May 11th, 2012 § Comments Off § permalink
In a lot of programming languages, a bang, or exclamation point, is the symbol for Boolean NOT. I’ve been working with JavaScript a lot lately, where you’ll write stuff like the following:
if (!bouillabaise) { whatever }
So when I read Ming Tsai’s One-Pot Meals cookbook, and saw the recipe for what he calls shrimp bouillabaisse, I laughed a lot, and then renamed it shrimp !bouillabaisse for my own use. Because, okay: it’s a good soup, and I’ve been enjoying it whenever I cook it, but bouillabaise comes from a fairly specific tradition, and this recipe does not conform to that tradition. I’m all for remixing tradition, all for making recipes your own, but there’s pretty much no way you are going to convince me that this is not just a simple shrimp soup, and Ming’s name for it is false advertising. (The Wikipedia article is a reasonable introduction to the tradition.)
(The title of the book is also false advertising, frankly, and this recipe is one of the most egregious offenders. By my count, this recipe demands a soup pot, a strainer, a large bowl, and various mise en place containers, plus more if you make garlic bread to go with, as Ming suggests.)
photograph by johnnyd2, licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND
Recipe
Peel a pound or so of shrimp (frozen is fine). Don’t throw out the shells. Coat the bottom of a tall pot with olive, grapeseed, or canola oil and heat over a medium-high flame. Add the shells and sauté until they turn that gorgeous pink. Pour in a scant cup of white wine or chicken stock (when particularly forgetful, I have used water and it was perfectly edible), deglaze the pan and reduce by half.
Add another quart of chicken stock. Simmer for five to ten minutes. Strain the liquid into a large bowl, and discard the shells.
Reheat the pot, and add a little more oil. Sauté a mirepoix of a chopped onion, one or two chopped carrots, a stalk of chopped celery — if you like fennel, include that; I hate fennel — and season the whole with a bit of paprika. When the mirepoix is soft, add the strained liquid and the shrimp you peeled. When the shrimp are cooked through, remove from the heat and whisk in a cup of Greek yogurt. Serve with toast.
November 1st, 2009 § Comments Off § permalink
Come hither, my children, and do not as I did.
For I hath committed a grave error: I have succumbed to the clever name. Yes, I tried to make butternut squash soup…with buttermilk.
This was not a good idea. This was a clever idea that sounded awesome, and then it was a frustrating idea that tasted middling at best. Did you know that trying to cook butternut squash in buttermilk, on the stove, is an ugly process? I do…now. The buttermilk separates, and the butternut squash doesn’t cook, not for the two hours you leave it over low heat (low in the futile hope that the buttermilk will stop separating).
Buttermilk is a wonderful thing, thick and tangy and to be respected; part of our culinary heritage from when it was the remnant of the process of making butter.
photograph by Mel B.
Do not, for the love of God, try to cook root vegetables in it.
If you cook root vegetables, have the sense God gave, well, a turnip, and oven-roast them at 400º until tender. Or in stock, which you can bring to a boil.
Then puree them (with hot stock, if you have chosen the roasting method), and eat hot with croutons. If you are so mad as to ignore my dire warnings, and wish to try the buttermilk route, being as susceptible as I am to charming names, add grated Parmesan. Believe me. It will help.
And now I am going to count my sins once more, in hopes that the kitchen gods will look kindly upon my trespasses.
October 13th, 2009 § § permalink
Stock is one of the major building bricks of cooking. I am not exaggerating here; you can use water or canned chicken broth, but I don’t see why you would, as water adds pretty much nothing to the food except liquidity and canned chicken broth is salty and made with chickens who do not think of themselves as chickens. Real chicken stock is amazing, but I am not up to explaining it — Barbara is the woman you want to talk about making stock, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Vegetable stock, however, I can talk about — and was asked to, by the faithful minion!
photograph by dogeared
If you are me, you will have a ziplock bag in the freezer wherein you dump scraps of vegetables pretty much every time you cook — rinsed onion skins, the trimmings from carrots, celery ends, the heels of garlic cloves, odd-shaped bits of sliced tomatoes, mushroom stems, peapods, corncobs, trimmed green beans, whatever you have been playing with. About the only things you should not put in that bag are brassica-family vegetables — broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage — which overcook easily and make it taste (my hand to God) sulphery. And the insides of bell peppers, which are bitter and terrible. If you do not have the freezer room for such a bag, just collect some vegetables of the sort together and chop them roughly. Martha Stewart recommends a parmesan rind, but this is (a) not vegan, if that is a concern, and (b) something that makes no difference, as far as I can tell.
Dump everything in a soup pot, add some dried or fresh herbs if you wish (oregano! thyme! basil! rosemary! whatever!) and cover with cold water. Bring to a simmer, and let simmer slowly for at least an hour. Really, you can let this cook as long as you want, up to twelve hours, as long as it doesn’t dry out. When bored, take off the heat, and strain through cheesecloth, muslin, or paper towels. This will keep for a week or so in the fridge and a few months in the freezer (I suggest devoting a couple of ice-cube trays to the purpose of storage; that way, stock comes in convenient two-tablespoon sizes). Use wherever stock is called for.
Every batch will be a little different, depending on what you put in; the only really essential things are onions and carrots, as far as I can tell. My latest effort was unusually dark, because I had a lot of tomato and mushroom bits in, but it makes amazing rice, rich and colorful, and delicious.
September 10th, 2009 § Comments Off § permalink
It is autumnal tonight, the air hard-edged with chill, and while I can’t see the stars for the light pollution, I suspect that could I see them, they would be gleaming down, fierce and unblinking. So I made soup.
Carrot soup, to be exact, using up the last of the bunches of carrots I bought last week at the farmer’s market, a new kind of onion the color of sunset, and some tangy yogurt.
photograph by joyosity
It was exactly what I wanted, sweet and warm and thick — and simple! The prep work took maybe five, ten minutes, and then I could wander off and read the book I picked up at the library yesterday (look, I tripped, okay? the dog ate my homework! it wasn’t my fault!), Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America, by Jessamyn Neuhaus, which is fascinating.
And it is almost my bedtime, so instead of a more formal recipe, I am going to write the instructions out the way I scribble cooking-notes to myself so I don’t have to take the laptop into the kitchen.
Carrot soup
Dice an onion and a few cloves of garlic. Sauté in olive oil over medium heat until translucent. Roughly chop carrots (1 bunch at the farmer’s market) and add to the onions, stirring to coat with olive oil. Add water or stock to barely cover. Bring to a gentle boil, lower heat to simmer. Cook until the carrots are tender (20 to 30 minutes. Ish. I think. Ten pages or so). Remove from heat and puree with an immersion blender if so fortunate as to own one, or use a potato masher for a chunkier soup, or pour into blender. Drizzle with delicious olive oil when serving, or sprinkle croutons on top, or add chopped herbs, or a dollop of crème fraiche or Greek yogurt.
