Veggie - - Page 31

by BS

Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week

– Reaching back to an old Friday Fuck Up, erisgrrrl confirms that cooking kale chips is easier said than done:

I have tried to make kale chips twice and both times it was fail city! They looks so easy and tasty! I have no idea what I did wrong but it was no good! So, I totally feel your pain!

Why is this so hard? Some tips please? Anyone?

– In another oldie-but-goodie, real live French-Canadian Jean-Guy Bourque approves of our NYC Tour de Poutine:

I am a French-Canadian who left Montreal for a 6 month visit to the USA 42 years ago, and I’m still here in New Jersey…I am very happy to see that you can finally get a taste of Montreal here in the NYC area! Bravo! What I really hope for is for “smoked meat” to also catch on here…You’ll forget about NY style pastrami once you’ve tried Montreal’s smoked meat! Also the Montreal style of BBQ chicken that you get at places like Chalet BBQ, Benny’s or St Hubert BBQ…

Consider us on board the smoked meat bandwagon!

– Finally, star ES commenter erica offers up some more ideas for what to cook with lentils:

by gansie

What the Hell Do You Make with Lentil Puree?

Unless it’s mashed potatoes, I’m not into a side of mush. I once made a butternut squash-pumpkin-ruttabaga puree as a side to a cabbage hash, but that was once. Just once.

And now I possess a large bowlful of lentil puree. At first I wanted to make a lentil salad, but when my lentils tasted bitter, I doused them with soy sauce and threw them in the food processor for a prompt whipping.

I rolled the first batch of the puree, with slightly cooked and soy-flavored cabbage, into spring rolls. The rolls were then topped with a dipping sauce of grated carrots (using a microplane), sesame oil, sesame seeds and more soy sauce.

But the appetizer used only a third of the lentil puree. What to do? I googled “lentil puree” and found an idea from The Sneaky Chef.

Lentil Patties with Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Carrot-Soy Sauce

And I just want to put this reminder out there – I mess around in the kitchen. I love telling you what I’ve made and how I do it, but there is no exactness to my cooking. Take it as a guide.

by BS

America’s Top 10 New Sandwiches

Forget who piles pastrami highest or fits the most varieties of cold cuts onto one hero roll. A great sandwich has come to mean more than just bigger, better and meatier. Across the country, a new breed of sandwich artisans are taking lunchtime to a whole ‘nother level. From California to New England, here are Endless Simmer’s top ten favorite new sandwiches.

10. The Spuckie — Cutty’s, Boston

Spuckie is a term used by old-school Bostonians to identify any sub sandwich, but it’s increasingly associated with this year-old Brookline shop. It’s also probably the one sandwich that most successfully merges the old-school method of overdoing it on Italian meats with the new world of artisan, veggie-centric goodness. Super-thin slices of fennel salami, hot capicola and mortadella are layered on an oversize ciabatta, then topped with gooey, hand-pulled mozzarella and a fresh olive-carrot salad. For even less traditional sandwich-lovers, there’s also an eggplant spuckie available.

9. Bulgogi Steak Sandwich — Koja, Philadelphia

At the risk of outraging an entire city, we’re going to say it: the Philly cheesesteak is boring. With no disrespect meant to the age-old art of slathering fake cheese on top of a mound of meat, we just think this is one classic sandwich that is ready for a creative update. Enter University City sandwich truck Koja, where the chewy cheesesteak meat is replaced with bulgogi, Korea’s signature thinly-sliced, spicy BBQ beef. It’s served on a hoagie roll that’s coated in sweet chili oil and accented by sauteed peppers and onions. Koja also offers bulgogi pork and bulgogi chicken variations, but the best part is the unbelievable price — $3. Read more about this amazing sandwich at My Inner Fatty.

8.Crispy Drunken Sandwich — Baguette Box, Seattle

Have you ever dug into a steamy styrofoam container of General Tso’s chicken and thought, “this is delicious, but it would be even tastier on a bun?” Of course you haven’t, that’s the most insane thing we’ve ever heard. But crazy is sometimes genius, as is proven at this tiny Seattle sandwich shop, where hunks of tender chicken are deep-fried and glazed in a tangy brown sauce, then served on a crispy baguette with caramelized onions and cilantro. The result is a supremely sticky, but utterly satisfying sandwich. (Photo: Sevius)

7. Cheesy Mac and Rib — The Grilled Cheese Truck, Los Angeles

Another new West Coast outpost that achieves genius results by thinking outside the bun, LA’s great cheese-on-wheels purveyor offers several list-worthy grilled sandwiches, but none is more awe-inspiring than this. Sharp cheddar mac-and-cheese, strands of sweet BBQ pork and caramelized onions are all stuffed into two perfectly buttered-and-fried slices of white bread. Yes, it sounds like the horrifying 3 a.m. creation of a stoned college student. Yes, it actually works.
(Photo: Grilled Cheese Truck)

6. Pibil Torta — Xoco, Chicago

Upgrading Mexican street food has suddenly become a hot task of haute chefs around the nation, although the results often have us pining for the real thing. Not so at Rick Bayless’ Chicago sandwich shop, where tortas baked in the wood-burning oven take Mexican to levels we didn’t know existed. In this sandwich, silky strands of roasted suckling pig are served on crusty bread spread with black beans and achiote paste, then finished with a layer of pickled onions and habanero salsa. The Pibil may be one extra ingredient away from being a Top Chef disaster story, but as is, it’s perfection on bread.

