point of reflecting the best of its origins (to my surprise and delight, starting with Batman Begins) rather than eclipsing them.

Ebert also calls Wall-E "[t]he best science-fiction movie in years", despite having awarded 2007's Children of Men 4-stars vs. 3.5 for the gentle Pixar flick. Either he likes Wall-E better or does not consider Children of Men to be scifi. I'm guessing the latter, what with no robots or spacetravel.

Thanksgiving Notes

Thanksgiving cooking was a big success. We had total of 6 adults, 6 children, although only some of the children actually ate food. I got some requests for details, so here are my after-the-fact notes. "Recipes" are from memory so may not be perfectly accurate.


chestnut dressing
4x 350g fresh chestnuts, roasted -- good yield, about 75%
bread cubes: good sandwich bread, de-crusted, cubed, dried in oven
1 lb. sausage
approx. 130g butter
1 sm. bunch green celery
2 onions
6 cloves garlic or so
1 lg. bramley apple
fresh sage
homemade chicken stock

Verdict: excellent, one of my favorites to date. Good chestnuts this year. Did not use any mushrooms this time but they weren't missed. Due to my forgetting to check if I had any stock in the freezer until I needed it, stock was hastily made from uncooked chicken backs (backs, onions, carrots, celery, bay leaves) so not as luxurious as usual roast chicken stock, but worked fine.


turkey
6.5kg, fresh free range bronze, from the Ginger Pig
cut out the the backbone and flattened the whole thing a bit
successfully avoided pushing sharp rib ends through palm of hand
quick-roasted backbone, split into sections, wingtips, and gizzardy bits then made gravy out of them while turkey roasted
rubbed butter under and on top of skin and salted it
cut deep slashes across legs and thighs to encourage them to overcook (I like undercooked white meat, overcooked dark meat)
roasted at high heat on rack on broiler pan (oven too small to fit turkey in any other way) -- 220C for 30 minutes, breast-side down, then flipped over; ultimately finished last 20 minutes or so at 200C but with the convection fan on
don't remember how long it took in oven, 90 minutes maybe, maybe less
(next time try leaving back up for first 45 minutes at 220C before flipping)
pulled out when coolest part was at least 65C
rested a full 30 minutes, loosely under foil, before cutting
pulled breasts off and cut thick slices vertically (so everyone gets skin, middle, and inner sections in every slice)

Verdict: fantastic. Legs were overcooked just like I like them, breast meat was tender and really juicy (much remarked-upon). The size was plenty for everyone, and there was plenty leftover, too.

green bean casserole
600g green beans, cut, blanched(+) until just starting to get tender, then steeped in ice-water to
250g chestnut mushrooms (no particular reason for this choice, any should work), sauteed, but not overly so, in plenty of butter
thickish bechamel using about an imperial pint of milk
medium aged english cheddar

cold green beans into casserole dish (I used 8"x8"x2.25" glass baking dish), bechamel over top and stirred in, shredded cheese over top
cooked 180C with convection fan on, then finished briefly under the broiler to put a nice crispy attitude onto the cheese

Verdict: exceeded expecations! Was really good, a hit, and a bit of a triumph for the US midwest. Definitely put it on the menu next year.


brownies
Brownies Cockaigne (1931 recipe from Joy of Cooking)


All in one small oven:

• made the gravy from the back, wingtips, and gizzards while the turkey was roasting
• made the green bean casserole and the [non-]stuffing the night before
• cooked the stuffing the night before (no need for casserole), then reheated before serving
  
• if fridged, the casserole and stuffing need to come out early to go into the oven close to room temperature rather than cold
• casserole (uncovered) and stuffing (covered with foil) were popped into the oven at 180C, with convection fan on, right after taking turkey out -- 30 minutes of resting was perfect for getting them hot; casserole was bubbly on the bottom shelf, but popped it on top under the broiler just briefly after taking the stuffing out to serve
• garlic mash, fresh cranberry sauce, gravy all done on stovetop

Leftovers:

• turkey meat went into black bean & turkey soup
• turkey carcass made excellent turkey stock
• almost no leftover stuffing or casserole, will need to make more for larger groups
  

Late To The Party: The Wire

Great show. Just started getting it on DVD. Heartily recommended.