The Impatient Chef Makes a Shopping Error

The Impatient Chef Makes a Shopping Error

I sometimes go to the local Cash & Carry store, which caters mostly to restaurants.  I started going there when I owned a small fleet of doomed espresso stands the Portland area back in the 1990's, and now I occasionally stop by when the need strikes.  This time, I was after olives.  Not just a jar, but an industrial sized jar.  I have always liked olives, but about 10 years ago, I discovered the joys of the martini.  I enjoyed them a little too much, so they had to go.  I drank, by the way, the Winston Churchill martini: fill a glass with gin, show it the bottle of vermouth, and drink the gin - preferably with 3 olives.  Gin, oh gin, how I love thee.

Sigh.

I have retained an even deeper appreciation for olives since I found the martini, which has become a passion since I had to leave it behind.  On a recent trip to Cash & Carry, I found a large jar of pimento-stuffed olives (the way I like them), and brought it home.  They were delicious.  I wanted another jar, so I stopped by again, and picked up 2 jars.  Without noticing one glaring omission.

Always read the Label

 They aren't stuffed.  I could have taken them back, but I hatched a plan:  Stuff them myself.  I had picked up some lunch meats a few days before.  I had a bottle of roasted peppers in the cupboard. Perhaps...

A plan was hatched:  Stuff them myself.

The Meats

The plan was to roll the meats up, and cut the cheese (stop snickering) into small chunks.  These were large olives.  I couldn't imagine trying this with smaller ones.

The first thing I noticed was that it would take a lot less than I had initially guessed.  The second thing I noticed was that I would have to roll the meats tighter than I had imagined.  After about 15 minutes with greasy hands and kitchen shears, I had two small bowls of stuffed olives.

All The Marbles

My verdict:  You gotta try this.   The meats must stand out from the olive, so spicier meats seem to be best.  You also must not care what they look like.  At least, at first.

Good luck, and have at it.

The Impatient Chef

The Impatient Chef Recipe: PA Dutch Red Beet Eggs

The Impatient Chef Recipe: Pennsylvania Dutch Red Beet Eggs

A Jar Full of Home (a quilt made by my grandmother is in the background)

I grew up in Central Pennsylvania.  Specifically, the Berks County / Lebanon County area.  There the Amish drove their "horse and buggies" on the country roads, the history was just about as long as you can get in the New World (unless you're Native American), and the Pennsylvania Dutch kept alive some of the old ways well into the 20th century. The one clarification that I have about the PA Dutch, of which I am one (on my mother's side of the family), is that we are not Dutch.  Our heritage is German.  The German language that my ancestors arrived with was frozen in time, and did not change in he ways that languages do where they are natively spoken.  Like the tortoises of the Galapagos, we evolved in isolation, and differently.  At least, the language did.  Over time, the irregular verbs disappeared, Deutsch (German) became Dietsch; tag (day) became dawg; and so on, and so forth.  I like to think of the PA Dutch language as Hillbilly German.  Most Americans did not know the Germans as Deutsch, but they knew the Dutch as the Dutch, so we became the Pennsylvania Dutch because the names Dietsch and Dutch were so close.

Around the time of World War II, the PA Dutch stopped passing down their Germanic language to their children.  Many of the more germanic sounding names became less so.  The anti-German sentiment of wartime America sent the PA Dutch into hiding from their heritage.  Now, there are less than 50,000 of us left.  I don't speak the language.  I know phrases, and individual words.  That's all.

One of the things I want to do as The Impatient Chef is to pass along some of my family recipes before they disappear.  This is the first.

The recipe goes thusly:

NOTE:  These are not pickled eggs.  You can not treat them as such.  They must be  refrigerated.

You will need a clean 1-gallon wide-mouthed jar.  Glass is necessary.  Do not use a plastic tub.  

Ingredients:

2 dozen eggs

4 good sized beets, peeled and sliced about 1/4” thick

2 1/4 quarts beet juice from boiling the beets (approx.)

2 cups white vinegar

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp salt

We Got the Beets!

