Conan is such a copycat

We all know that bacon alcohol is a bad idea, because we all saw my post about it. And yet, here's Conan O'Brien, making Andy Richter try bacon vodka like he didn't read about it here first:



My guess is that the vodka didn't need bacon flavoring to taste terrible, by the way; I imagine the company is using a gimmicky flavor to mask a subpar liquor, because that is TOTALLY how I would do it if I were a manufacturer of trendy vodka.

I dunno - should I buy a bottle of a guaranteed-sippable vodka and try the bacon experiment again, just to show Andy Richter how it's done? (The answer to this question, of course, is no. As much fun as it is to show up Andy Richter, it's not worth the very real risk of turning a palatable vodka into an unpalatable vodka.)

Food Experiment: Baconated Bourbon

It was dumb luck that I saw this recipe for bacon-infused bourbon the same day I planned to cook up a batch of bacon for addition to a soup. Hey, it's not like I was going to use the fat for anything else.

So in the normal mad rush to get home on Monday night before Chuck comes on, I found a few minutes to swing by the liquor store for two bottles (gotta have a control group, doncha know) of this:



I chose Evan Williams because Esquire magazine recently rated it the nation's best deal in cheap liquor. (Mr. W scoffed at this, because clearly Esquire magazine has never heard of Luksosawa.) The recipe calls for "good" bourbon, but I'm not about to commit a bottle of Maker's Mark to a food experiment. That way lies madness.

So, the deal is that you pour rendered bacon fat into the bourbon and let it infuse for a while (I let it sit overnight), then chill the mixture until the fat hardens enough so you can strain it out.

(Is there anything one can do with bourbon-flavored bacon fat? The mother of all gravies, perhaps? Maybe that's the next food experiment.)



I sniffed the bottle of Bacon Williams before sealing it back up, but couldn't discern any particular bacony scent. Then I went back online and read about people letting their bacon liquors marinate "for a few days." Uh-oh.

Anyway, that Friday, Mr. W and I had dinner with our friends James and Katie, which seemed like the perfect opportunity for a taste test. So while the others made hamburgers and set out pickles, I poured the drinks.



The little square glass holds Evan Williams (there was a second glass that doesn't seem to have made its way into the picture); the larger round ones have Bacon Williams.

As I poured, I took the opportunity to sniff the two bottles. Compared to his brother, Bacon Williams smelled ... not like bacon. Kind of metallic, maybe?

I didn't tell the others which drink was in which glass; I didn't have to. Katie took one sip from the round glass, frowned, and said, "This one's the bacon, isn't it." It was clear from her tone that that was not a good thing.

There was a definite taste difference, and it was not pleasant. Everyone agreed that instead of bacon flavor, the bourbon seemed to have absorbed the flavor of fat. (To replicate this experience, try drinking a glass of bourbon on the rocks, except in the place of rocks, use lumps of Crisco.)

After those initial sips, everyone stuck to the plain Evan Williams for the rest of the evening. We tried to think of something to do with the Bacon Williams (play a practical joke on an unsuspecting friend, perhaps?), but in the end, Mr. W disposed of it privately. I can only hope he did so in a manner befitting an $11 bottle of bourbon cut down well before his time.



Rating: frowny tipsy face.

Food is weird

Right now, I'm drinking a brew made from the roasted, ground-up pits of a cherry that grows in subtropical climates. I do this almost every morning, and so do hundreds of millions of other people - enough to make it among the world's most popular beverages. You'd be hard-pressed to find a restaurant or bar in America that doesn't offer it.

Some people like to flavor their roasted-ground-up-subtropical-cherry-pit brew with a solution made from the dried seed pods of one of three species of a rare orchid. (These orchids don't self-pollinate, so in order to get the pod, you either have to trust the pollinating power of insects and wind, or go around harvesting the pollen and brushing it onto the flowers' pistils yourself.) This flavor is now so widely used that it is sometimes used as a synonym for "dull."

