Confit Nutter

Well, what am I supposed to do with all that goose fat lying around? In addition to a jar of confit of 4 goose legs, I have another jar of a pair of duck legs, a small jar of shredded breast of lamb, and today's project was a stab at beef. I used topside and shin. The shin is a perfect choice for this (topside less so, but it's what I had in the freezer). Because I'm greedy and selfish, I did scoop out the marrow from the shinbone as soon as that bit was cooked so I could eat it warm with a bit of salt. I love the marrow. I cooked it with lots of garlic in the goosefat, and it seemed to work ok. We'll see how it is in a few weeks or months.

Goose Fat

Many people wrongly think animal fat is 100% saturated fat. Regardless of whether you think saturated fats are "bad" or mononsaturated fats are "good", the breakdown of various fats is pretty interesting. Lard, for example is nearly half monounsaturated. Goose fat, which is a culinary gift from nature, has more than twice as much mononsaturated fat as saturated (by weight, less than 28% saturated, more than 56% monounsaturated; and it's less than 10% omega-6 to boot). Almost all of that monounsaturated fat is oleic acid, the same magical stuff in olive oil that makes everyone near the mediterranean live to the age of 300 without heart disease. Having some extra goose fat from the confit session of the christmas geese, I let some cool to room temperature in a spare jar, and the solids settled out at the bottom, leaving most of it a golden liquid at room temperature. I used a little for eggs this morning, and it had picked up a bit of the garlic, bay, and thyme from the confit process. Aromatic and satisfying.

Can Travelling Get Any Worse?

A few months ago, my youngest and I were stuck on an unmoving Eurostar train for a couple hours. They turned the air and power off. Fortunately, the delay was only a few hours and not nearly day-long imprisonment hundreds of passengers had to suffer recently due to the wrong kind of snow. And now flying is going to get even worse.

A few years ago, one idiot tried to light his shoe on fire and now we all have to kick ours off as part of our pre-flight routine. Now a new idiot smuggled something a bit like semtex in his underpants and tried to ignite it. So can we look forward to being aggressively groped and fondled by security automatons? You betcha!

"They patted you down really well," said Allen, 41, an automotive engineer from Shelby Township, Mich. "It wasn't just a quick rub, it was a slow pat."

Fabulous! I'm looking forward to the slow pat already. But it gets even better. What's the best way to prevent someone from blowing up a plane with a c4 jockstrap? If you said, "don't let anyone put a pillow in their laps", you're qualified to work in airline security. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that waiting until the end of the flight was not an essential feature of this particular explosion plot. But once you remove the power of critical thought, you get idiotic practices [already adopted!] such as these:

Passengers getting off flights from overseas reported being told that they couldn't get out of their seat for the last hour of their flight. Air Canada also said that during the last hour passengers won't be allowed access to carry-on baggage or to have any items on their laps.
...
Passengers on a United Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Washington were not allowed to have anything on their laps during the descent into Dulles, or to open the overhead bins an hour before landing

Since I haven't yet had my lobotomy, I'm not seeing how these measures will help. If he tried to ignite his pants in the middle of the flight, would there be a ban on getting up or putting a pillow in your lap for the middle hour of the flight? What color were his underpants? Can we ban that color, too? He spent 20 minutes in the loo, can we look forward to flight attendants having to time our toilet breaks?

What preventive measures would be better to put the kibosh on copycats? Given dogs' natural love of crotch-sniffing and some breeds' remarkable ability to be trained to detect explosives, I think the solution is obvious.

Eurostar Should Consider Steam

"If any of the train operators want to modernise their services by using steam trains, I would be happy to give them a quote."