Tip on eggs:  fresh eggs do not peel easily.  Buy your eggs a few weeks in advance, and leave them in the refrigerator.  

The night before, hard boil the eggs.  A good method is to lay them in the pot first, and then cover them with water.  The water should be about an inch over the eggs.  Bring the pot to a boil without a lid.  When the water is at a rolling boil, cover the pot, and turn off the burner.  let the pot sit for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, drain the water, and refill with cold water, and drain again.  Repeat this for 3 to 4 cycles.  After that, refill the pot with water and add ice.  Use enough to bring the temperature of the water down rapidly.   After a few minutes, drain again, and refrigerate the eggs overnight. 

The next day, cook the beets as follows:

Sliced Up

In a large stock pot, boil the sliced beets in at least 3 quarts of water.  While they are boiling, peel the eggs, and cover them with water.  Boil the beets until they are tender.  Then, remove them from the pot, and let them cool.  While they are cooling, measure out 1 1/4 quarts of the beet juice.  Reserve the rest in a separate container.  Return the 1 1/4 quarts of beet juice to the pot (or a large mixing bowl), and stir in the vinegar and sugar until the sugar is dissolved.  Taste.  It should not be too bitter.  Add more vinegar and sugar if necessary in the same proportions.  

Ready to Pour.

In the gallon sized jar, layer the beets and eggs in the jar.  Top it off with the beet juice.  In the unlikely event that there is not enough, top it off with some of the reserved juice.  Refrigerate for a week before digging in.

Red through to the Yokes

Impatient Chef Tip:  For peeling too fresh eggs.  If your eggs have not aged for a few weeks in the fridge, and removing the shells also removes large chunks of the egg white, you can use a spoon to get the egg out of the shell.  Keep a bowl of water nearby.  Thoroughly crack the shell, and peel off the area of shell at the rounder end.  That's where the air bubble usually resides.  Carefully remove the exposed, thin membrane between the shell and the egg.  Wet the egg in the water, and inset the spoon between the membrane and the egg white.  Carefully work it around the egg.  Your eggs still won't be perfect, but you will lose much less of the whites, and it won't take hours.  

The source for this tip, as well as the egg cooking method, is Gaia Quay.  

The Impatient Chef's Bragging Rights: My Tomato is Bigger than Yours

The Impatient Chef's Bragging Rights: 

My Tomato is Bigger than Yours

Nickle Included for Comparison.

What would you do with a tomato like this?

And now,  a gratuitous limerick:

My tomato is bigger than yours.
My tomato is not from the stores.
It is red and its round,
and with seeds does abound,
and later on, I'm conducting tours.

The Impatient Chef Food Frolic: The Anatomy of a BLT

The Impatient Chef: Anatomy of a BLT

Some would ask "why bother with the BLT?"  It's so simple.  It has 3, no wait, 4, ingredients including the bread.  But, there's mayo, that makes 5.  You can put onion on it.  That makes it  BLOT (pronounced as written).  Subtract Onion, and add avocado.  That makes it a BLAT (see previous pronouncement guide).  If you add both onion, and avocado, it becomes, yes, you guessed it, a BLOAT.  Add some salt and pepper...  BLOSPAT?  Well, you get the picture.

So, let's start this anatomy lesson with a simple listing of parts:

Basic Parts

Okay, that wasn't the one I was looking for. Let me see...  Ah!  Here it is:

The Correct List

Let's start with the essentials.  First: the bacon.  The bacon should be uncured.  There has been research that has pointed to chemical curing with sodium nitrites leading to cancer.  The jury is still out on this, but why take the chance?  In my opinion, uncured bacon also tastes better.

The other controversy surrounding bacon is thick slices versus thin.  I prefer thinly (but not too thin) sliced bacon for BLT's.  I've had thick bacon come out of the sandwich as a slab when I bit into it, and I don't want to have to rebuild my sandwich constantly.  I have learned over time that slightly thinner is better.

Pepper bacon versus just bacon.  Your choice.  Both are heavenly.