Isn't that crazy?

Farmer's market bounty, part 2 (or: Once you go heirloom, you don't go back)

When last we left our heroine, she had just bought some lovely produce from the farmer's market down the street. But how to use it all up before it spoils?

On Monday night, I began by trying out this recipe (found by Googling "heirloom cherry tomato recipes" and picking one that didn't require, like, two pounds of tomatoes). I used cod instead of halibut 'cause that's what I had on hand, and I added a couple tablespoons of wine to the tomatoes as they cooked. The result, served with couscous:


OK, so the fish was overcooked (the result of trying to sear cod) and the couscous was dry (because it came out of the freezer instead of fresh from the pot), but I didn't care, because those tomatoes? Holy crap, those tomatoes were good. I mean, seriously, wow. I loved them so much that I was really happy the recipe called for only half of them, because that meant I got to make them again on Thursday night! (That time, I served them over chicken and had roasted potatoes on the side.)

(By the way, is there any better smell in the universe than garlic sautéing in olive oil? Why is there no Yankee Candle for that smell?)

Tuesday, I boiled some pasta and opened up my paper bag of mushrooms - only to find that they had shriveled to about half of their original volume. But no matter: a half-hour soaking in some water perked them back up.

So, butter and a little olive oil; garlic; the mushrooms, all diced up; some wine; sea salt and pepper; some basil at the end. (It's basically the tomatoes all over again.) Add the pasta to the pan and toss; serve with lots of Parmesan. (No picture this time; I forgot, but it wasn't that pretty anyway.) It was tasty, but the reconstituted mushrooms still wound up being pretty insubstantial. $4 for 4 oz is probably not the best use of your farmer's market dollar.

So that just leaves the rest of the basil, which I stripped the leaves from yesterday. I've got about two cups, so I think I'll halve this pesto recipe ...

LATER. Welp, that's done. I took a picture but decided not to post it because it didn't look very appetizing. Good thing it tastes so delicious.

So that's the end of the farmer's market veggies! Yay! Aaaand I've got a special treat for anyone who was interested in the fate of Wilty the Kalewhale: he did not get thrown out! Instead, he and some of his veggie friends (who I save in a freezer bag for just such an occasion) got tossed into a Crock-Pot with some water for 12 hours. The result: six cups of vegetable stock, which are now stacked neatly in my freezer:



The V written on each container stands for "victory over wastefulness"! (OK, it also stands for "veggie.")

Farmer's market bounty

Heirloom cherry tomatoes ...

... sweet basil, and ...

... oyster mushrooms! (OK, the mushrooms are a little hard to see.)

Finding myself actually awake and dressed before noon on a Sunday, I decided to walk over to the farmers' market (in Hyde Park, to be known henceforth as Oakley near) to see what I could see. $9.50 got me this lovely produce, which I am bound and determined to use before it spoils for once. (Wilting bunch of kale in the fridge, this is for you.)

Late dinner

In the past few months, I've been turning more and more to beans as an inexpensive, healthy source of protein. (They're tasty, too - black beans and brown rice has become one of my favorite meals.) Lately, I've been taking this frugality to an extreme by buying dried instead of canned beans. They're kind of amazing - $1.50 (at the most) gets you something like 12 servings of legumey goodness.

So late last week I cooked up a batch of chickpeas, figuring I'd make hummus or something. But then there was this party and I didn't have the time to figure out the proportions for The Ultimate Homemade Hummus, so I just bought some at Kroger a half-hour before the party. And because I was hungry, I bought way too much, so now I have a fridge full of hummus AND a full Crock-Pot's worth of chickpeas.

Luckily for me, Kris at Cheap Healthy Good uses psychic power to tap into my every culinary need. I want a schmancy dish to serve my mom for her birthday; she posts Chicken Marsala. I have 17,000 chickpeas what needs eatin'; she puts up Curried Chickpeas and Black Beans. It's eerie!