Next: The top 5

in Breakfast / Cheese / Featured / Fowl / Lists / Pig / Red Meat / Sandwich / Veggie 49 comments

by Hannah

Search for the Holy Broil: Welsh Rarebit

Editor’s Note: Brooklyn resident, food writer and Serious Eats vet Hannah Smith-Drelich hops over to ES this week to answer a vexing food mystery — just what the eff is Welsh rarebit?

Welsh rarebit is a great thing. Its name conjures wet gloomy mountains and smokey cabins full of hunched, hairy people. At least, that’s what Wales looks like in my imagination. And Scotland, too. But apparently, Welsh rarebit doesn’t have that nostalgic throw-back effect (remember the good old Celtic days?) on everybody.

“It’s steak, right?” said one of my friends, suddenly concerned that maybe it wasn’t.

“I thought it was rabbit,” said another with barely-concealed disgust. She owned a pet bunny.

Welsh Rarebit is neither steak nor rabbit. In fact, it’s not even Welsh rarebit. The correct term is Welsh rabbit, which makes sense only when you put it into the context of the English making fun of the Welsh, which they did even back when everybody wore furs non-ironically. Welsh rabbit, at its simplest, is cheese on toast. The Welsh were notoriously fond of their cheese, and back in the 1700s they were also notoriously short on meat: hence, their version of rabbit was cheese on toast.

This tricky bit of linguistic mockery was ruined in 1785, when Francis Grose identified ‘rabbit’ with ‘rarebit’ in a document oddly titled A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Word historians have had their knickers in a twist ever since (especially the folks at Merriam-Webster), as ‘rarebit’ exists nowhere else as an independent word. Eccentric grammarian W.H. Fowler wrote in his 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage: “Welsh Rabbit is amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong.”

Any way you slice it, this is not your average grilled cheese. Nor any dolled-up croque monsieur, for that matter. Welsh rarebit is, essentially, a fondue. Except instead of wine, there’s beer; instead of tiny Frenchy forks, there’s a thick hunk of bread foundering under the oozy weight of melted cheese. (Flash back to fur-wearing men hulking by a campfire.) Cheddar is most commonly used in recipes today, along with dried mustard, cream or milk, and Worcestershire sauce. In some British restaurants the dish is accompanied by something called Branston pickle.

“What is that?” I asked my waitress at Tea & Sympathy, a very British restaurant in Manhattan.

in Cheese / Restaurants / Veggie 6 comments

by gansie

My First Pickle

This summer my little brother and his girlfriend moved in together. She keeps the apartment beautifully in shape. This includes their classy Christmas tree this holiday season. I’m not sure if my brother ever lived with a Christmas tree before. My first experience with a tree occurred during college; my roommates even presented me with my first stocking.

(Actually, funny story. That same year we also arranged a house Secret Santa and my roommate bought me a slow cooker cookbook, as I knew nothing about cooking. She bought it as a joke. She took “slow cooker” to mean not smart. Of course, the joke was on her.)

For his first Christmas tree occasion, my brother’s girlfriend bought him a few ornaments: a soccer ball, a menorah and a pickle. It’s nice to know food shows up at all the most important moments. Even if it’s porcelain.

in Holiday / Personal / Veggie 3 comments

by gansie

One Cook’s Trash is This Cook’s Treasure

Editor’s Note: Doctoral Candidate. Nature lover. Newlywed. Borracho‘s sister-in-law. Procrastinator. Phish follower. Here’s EvoDiva and her discovery of simple stock-making.

I used to think that the garbage disposal was the best invention ever. For those of us city dwellers who desperately want a compost pile to feed our non-existent vegetable gardens, I thought this device could offer me less guilt. I realize that disposal of vegetables down the sink may not be any more eco-friendly than throwing food in the trash, but it just felt better.

That is, until I threw the feathery tops of fennel bulbs down there and catastrophically clogged our kitchen sink, thus rendering our dishwasher unusable as well. After a few stubborn weeks of plunging, using the baking soda/vinegar/boiling water method, and washing dishes in the bathtub (no, I’m not kidding), we finally called the plumber and never ate fennel again.

Then I heard the most brilliant idea from a fellow grad-student and friend: he saves the tops and bottoms of onions, carrots, and celery in freezer bags. He then combines with bird carcasses to make delicious stock.

You can make deliciousness out of trash!

in Recipe / Veggie 6 comments

by BS

Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week

– You eaters love your tweeters, huh? It’s still early in the 4th annual Endless Simmer Eater of the Year voting, but Ruth Bourdain has jumped out to a commanding lead with 50.6 percent of your votes. The Michelin Man is running a distant second with 18.07 percent, although HuffPo reader YankeeCanuck brings up a good point:

Michelin Man has a name — it’s Bibendum.

Did not know that! Thanks, YC. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is running a surprisingly strong third with 13.08 percent, and we’ve seen write-in votes cast for Jamie Oliver, Cooking for Assholes, Gordon Ramsey, Man vs. Food, Hungry Todd Rungy and Lisa Murkowski (spelled correctly).

I’d like to cast a personal write-in vote for an eater whose big move came one day too late to be nominated: Denise Vivaldo, a recipe ghost writer who made the shocking confession this week that she is the person who originally wrote and sold the universally acknowledged worst food crime of all time: Sandra Lee’s infamous Kwanzaa cake. We’d give Denise a special award, but she’s currently hiding in an undisclosed location. If you haven’t voted yet, don’t forget to cast your ballot for Eater of the Year.

– Elsewhere, Nick (Macheesmo) agrees that gansie’s laborious nacho constructing method is the only way to go:

in TV / Veggie 2 comments