Boxing Day Dinner

The confited goose legs are happily sitting in a jar of gorgeous golden goose fat. Yesterday no one was keen for a big dinner so we saved the festivities for tonight instead. Roasted a goose, sans legs, stuffing the neck with a sausage stuffing and the body with apples, onions, and prunes. Made the inauthentic green bean casserole, and brussel sprouts with roasted chestnuts, plus almond cake for dessert. I do occasionally have big gaffes in the kitchen. When I was prepping the legs and rending the fat from the geese, I fried and ate one of the livers (which was wonderful), and made a stock from the rest of the giblets/offal. I added some onions, carrots, bay leaves, and some unused mushrooms that were nearing end of shelf life. The stock ended up with a nice earthy flavor and a very dark brown color, or so I thought. Today I pulled it out and thickened it a bit with a bechamel, at which point I noticed the color was actually grey. It was the most unappealing thing I've concocted in a long time. It looked so bad, I tried to brighted in up with a bit of turmeric, which just turned into green (in a greenish grey kind of way). It still tasted ok, but I couldn't get over the horrifying pall it was casting over the rest of the cooktop and had to toss it. Oh well.

This Year's Geese

Picked up the geese from the butcher today, and started the prep. The year-old confit the other day was delicious, but I don't think this batch will survive that long before I eat it.

Gooseful fridge

Year Old Leftovers, Never Frozen

Just tried some goose leg confit I'd made almost exactly a year ago. Normally it would've been eaten much sooner, but I forgot about it in the winter and then the summer didn't seem the right time to break it out. It's very tasty. Hopefully I won't die from botulism but if this is my last post ever, assume my followup would've been: "Oops!"

Bad Science 2009

A nice wrapup of the year in bad science from Ben Goldacre.

Great Urban Run

Went for a last long run of the year (about 22km) yesterday through (of course) East London. Went up through Homerton and Lower Clapton, east to the canals by the football pitches of Hackney Marshes, down the Lea (aka Lee) River, south past the Olympic Stadium (in progress), down through Three Mills and past the House Mill into the Bow Locks, with Canary Wharf shimmering in the low winter sun beyond, like the emerald city. Then to Limehouse Cut, around the Limehouse Basin, and back up the canal through Mile End park and into Victoria park. The run has a bit of everything bad and good about the East End: neighborhood shops, council estates, new schools, row houses in various states of gentrification, crack houses, Georgian canals, 300+ years of buildings, from those old mills to repurposed Victorian industrial warehouses to 21st-centry work/live buildings on the waterfront. It has industrial decay as a backdrop for moor hens, geese, heron, swans, mallards, and the old boys fishing for carp. It has hand-cranked locks, tidy canal boats, derelict barges, kayakers, rowers, and yachts. A bit of sunshine, often rain, always mud, yesterday ice. Keep the pristine wooded nature trails, there's nothing like a great city run.

How To Play Chess With Kids

Simple: handicap yourself by removing some of your pieces at the start of the game. Then you get to play all-out. Adjust based on results. Fun for both of you. Now it works both ways: since my 11-yr-old crushes me regularly at full strength, I'm going to make him start handicapping.

Perpetual Performance Art

So a company in Dublin that appears to be headed up by Deco Cuffe from The Commitments is demonstrating a perpetual motion machine. I will be disappointed if this isn't a brilliant viral marketing scheme for a new Roddy Doyle book.

Police Crackdown on London Photographers

Kind of like the dreaded "africanized" bees that have been threatening to swarm homicidally over the US any decade now, I'm concerned that UK cops have been getting "americanized". The image of the mild-mannered police who actually walk around and talk to people, neighborly-like, is largely being replaced by that of militarized guys covered with gear and weapons and carrying a chip on the shoulder. Everybody wants to be a hard-ass I guess. The power-grab masquerading as protection from terror has made things a lot worse. There have been disturbing reports of photographers getting hassled. Yes, section 44 of the Terrorism Act sucks, but a few police are acting like it invests them with powers far beyond the letter of that law. Watch this video if you want to be depressed by an example.

To the credit of the police, the Met actually publishes a useful sheet on advice to photographers. It would be great if the police in the streets actually read this as well. A few key quotes that not all of them seem to be up on:

Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.

The Terrorism Act 2000 does not prohibit people from taking photographs or digital images in an area where an authority under section 44 is in place.

Officers have the power to view digital images contained in mobile telephones or cameras carried by a person searched under S44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, provided that the viewing is to determine whether the images contained in the camera or mobile telephone are of a kind, which could be used in connection with terrorism.

Officers do not have the power to delete digital images or destroy film at any point during a search.