I should probably be concerned that Kris will use her powers to extract my bank account numbers from my head or something, but for the moment, I'm just happy to have something for dinner.

Carb-loader's pasta

For all you marathon trainers out there, here's a hearty recipe that's just chock-full of carbs. Pasta? Check. Bread crumbs? Check. Beans? Check.

And still, it manages to be low-fat. Go, Mark Bittman!

I'm eating it right now. I made mine with kielbasa, because it's like 8,000 times cheaper than chorizo, and I sprinkled a little Asiago on the top. If you don't feel like rehydrating, then cooking dried chickpeas (which I had on hand anyway), I think two cans and their liquid would work well, although I'd add a little water to thin out the liquid.

Discovered!

As I bend down to search for red-tag clearance Angus beef, the guy behind the meat counter asks, "Can I help you?"

"Nah, I'm just looking," I reply dismissively. This normally causes store people to stop talking to you and walk away. Not this time.

Instead, the meat guy laughs. "Yeah, I know you - you're always looking!"

I stare at him. Is he hitting on me or something? But he quickly elaborates: "I see you wandering around here all the time."

Yikes! I've been identified!

It's true - I spend a lot of time in the meat department: digging through the whole chickens to find one for under $3.50, then $3.40, then $3.20; comparing the price per ounce of chuck roast vs. round roast; taking four packages of imitation crab meat, then returning three; staring at the buy-one-get-two-free smoked sausages, trying to decide if I'd ever actually eat them. Meat is expensive, and there's a lot of variation in price out there, even within a single store. I'm looking for the best deal I can possibly get.

What I'm not looking for is anyone to notice my mad rambles through the supermarket.

I laugh nervously and explain to the meat guy that I'm just looking for deals. "You know, grab the sale stuff, pop it into the freezer before it expires," I explain.

"Oh, well, you know this is the Angus beef section," he replies. "All the stuff in black trays is Angus. The USDA Choice beef over there is gonna be cheaper."

And at this, I feel a mix of irritation and - I think - shame. I shouldn't really blame Meat Guy; I know he was just trying to help. But I feel like I have effectively led him to dismiss me from the Angus section. I feel like if I want to browse there for 40-percent-off top sirloin again, I have to go late at night, when the employees are gone from the service counters.

Later on, I will think: If store employees I've never spoken to before are pointing me toward the cheap cuts of meat, am I taking this budget thing too far? Perhaps I've passed frugality and am heading toward tightwaddery.

But I don't say any of this to Meat Guy, of course. Instead, I smile, say, "Thanks, I've already looked there," and walk away.

Book review: In Defense of Food

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

These are the seven words that began Michael Pollan's New York Times Magazine piece "Unhappy Meals," printed in the beginning of last year. They are also the seven words featured on the cover of his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. (You'll notice it printed on the cord that binds that delicious-looking lettuce - an odd choice of imagery, if you ask me. Even if you don't ask me, actually.)

The ironic thing about this book is that my main criticism of it was summed up by Pollan himself, in his Times article:

I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words.

Which is basically what he's done in In Defense of Food.

The book is divided into three parts: the first two (which are rather ill-defined and therefore run together in my head) describe how the "Western diet" values nutrients over actual foods (and to a lesser extent the ways in which this attitude has been shaped by capitalism); how lifestyle-related ailments (heart disease, diabetes, etc.) are so prevalent in the U.S. compared to cultures with traditional diets, for a time they were known as the "Western diseases"; how the science of nutrition is not a good thing to be basing your diet upon. You get the picture.

And frankly, it's a dull, stretched-out sort of picture, taking the premises laid out in his magazine piece and spinning them out to a hundred or so book pages.

The premise of these sections is, "Look, two hundred years ago we thought we knew everything there was to know about food. Then we discovered vitamins and thought that was the key. Now everyone's talking about omega-3s and antioxidants, and again we think we know it all. Well, we probably don't - so why not look at the diets and lifestyles of cultures that are healthier than us and try to emulate them?"

