Rambling: Potatoes and Heat and Fat

I'm frying potatoes.

I recently said, on a writing forum where I hang out, that if a writer imagined the potato, nobody would believe in it. Easy to plant, easy to harvest, easy to store, easy to propagate. Rejoices in cold wet weather that many other crops can't tolerate. Poisonous foliage so that not many things come along and eat it. Very high calories per square foot. Carbs and protein and, of all things, vitamin C.  What more could you want?

I took a writing break and ate the potatoes. Mm, butter.

I caught a cold. When I catch a cold I tend to feel all anxious and Looming Doomish. Potatoes are helpful. Oddly, chocolate isn't.

I'm putting all the nervous-making things that I should be doing this week on the shelf, to do next week when I hopefully feel better. This week, potatoes.

Um. That is all.

Garden: No cheese

I don't know what kind of salad it is, I'm eating a salad, okay? I'm doing it, do I have to know the names? There's no difference between them, it's a bowl of weeds. Some of them have cheese. This isn't the kind with cheese. Does that answer your question?
Toby Ziegler, West Wing

The garden is producing food! Hah!

No, it didn't produce those walnuts. Or the cranberry raisinesque things. But the greens, yep yep. And there's a wad of kale in the fridge waiting for me to remove all of its health benefits by cooking it with butter and onions. Mmmm.

Um.

I'm going to eat my bowl of weeds now. Possibly more later.

Photo: Mine.

Rambling: More big plans

You may have noticed that I tend to make Big Plans That Fall Down. The latest ones involve food.

See, I've been resolving to do more cooking. Partly to save money, and partly so that if we keep up the "farm"ing, we actually eat a decent percentage of the crops. And partly for better control over my diet. "Diet" in the "foods habitually consumed" definition rather than the "trying to lose weight" definition. Though both definitions are relevant.

But we've learned that we tend not to properly cook on a nightly basis. So that leads me to cooking for leftovers, and cooking-and-freezing, and so on. It could even lead to canning, except for my fear of botulism. I know that many people have canned without dying, but it makes me twitchy.

There's Once A Month Cooking, a concept that probably doesn't need a whole lot of explanation. You buy a lot of ingredients, you spend a chunk of the weekend making large batches of several dishes, you freeze 'em, and boom! You have a month's worth of food ready to reheat. Well, I don't suppose there's anything magical about the month, it's just a tidier acronym than, say, "once every five weeks cooking."

We even have the freezer, so there's really nothing to stop me from making a giant pot of...

OK, do you have recipes (maybe "recipes" is too dignified a term) that you make when you're going to be eating alone, when no one else can see just how much of a food barbarian you really are? One of mine is...Goop. There's Chicken Goop and Pea Goop. Really, Chicken Goop is essentially simplified Chicken a la King (chicken, frozen peas, perhaps slow-cooked onions, in a cream sauce), but to be most authentically Goop, the cream sauce is overcooked and overbuttered to the point that it "breaks", the fat separating from the thickened sauce. Pea Goop is what you make when you want Goop but you don't have any chicken. They're both morally wrong. Yum. I could happily make a giant pot of Goop, divided it into Ziplocs, and eat it whenever I'm in a sad butter-craving comfort-food mood.

Not that that's relevant to the farm. We don't grow chickens on the farm (They grow on vines, right? And the features are green until they're ripe?), and it's unlikely that we'd grow enough shelling peas to need to stash the leftovers in the freezer. Fresh shelling peas are so good that I'm not positive that they'd even make it inside to a buttered pot. But I wonder how other vegetables would freeze in a cream sauce? Would they do that thing that so many frozen vegetables do, where the freezing seems to tear them apart from the inside, or would the magical blessing of butter prevent that? Sugar snap peas, for example, come to mind--a much more plentiful crop than shelling peas, but similarly pleasing.

I would have assumed that onions would be ruined by the freezer, but I recently read that caramelized onions freeze extremely well. The obvious realization comes to me just as I type this: That means that I can grow quite large quantities of Copra onions next year and caramelize them en masse, rather than struggling to make space for the bulbs in the freezer. In fact, I could caramelize this year's modest crop, and the remains of last year's crop (yes, they did survive a full year) and put the results in the freezer. Though the crops are small enough that I might be tempted to just eat all the finished  onions with a spoon.

I could similarly cook a great volume of tomatoes down into freezable tomato sauce. The difficulty with that is that tomato sauce is available at every grocery under the sun, or a least in the state, and I don't know if the homemade kind is significantly better, especially after a few months of freezing. Now that I've had the onion inspiration, I'm tempted to forget the tomatoes and just grow more onions.

Big plans.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Food: Puritan Chocolate Chip Cookies

OK, it's not exactly a recipe, it's a minor modification.

I'm never entirely happy with chocolate chip cookies. I always find myself wanting more soft, chewy dough with fewer of those annoying chocolate interruptions. And I want more flavor beyond the sugar and chocolate - specifically, more salt and vanilla. And those big chocolate chips interrupt the structural integrity of the aforementioned soft, chewy dough, and that annoys me.

It took me this long to realize, hey, I'm making the things, I can make them how I want. (Or, well, I can then the way I want if I make two batches. It's cruelty to Himself if I don't also make the traditional ones.)

So I took the standard Tollhouse Cookie recipe. I put in about fifty percent more salt. (Next time I'll double the salt. The salt will continue to increase until I'm completely happy.) I put in double the vanilla. I tossed in a handful of itty bitty mini chocolate chips. (Next time I may make it two handfuls; I do want to be able to taste a little chocolate.) And I squished it all into a nine by thirteen glass baking pan to make cookie squares. And I underbaked it just a tiny bit to make sure they'd be soft.

Yum.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Food: 90-Minute Carrots

Marcella Hazen's Essentials of Classic Italian cooking has a wonderful recipe for Braised Carrots with Parmesan Cheese. We call them 90-minute carrots, because that's how long they cook. These were a success at our Bacchanal party this summer, so I wanted to offer the recipe. I found it reproduced here, on RecipeZaar.

Photo from WikiMedia Commons.

Wrong Food: Chicken Chips

There are few things more fundamentally unhealthy than this. Perhaps deep fried Mars Bars would qualify. Or just sitting down and eating a stick of butter with a knife and fork.

So, to make chicken chips:

• Preheat the oven to about 250.
• Get a bunch of chicken thighs with skin still attached.
• Remove the skin and place it, fat side down, in a single layer in a baking pan with sufficiently high sides to keep the chicken fat in when it starts to render out.
• Put the rest of the thighs away to do something else with.
• Put the pan in the oven and bake it very slowly until the chicken skin is brown and fully crisp.
• Remove the chicken skin and salt it. Do whatever you want with the chicken fat left behind.
• Eat the chicken skin.
• Bask in your utter dietary irresponsibility.
• Prepare for the chicken-fat hangover the next day.

Mmmmm.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Food: Slow Fried Chicken

Fried chicken is special.

It's delicious. It's evil. It's fattening. It's saltycrunchygreasy. It's got all that going for it.

It's also a food that cannot successfully be mass-produced. Real fried chicken is pan-fried in shallow fat, watched intently by a focused cook who dodges grease splatters while waiting to turn the pieces at exactly the right moment.

Deep fried chicken can be a perfectly edible, even enjoyable food, but it's just not in the same class.

And the crunch isn't about batter - it's about getting the skin rendered to perfect crispness, without destroying the meat in the process. Just dredging the pieces in flour is plenty, for breading. And the flavor isn't about spices - salt, preferably applied an hour or so before cooking, is plenty for seasoning. Fried chicken is simple ingredients transformed by careful cooking into full-on luxury gluttony.

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