Archive for the 'Food' Category

So my choice is “or death”?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on August 21, 2008
in Extemporanea, Food and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I used to work in a bakery, so I really enjoy this blog.

The worst part is, I think this is still better than my cake writing.

The most important lessons from my high school job?

  1. Never trust the customer to write down what he wants on the cake. A Penn professor whose son was graduating from MIT wanted a cake that read “Congrats on your Collage Graduation.” I can only hope he taught math.
  2. Never assume you know how to spell someone’s name. Don’t even suggest. The mother of a two-year-old once gave me the evil eye for asking if her daughter’s name was spelled Anita. No, it was Eneedah. Duh.
  3. The larger the difference between cake size and child’s age, the crazier the parent is. A 13-year-old with a 7″ cake? Probably a lovely person. A one-year-old with a full sheet cake? HIDE.
  4. People are weird. Someone once sent me to put extra sprinkles on a cake because otherwise it might not be appealing to children.
  5. No one listens to instructions. If you tell them to refrigerate the cake lest buttercream icing melt all over the kitchen counter, you’d better do it twice. Or three times. And even then, you can reliably expect a furious phone call from at least half the customers.
  6. Never, ever argue with a bride. I still have scars.

ETA: For what it’s worth, I’m still holding out for one of these.

Thursday Grouch Blogging

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on August 21, 2008
in Extemporanea and Food
. 2 Comments

We still have no Internet access in my apartment. (Dear landlord: this is not okay.) Blogging from work is problematic, given that…well, my bosses read my blog. (Dear bosses: I wrote this at home. Really.)

The worst part, of course, is that blogging doesn’t just require an Internet connection to post but to write. I need my computer, my bookmarks, my tabs full of the posts I’m responding to, my Wikipedia page, my Word files so I can find that quotation… It’s an entirely different mental setup than other forms of writing, and it’s next to impossible without an Internet connection.

So instead of a real blog post, I will give you two quick and delicious recipes. They’re both adapted from Cook’s Illustrated, which has never directed me wrong in cooking.

Pan-Seared Steak with Mustard-Cream Sauce

Mince one shallot. Set out half a cup of low-sodium chicken broth, 3 tablespoons of white wine, 6 tablespoons of heavy cream, and 3 tablespoons of whole-grain Dijon mustard. (You’ll want them all ready when you make the sauce.)

Season your steak with salt and pepper. Any kind works — I tend to do it with the cheapest stuff I can find at Whole Foods, but if I had the money I’d use a nice strip steak.

Heat a tablespoon of vegetable oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. When it’s smoking, put the steak in the skillet. Cook the steak for about two minutes without moving it, then flip it with tongs. Reduce the heat to medium, and cook (again without moving — you want the brown bits) for about 5 minutes. If you have an instant-read thermometer, you want the internal temperature to be around 125 for medium-rare. I have no instant-read thermometer — or food processor, or mixer, or sharp knife — in my apartment, so I do it by sight, and it’s always been pretty good.

Remove the steak to a large plate and tent it with foil. Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat from the skillet, then return it to low heat and add the shallot. Cook it, stirring frequently, until it begins to brown. Add the wine and increase the heat to medium-high. Simmer rapidly, scraping up the browned bits, until it’s reduced to a glaze. Add the chicken broth and simmer for about three minutes. Add the cream and any juices that have come off the steak, heat it through, then whisk in the mustard.

Serve the steak and sauce separately. Enjoy. If you’re serving boys or others with poor table manners, include some bread so they can sop up all the leftover sauce. Remember to keep some so that you can drink it from the measuring cup in the kitchen while doing dishes.

Quick and Easy Cream Biscuits

Heat the over to 450 degrees.

Whisk together two cups of flour, two teaspoons of sugar, two teaspoons of baking powder, and half a teaspoon of salt. Stir in a cup and a half of heavy cream. Knead briefly by hand for about thirty seconds. (Unlike most biscuits, these actually benefit from rough handling, so don’t worry about that.)

Divide dough into chunks about the size you want your biscuits. Bake until golden brown, 10-15 minutes depending on the size of the biscuits.

Devour all of them.

Does this federal subsidy make me look fat?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 25, 2008
in Food and Politics
. 0 Comments

Via Adam, a story about government intervention that doesn’t get me up in arms:

Better labels are all well and good, but “we don’t want to exhort people to look at labels for trans fat,” he said. “We want people to walk into a restaurant and not worry there’s an artificial chemical in their food” that is killing them. A city trans-fat ban, he says, could prevent 500 premature deaths a year from heart disease.

The first time I ever heard of trans fats was in high school, when I was working in a bakery. A customer asked if our products had any trans fats; I’d never heard of them, so I asked the owner, who had never heard of them either. “What are trans fats?” she asked. The customer allowed as she didn’t know, but that they were bad for you.

“Well, we use the same ingredients you’d use in your kitchen,” my boss said, “just in larger quantities.” (If you’ve never seen a five-pound stick of butter, you haven’t lived.) And that’s the crux of this.

Saturated fats, like butter or lard, really aren’t that bad for you. The problem is when you take unsaturated fats and artificially saturate them. Liquid oil becomes a solid, which is much easier to transport and store. That’s great for bakeries that use large quantities of shortening. (If you’ve never had to clean up the five pounds of butter that have melted into a greasy mess because someone forgot to put it back in the fridge, I envy you.)

Still, if you’ve used oil while baking, you know it doesn’t taste as good. No one would choose partially hydrogenated soybean oil over butter — except that it’s much, much cheaper. The price has been artificially lowered by corn and soybean subsidies (though vegetable oils would probably be slightly cheaper than animal fats anyway, because plants are more efficient converters of energy).

And, like most cheap, convenient food-like products, it’s also much worse for you.

The trans fat crisis is just another symptom of industrial agriculture. It galls me to see programs like this — we incentivize Very Bad Things, then ban them — but it’s a short-term fix for one of the worst consequences of a disastrous federal program. The best option, of course, would be to end farm subsidies and make sustainable farming and eating a viable option for Americans. If people could bake with butter for a reasonable price, they would.

In the short run, though, this is better than nothing.

Domesticity Regained

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 14, 2008
in Food and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

I spent most of the last week sick in bed, which means that in addition to accumulating empty packs of cigarettes (Will) and water glasses (mostly me) on the porch, we have been surviving on takeout and ramen.

The first order of business, once Cipro returned me to some semblance of normalcy, was real food. (Well, maybe second, after catching up with work.) Luckily, there has been substantial discussion on this topic, and well-fueled with theory we traveled Whole Foods-ward.[1]

Tonight, we made — by which I mean I made and was observed while making — John’s fantastic Pasta with Corn, Pancetta, Butter, and Sage. Due to a shocking lack of pancetta, it was actually with bacon, and I only used half the butter called for,[2] but it was delicious. I might reduce the amount of butter even more and leave out the pasta altogether (the corn and bacon all hid at the bottom of the pot) to have it as a side dish.

Oh, and also, if anything important has happened in the world in the last few days and you didn’t e-mail me about it, I probably don’t know it happened. Hillary — still in the race, right?

[1] Advantages to Whole Foods being the only supermarket within walking distance: quality of produce and meat, selection of delicious gourmet food. Disadvantages to same: temptation to blow entire grocery budget on cheese.

[2] This is still an entire stick of butter, which I think is quite sufficient. On the other hand, the reason my Thea Helen’s baklava is so much better than mine is that she uses twice as much butter. The parallel is left as an exercise for the reader.