Which you kind of get the point of after just one reading, right? But Pollan just keeps hitting us over the head with studies and history and details, striving for that magical page count where he can justify selling the book as a hardback for $21.95. The only way he could've been more obvious is if the book were typed in double-spaced 13.5-point Courier New with 1.25-inch margins.

After these rambling pages, the third section is a big improvement - a fleshing-out of those seven words Pollan keeps repeating. He lays out five or so guidelines under the heading of each sentence in his "manifesto": under "Eat Food" you'll see things like, "If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, you probably shouldn't eat it" and "Shorten the chain between you and the farmer." This, he says in the book's introduction, is in response to people asking him in the wake of his immensely popular The Omnivore's Dilemma - at its best, a polemic against the industrialization of the American diet - "Well, then, what should we be eating?"

Mr. W won't like to hear this, since he's anti-Pollan for reasons far too numerous to mention here - but one of the guidelines actually reminded me of him. Mr. W prefers to choose his bread based on what has the fewest ingredients, explaining that good bread has no need for things like high-fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Pollan is right there with him - only he expands this rule to include all foodstuffs. "Don't buy foods with more than five ingredients," he says.

Hmm - no foods at all with more than five ingredients? That's a bit impractical, isn't it? Which is kind of the point of this Slate review of In Defense of Food:

Buy a hog? An entire hog? Cut it up and put the pieces in a freezer? I'm a fan of Michael Pollan's work, but he does have a tendency to hurtle himself into the stratosphere like an errant missile, then plummet back to earth and casually pick up where he left off. This time it's on Page 168 of his latest book, In Defense of Food: One minute he's carefully explaining the difference between "free-range" and "pastured" eggs, the next minute he's perched on his own private planet brandishing a grocery list that might as well be headed "carrots, magic."

It's a nice review, worth reading especially for the "gotcha" moment in the final paragraph, when the Slate reviewer points out that even Pollan cannot always live up to his own lofty foodie standards.

So, the first two sections of In Defense of Food are clearly stretched out to fulfill a page count, and the last section suggests I forage for wild field greens and buy a freezer for storing entire pigs.

And yet ... I enjoyed this book. (Not enough to pay list price, though - I bought it at the Enquirer book sale for $3, and it was worth every penny.) I liked the idealistic picture it paints of people coming together and sharing fresh food they've prepared (perhaps even grown) themselves. I like the idea of passing up processed and pre-prepared foods in favor of whole foods. Not all of it is practical, but it is inspiring. Pollan's "manifesto," in more words than he himself used, is really, "Think more, and more critically, about the stuff you put into your body." That's a philosophy I can get behind.

So, gentle readers, my recommendation to you w/r/t In Defense of Food: If you crave inspiration and a few nice tips on how to eat more thoughtfully, pick up this book from the library or bargain bin. (I wouldn't pay more than $5 for it, though - that's how much it would cost if it were the slim paperback treatise it really ought to be.) If you find your eyes glazing over at some point during the first hundred pages, feel free to skip ahead to that third section; you won't be missing much.

Vacation Food Experiment: Quinoa Pudding

This week, I decided to finally cook the remains of a box of quinoa that's been sitting in my pantry for months. When I opened the box, I saw that the quinoa had come with a little pamphlet of recipes - and that I actually had all the ingredients to make one of them.

Quinoa pudding involves cooked quinoa, milk, eggs, cinnamon, vanilla, honey, chopped nuts and coconut. You cook it in custard cups, and it ends up with a taste and consistency that's rather like bread pudding. It's fairly tasty and easy to make if you happen to have all the ingredients, and it can be served hot or cold, plain or with various toppings.

Rating: smiley face. I would certainly make it again if I had quinoa on hand, although I'm not sure how likely that is; it turns out I'm not really a huge fan of plain quinoa.

Vacation Food Experiment: Sautéed Chicken Livers

That whole chicken I used to prepare Beer Can Chicken had some giblets in it that had to be removed. (The label on the chicken was actually apologetic about there not being more internal organs for me to fish out and discard: "Some giblets may be missing.")