Iain Banks

Iain Banks might be too good for his own good. Sometimes in his writing he seems like he's just jerking the reader around, taking the piss, or being lazy. But I love him and am mostly just jealous. His non-SF books are ok, I can kind of take them or leave them. For his SF, the ones I can't fully recommend, but have redeeming qualities iff you're already a fan: Consider Phlebas, Look To Windward, Against a Dark Background, Inversions, Feersum Endjinn. (The latter, tediously, has one character whose narrated chapters are done phonetically. Unfortunately it's by far the best character in the book, so the sections shouldn't be skipped.) The latest doesn't look good at all and I'm giving it a miss. But the "good" ones are so good that all is forgiven:

• Player of Games -- straightforward and tightly constructed story, excellent starter book
• Use of Weapons -- the kind of book you wish you could unread so you could read it again for the first time
• Excession -- brilliant, and it's this kind of effort that makes me wonder if he's phoned in some of the others
• The Algebraist -- unlike the three above, not a "culture" novel, but engaging, funny, well-crafted

Those four very highly recommended. They make good presents for anyone who likes SF but hasn't yet read Iain Banks.

Mountain Food

There are a few foods that should be mandatory menu items in every ski resort globally (and north america has a lot of catching up to do vs. the alps when it comes to on-mountain dining).

Rosti: just a big plate of hash browns. Cook it skillfully (in a skillet, not a deep fryer), and serve it plain or with any number of toppings: eggs, cheese, mushrooms, whatever. Just put it on the menu.

Gulaschsuppe (yes, goulash): Lively and hearty beef stew, often with a nice but not overpowering zing to it. Kind of like the alpine version of chili.

Chili: fair's fair. With appropriate fixin's.

The pancake/waffle thing: goes by different names (e.g. kaiserschmarren), but essentially a giant mound of shredded pancakes, covered with powdered sugar and custard and/or applesauce. Pure sugar, yes, but if your skinny kids are burning 1200 kcals/hr just staying warm, or if you are getting grumpy, this hits home.

Toasted cheese: some manner of toasted cheese must be available. Maybe it's the swiss mountain cheese toast (dry bread, rub with garlic, splash with white wine, mound with cheese and pop under the broiler), or pizza, but cheese must be getting toasted on the mountain.

Croissants: I don't know why these aren't a universal food anyway. The only reason these contain flour at all is to hold the butter together. Go well with coffee breaks.

hot stuff: hot drinks, hot soup (in addition to goulash)

Ritter Sport Chocolate Bars: Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut.

Skiing

I love skiing. I'm very late to winter sports. (Winter itself is nothing new, having grown up with the long, cold, snowy midwestern variety.) I first started learning to snowboard at age 37, 6 years ago. I was terrible at it. I loved being up in the mountains and greatly enjoyed the holidays, but after years of still being crap at the sport I decided to try skiing. Starting in January of 2008, 41 now, I launched myself at the skiing attempt. To my surprise I was much less incompetent at it than boarding. By the end of my second season I was pretty comfortable, if graceless, on a lot of the mountain, and really enjoying the pistes. Now I'm starting my third season looking forward to more improvement.

Like a lot of sports, skiing is one in which having the skill lets you take it as easy or push yourself as hard as you want. It can be hard work in any condition before the skills are there, but once they are, you can cruise pretty much forever. In the alps, I've seen and met quite a few senior citizens still out there gliding down the slopes. Their rugby days are over, certainly, but they're still out there skiing.

A more geeky pleasure of skiing is the technology to get you up the mountain. The engineers really get to flaunt. Not only are mechanisms of lifts and gondolas and cable cars usually exposed, but they almost always clearly post facts and figures -- weight, capacity, throughput, speed, thickness/strength of cabling, etc. I'd love to see this more commonly practiced around machinery of other types. I suspect these lift designers have a competitive streak. There's no real explanation for, say, the gondola in St. Anton that gets lifted at the base station from ground level up to a higher exit level on a giant wheel, other than that they did it because they could. Clearly showing off. And it's brilliant.