So I went online to see if there was anything I could do with them. The gizzard was thoroughly unappealing to begin with, and the heart required some heavy-duty braising ... but the livers seemed fairly easy to cook, requiring only a sauté in "wine, stock or other aromatic liquid."

So I chopped up an onion and threw it in a pan with some olive oil. When the onion was translucent, I added some Chardonnay (all I had on hand; red wine would have been better) and let it reduce for a bit. Then I added the livers and put some salt and pepper on them.

The results were pretty much what you'd expect of chicken liver. It wasn't terrible, but I wound up throwing it out after a few bites anyway - partly because of an inexplicable bias against liver that wasn't really being challenged by the taste, partly because I had chicken roasting in the oven and didn't want to spoil my appetite by eating something so-so.

Rating: "meh" face. I'd eat chicken livers again, but I probably wouldn't make them.

Vacation Food Experiment: Beer Can Chicken

Sorry, no picture of this one.

Meijer's been having crazy sales on whole chickens (like, get it for $3.50 instead of $8), so I bought one to try a recipe I saw in a comic. Because, hey, that's awesome.

(I had never heard of beer can chicken before, but when I mentioned it to my mom, she said, "Oh, yeah - that works great!" I guess it was a thing, once upon a time.)

So the way it works is you stick a can of beer that you've added some spices to in the cavity of the chicken, then roast it in the oven. One nice thing about this recipe is that since the chicken goes in upright (looking kind of like it's sitting on the beer can), a lot of fat drains off it into the pan.

But here is a bad thing about this recipe: I don't have a meat thermometer. (This might actually be considered a bad thing about me: "There goes ol' Kelly No-Meat-Thermometer," people will whisper as I pass.) So when I took out the chicken and saw that much of the dark meat still had a pinkish cast (as dark meat tends to have), I had no way of verifying that the meat had reached a friendly 160 degrees. Since I am a worrywart, I wound up cutting up the carcass and sticking the parts back in the oven - for 40 minutes. (!)

Even after all that punishment, the chicken was utterly delicious: tender, juicy, flavorful, the works. But to be honest, it's probably not going to usurp my beloved Crock-Pot as a means for cooking whole chickens. It just takes too long, even if you do have a meat thermometer.

Rating: smiley face using disembodied yellow hands to tap a wristwatch. Scary!

Vacation Food Experiment: Tomato Ice Cream

After reading rave reviews of Trader Joe's tomato and roasted red pepper soup on the Enquirer Foodie Report, I went out and bought a box. However, I was disappointed. It was creamy, but bland and far too sweet for my taste. (For an idea of what I think tomato soup should taste like, try Progresso's version.)

I described the Trader Joe's soup in an e-mail to Mr. W as "hot tomato milk" - which is when I decided to pour the remaining soup into the ice-cream maker. Just to see.

The result was not as disappointing as the hot soup - but only because my expectations were lower. It was icy, salty, and still bland - although you could at least taste some tomato flavor, which is more than I can say for the soup.

Rating: yuck face. Kids, don't try this at home. Or anywhere.

That Kuwaiti family eats a lot of eggs

If that's a double layer, each person is eating like eight a week.

Here's a super-fascinating photo project - what a week's worth of food looks like for families around the globe.

The project has sparked commentary elsewhere on the tubes about hunger and nutrition. I'm a little bit unclear on whether the food pictured represents what was consumed or just what was bought. Perhaps I will pick up the project's book and find out.

You can buy little butter turkeys at Meijer. Cute and weird!

Recipe Corner: Stir-fry sauce

When I was growing up, my mom had a pretty standard rotation of Midwestern recipes: mushroom-soup-and-rice casserole, chicken from the Crock-Pot, pork chops, make-your-own tacos.