On a more personal scale, the equipment is a lot of fun. I'm still figuring out what things need to have money spent on them and what don't. For me, the jacket is in the latter category. I made do for years with a big blue raincoat, and have just replaced it with a weatherproof shell from eddie bauer I got on sale over the summer in the US ridiculously cheap. It's not a ski jacket, but it has pockets in all the right places, and keeps the water and wind out. It cost, literally, 1/10th the price of a decent "ski" jacket. Ideally it would be just slightly longer and the sleeve openings would be a bit wider, but other than that it's quite the steal. It's not insulated, which I prefer anyway, as I layer depending on the weather.


Ski pants seem worth the price, up to a point. I had a decent pair of boarding pants that took me through boarding and then skiing but finally had to be retired. Now I've moved on to a nice pair of salomon ski pants that are very comfortable and so far fitting the bill perfectly. There may be bargains at the cheap end of the market, but most of what I looked at in the lower price range seemed flimsy and/or shoddy. In the middle of the market there are a lot of choices that look quite good, quality-wise. Of course, there are ludicrously expensive options as well. Yes, the £400 ski pants seem very nice, but until I'm spending 15+ weeks per year skiing, they are not worth it.

Socks: definitely worth it. I love falke socks. For the torso, I usually go with a cotton t-shirt to start. An entire generation of recreational athletes, at least in the US, has been convinced by successful marketing campaigns that wearing cotton during anything strenuous will result in certain hypothermia or death by heat stroke, or possibly both, and that only "technical" fabrics are acceptable. I wear cotton year-round for all sorts of things and despite this shocking display of risk-taking have yet to suffer calamity. On top of that, I do upgrade to merino wool, in particular I've found the icebreaker stuff to be excellent, and worth the money. One or two layers of wool in between the cotton and the outer jacket handles a broad range of winter coldness as long as my extremities are warm. The helmet works well until it gets really cold, at with point a skullcap or a facemask with hood works great under the helmet. I also wear wool leggings if it's really cold.

Gloves I'm undecided on. Cheap gloves seem to work great for day 1, then are miserable to try to put on the next morning. But gloves can lead a hard life. I suspect the middle of the market is the place to go here. With goggles I think fit is the important thing. I'm a little skeptical of the various anti-fog claims of some types of goggles. Some people have the ability to fog up any goggles, regardless, while others' remain clear no matter what. I've broken a lot of goggles though, mostly when snowboarding and falling on my face, hard, so I still have a vestigial reluctance to spend a lot of money on them. They don't seem to last long in any case.

Helmets: I wear one all the time. It won't save me from catastrophic decceleration into a tree or a boulder, but it will keep my skull from getting sliced open under the edge of the idiot boarder or skiier who's out of control. And it keeps my head warm, and vents well when it gets warmer. Definitely worth the money on a comfortable one that fits well.

Boots: the first best upgrade from rental gear, even before skis. Makes a huge difference in comfort. Fit is far more important than brand. Skis are the next best upgrade. It's been great skiing on my own skis and not having to get used to a new kind every trip. I look forward to outgrowing them and needing new ones.

Little Drummer Boy

Not only is this an excruciating song to have to listen to, but the idiocy of the premise never fully struck me until now. What kind of psychopath thinks it's a good idea to start tapping out paradiddles for a newborn? Try this: borrow someone from the drumline of your nearest marching band and send them to the mother of a newborn, with snare and sticks. See how well that works out. It's hard to imagine anything worse. Maybe "Little Smoker Boy", who gives the baby the gift of secondhand smoke (instead of tears of shock and deafness)? I smoked my best for him pa-puff-puff-puff-puff....