There was one Chinese dish in this lineup. To this day, nothing I've eaten in a Chinese restaurant can compare with my mom's chicken almond. It's the reason I own a wok. (Well, that and Target was having a sale.) But since I don't always have raw almonds on hand, lately I've been trying out the sauce with different stir-frys. It's a really basic "chow mein" sort of sauce, so it works well with chicken and tofu. I haven't tried it with beef yet, but I bet it would hold up.

Here's the recipe:
- 1/3 cup white wine
- 3 tbsp. soy sauce
- 3 tbsp. water
- 1 tsp. ground ginger
- 2 tsp. honey
- 1 tbsp. cornstarch

I recommend that the wine be at room temperature so the honey will mix in a bit easier.

To use the sauce, start by stir-frying your meat/tofu in a bit of oil. Once it's cooked, add the sauce and cook until it's thickened. Then, add vegetables/nuts and stir-fry the whole mess until it's as done as you want it to be.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the chicken almond recipe, it uses 1 1/2 lb chicken (cut into chunks, obvy), 12 oz snow pea pods, 1 c sliced water chestnuts, and 1 c raw almonds. Delish!

Cooking Mama

I had a spare pie crust rattling 'round my freezer, so last night I baked my first solo lemon meringue pie. (My mom and I used to make them all the time, particularly for my birthday; it was my favorite pie until I discovered the super-tasty and far simpler chocolate pie.) The instructions on the Jell-O pudding box are easy enough to follow, and having a stand mixer makes the meringue a breeze. I took it to work, where it seemed to be well-received. (Although that might have had something to do with the fact that I whined all morning that no one was eating my pie.)

When I came home, I started cooking this recipe for vegetarian curry from Stepfanie (whose blog is an inspiration for anyone who wants to eat healthier food, and who - as I've mentioned - also contributes to the Enquirer Foodie blog). Her recipe - which involves rice, a sauce, pan-fried tofu, stir-fried vegetables, and lots of chopping and grating - took me the better part of two hours to make. It's a tasty enough curry, but I didn't get to eat it until 10 p.m. Plus, I wound up eating half the block of tofu in pre-dinner nibbles. Maybe save this one for the weekend, kids ... or skip the lime zest. I spent like 15 minutes zesting those limes.

Ah, well - I guess not all kitchen experiments can be a total success. At least I have plenty of curry and stir-fried veggies left over for the rest of the week.

Grocery shopping and the single girl

I am a grocery store addict.

I will spend three hours wandering the aisles, comparing prices, looking for new products, scrutinizing labels. Mr. Wufflekins says I will stand motionless in front of canned soup displays for 10 minutes, apparently transfixed. (What he doesn't realize is that my eyes are actually darting all around, searching for the one can of soup that perfectly balances taste, price and nutrition. One day, I will find it - a delicious soup that is completely calorie-free and that the store will actually pay me to take away.)

Finally, I will drag myself to the checkout line with $200 in "ideas" - fresh vegetables and exotic ingredients for some future dish that will never materialize. I don't want to think about how much cilantro, eggplant and ground turkey has spoiled or developed freezer-burn at my hands over the years.

Reading this post by Stepfanie at the Enquirer blog The Foodie Report made me think about the way I shop for groceries. This is not a smart method for a girl who cooks only for herself (and occasionally her boyfriend).

I want to start shopping differently: more frequently, but less intensively. I want to breeze into Bigg's three or four times a week, spend $20 on food I will eat within the next day or two, and be in the express checkout lane within 20 minutes.

The grocery store is always going to be there. I just have to remind myself of that.

I usually get the Bol ...

My Chipotle Burrito:

Chipotle Fan.com

You will be mine, free ham

YEAH! I got all six coupons!



I'd like to thank the Bigg's cashier who plugged her broken printer back in after I told her I'd bought those six big cans of diced tomatoes specifically to put my total over $50; the guy ahead of me in line who forget to take his coupon, allowing me to snag it with the purchase of only a tray of sushi and a bag of Baked Doritos; and Gina. You guys made it all possible.