Ischgl Ski Mission

Spent a few days in Ischgl on an early-season ski mission. Ischgl opens early in the alps, usually the end of november. Most of the skiing area is above 2300m and it has a good snow record. Compact but dense, Ischgl has a reputation as a raunchy party town. It certainly has more lapdancing clubs than a typical Tyrolean village. The downside is drunks stumbling around in the evening with skis on the their shoulders, or getting woken up by fellow hotel guests trying to figure out how to use the keycard to regain entry at 3am. The upside, and it's big, is that if you wake up and head up top when it opens -- leave the village on one of the 3 gondola lines [the one I used daily had heated seats, genius!] at 8:30, midmountain lifts start at 9:00 -- you get the mountains pretty much all to yourself for an hour or two. The hungover masses don't seem to pour into the midstation in earnest until 10:30 or so. The lift network is comprehensive, fast, and mostly high-capacity. Even when the throngs do decide to try out a bit of piste-bashing, lift queues are pretty much avoidable. The skiing is good, there are some nice long runs. Lots of pistes to choose from. The area is slightly more extensive than it appears at first. It is well worth fanning out from the crowded mistation to either side, as well as dropping over the back to the runs on the Swiss side of the resort. It's not as mogully or as extensive as St. Anton (which is effectively linked all the way through zurs, lech, and back), certainly more efficient for piste-bashing and less frustrating with the lack of lift queues. Lots of mileage to cover for intermediates, certainly.

I stayed at the Trisanna, which was a cheerful and comfortable family-run hotel (as all small hotels should be). The room was very clean, nicely furnished, reasonably priced, very good value for money. Even had a tidy little sauna area in the basement -- jacuzzi, sauna, steam room, shower, quiet room. Breakfast was good -- typical selection of meats, cheeses, breads, jams, yogurt, cereal, juices, coffee -- but high quality and nicely presented. There was always one hot item of eggs as well, which was a nice addition. I normally had eggs, ham[s], liverwurst (talk about nutritious, one slice of that will keep you going all day), cucumber, tomato, a few different cheeses, and a pot of coffee.

Dinner in the village ranged from mediocre to excellent. The best dish I had was a single pan with small but perfectly cooked, shockingly, pieces of beef, chicken, and pork, with mushrooms and some veg and a mound of homemade butter spaetzle covered wth melted cheese.

The skiing was great fun. Had one day terrible weather -- gets quite exposed on some of the peaks -- but the payoff was the next day of perfect, glorious conditions: bright sun on brand new snow.

P.S. Obligatory nutritional zealotry comment: the last day I skied 6 1/2 hours without stopping except for one water break. No need for "fueling". Much later, I was hungry, and I ate.

City Warning P.S.

Saw a frontpage subhead on a UK daily yesterday that described the debt as "terrifying". Fabulous editorializing from the journos. Maybe that's ok, if bankers' peace of mind is more important than providing for your own family. Anyway, here's a handy quiz to help you decide what to be more worried about:

Are you wealthy enough to stop working right now and still live comfortably the rest of your days?

• YES: You should worry about government debt.
• NO: You should worry about high unemployement.

City Warning: Financiers Unhappy

Have not been following the news lately, but did see a brief item on the tv about city financial firms "warning" the UK government about the perils of too much debt. Yes, a stern talking to from the same geniuses who brought us catastrophe. Why is there no outrage about this? Who are they to lecture anyone? How many billions of dollars do they need to lose, how many bubblicious bailouts will these banks require, before they finally lose credibility? And they pretend to be speaking from some vantage point of wisdom, on behalf of the public, but it should be abundantly clear by now that financial firms don't give a toss about the public, they speak only from their own wallets. As a general rule, anything investment banks think is a really good idea (e.g. carbon trading) should be treated with the utmost skepticism. And many issues banks don't really care about (e.g. unemployment!) do in fact deeply affect the general public.

Fishmonger in Victoria Park Village!

The Fishmonger has opened! It's Jonathan Norris. Even though I was already carrying a bag full of duck legs and such from the butcher, I got excited and bought a few trout and some smoked mackerel.

Stella, Miracle Beer

I preferred the "reassuringly expensive" Stella Artois campaign to the current billboard campaign, which proudly boasts "only four ingredients!" Is that the quantity of ingredients a virtue all by itself? Well, the ingredients the trumpet are "hops, maize, malted barley, and water". If you're putting corn in your beer, you really shouldn't brag about it. But I'm enormously impressed they've managed to make beer without yeast.

Holiday Cooking: Turkey[s]

After many years, this is my current favorite method of preparing a holiday turkey. I find smaller turkeys better than larger ones. Two small ones for a large group are better than one large one. The plan of attack is to confit the legs and separately roast the breasts on the bone. So:

Get the turkey[s] a couple days early. Cut the legs off and section into thigh and drumstick. Cut the wings off. Cut the back off, leaving a nice breast roast. Put that in the fridge. Brown the leg pieces in a heavy pan on the stovetop in good fat with some salt and pepper. Pack them into a roasting dish with some crushed cloves of garlic and a bay leaf or two and cover with fat -- goose fat is best, or duck fat or even lard. Top up with butter if you have to. Almost-covered is ok, too. Put into a medium oven (I use 150C but anything between 120-160C will work fine) for a few hours, until very tender and almost falling off the bone. Pull out and let cool completely, in the fat, before covering and fridging the entire thing.

The backs and wings you can bake the same time as the legs, and use them to make turkey stock for gravy. Or just pick the meat off and eat it as a cook's treat. Or separate the wings into pieces and save them for the kids' table. Or confit them with the legs if you've got the room in the pan.

For the breast roast, cover with butter, adding a layer under the skin, too, if you're feeling ambitious, salt and pepper, and place in a pan on a rack in a hot oven -- 220C -- breast-side down for 45 minutes. Turn heat down to 200C, turn breast side up, drop some more butter on top, and cook until done. I pull it out when the coolest part of the breast is at 65C. Actually I don't wait even that long. If you're feeble and worried about eating pathogens from a dodgy bird you picked up in an alley somewhere, cook it to 70C. In any case, pull it out of the oven, loosely cover with foil, and rest it at least 30 minutes. This time is perfect to heat up stuffing or finish other dishes and such.

To serve, cut/pull the breasts off and vertically (or bias) slice them, thickly, so each slab has some skin and some middle bit in it.

For the legs, heat them in a very hot oven -- 220C or higher, on a rack. Should not take long, let them get warm and let the skin crisp up.

Holiday Cooking: Chestnut Stuffing Recipe

Ingredients
chicken stock (see note, below)
dried bread cubes (see note, below)
1400g whole chestnuts, in shell
1 lb sausage meat
125g+ butter
2 med onions
1 sm. bunch celery
6 cloves garlic
1 large or 2 sm/med bramley apples
fresh sage


Method
This is better prepared the day before.

(1) roast the chestnuts, peel, and chop
score them first with a little 'x'
I roast at 200C for about 30 minutes, or until they are opening up and getting easy to peel
peel while still warm, as hot as you can tolerate, and reject any that don't shed their skins easily (that's why you start with so many, if you get 75% yield, that's great)
chop them as finely or as roughly as you wish

(2) cook the loose sausage meat

(3) dice and saute the onions and celery together in the butter, finely chopping and adding the garlic after they are well started

(4) shred and finely chop the apples

(5) mix together the chestnuts, apples, sauteed veg, sausage, fresh chopped sage, and dried bread cubes
what I do is layer each ingredient in the ultimate cooking pan to make sure the amount is right, adding the bread cubes last, and then move to a very large mixing bowl to fold them all together and to finish with the chicken stock before spooning back into the baking pan

(6) stir very hot chicken stock into the mix until it's the desired moistness
if there's a bit too much liquid, you can bake it out later

(7) bake, covered, at around 200C for 30 minutes or so

(8) to reheat for serving, bake again uncovered until piping hot
I prefer 180C+convection fan for about 30 minutes, but it's very forgiving so if you've got something else in the oven almost any temp will do as long as you let it get hot


Notes
For bread cubes, I made loaves of sandwich bread in our bread machine, with 100% wholewheat flour, cut the crusts off, cut them into cubes, and dried them in the oven (not overly so). Each loaf used 400g wholewheat flour, dry, fwiw.

For chicken stock, my standard method is to use roast chicken carcasses, onions, celery, carrots, and bay leaves (bay leaves are key).

Mushrooms work fine as an addition, too. Sautee them in butter, separately from the onions+celery+garlic. Undercook them a bit as they'll be baking a while.

For a vegetarian version, definitely use mushrooms instead of the sausage. And of course veg stock instead of chicken (marigold powder is better than any veg stock I've tried to make, but my heart's never been in it).

Overall, this is a very forgiving dish. It's not a cake. Proportions, cooking times, ingredients are all flexible. As long as there are enough chestnuts and some butter in there, it will be good.