Next comes bread: I prefer a good sourdough.  You want a bread without a meaty crust for the same reason you want thinner bacon.  There's nothing more annoying than having your sandwich self-destruct as you struggle to gnaw off the first bite, and the first bite has other ideas.  BLT's are not internally self-adhesive.  Why make it even harder?  This being said, if you use mass-marketed, sappy white bread, you're missing out on a lot of taste.

Don't toast your bread too long.  I find that a lighter toast makes it easier to keep the sandwich together.

Mayo:  This is where I part ways with most foodies.  The best mayo in the world, other than what you can make at home, is available at any grocery store in the known universe.  West of the Mississippi it's called Best Foods; in the east it's called Hellmann's.  You really can't go wrong with it.  It has flavor while not getting in the way of the rest of the sandwich, and it isn't greasy.  Use Miracle Whip only if you have an allergy to regular mayo.

Lettuce:  Romaine.  Fresh.  Organic.  Experiment with spinach, arugula, or even some exotic lettuces, but romaine, even the crinkly type, is always an excellent choice.

Tomato:  I prefer locally-raised, and / or heirloom tomatoes.  I want flavor.  In the late summer to early fall, I get them from my itsy-bitsy garden.  Other times, I try to find any tomato that wasn't bred for shelf life.  The standard, supermarket tomatoes (you know the anemic tennis balls that taste like cardboard aspic) are simply not worthy of a good bacon.  I prefer brandywine tomatoes.  Warning, the juice from these will run down your chin, but... Oh. My. Lord.  They are good.  Experiment.  Find your favorite.  Skip the tennis balls.

Extras:  

Pepper: I have found that salt and pepper are not actually extras, but some folks may think they are.  I keep two pepper grinders in the kitchen.  One is set on coarse grind, and one on medium.  I use the coarse on BLT's to get a bigger flavor.

The Other Ones

Salt: I buy kosher salt, sometimes from Pensey's, and sometimes from whoever carries the large flake, or coarse version.  I use different coarsenesses for different purposes.  For the BLT, I want a coarse flake salt.  It adds an occasional little crunch accompanied by a salty goodness that brings out the best in the tomato.

As mentioned before, onions and avocados also go nicely on BLT's.  They are truly extras, and many times serve only to make the sandwich fly apart when you least expect it.  Despite the challenge that they provide, they can still be good on a BLT.  I prefer red onions and ripe avocados.

A barely ripe, or tack hard avocado is not edible.  Some attention must be paid to learning when one is ripe.  Usually, you find out that avocados are ripe in retrospect, as in "Oh, this was ripe yesterday.  Now, its a mass of blackened goo."  Getting your avocado fingers is kind of like getting your sea legs.  You have to give it time, and fall down a lot.

I hope this tour of the anatomy of the BLT has been helpful.

--The Impatient Chef.

The Impatient Chef Fish & Chips Review: Trillium Café

Fish & Chips Review: Trillium café, Hood River, Oregon

As I mentioned in my first Fish & Chips review, it was on the 7th day that God created Fish & Chips, and set out the commandments for what makes them great.  I noted in my second Fish & Chips review that there is a such thing as a "Rose & Thistle Scale."  This is the benchmark by which all other Fish & Chips are judged.  The Rose & Thistle is a tavern in NE Portland, on 28th and Broadway to be exact.  It is the Mecca, the Shangra La, the Woodstock, and, dare I say, the CBGB's of Fish & Chips.  (I would add that my all-time favorites were made of salmon at the Malhat Mountain Inn near Victoria BC, but that restaurant was gone the last time I went there).  But this is about Trillium, so here goes:

Come in, sit down, put your fedora on the seat back, and order up!

The Hat

The Trillium Café is a long-time watering hole in the heart of the Columbia Gorge that harbors both hipsters and boomers with equal yeehaaw!  On the walls hang pictures of musicians from Bob Dylan to Jerry Garcia, to Jack Black, and on the western wall is a mural of the Wild Things from Maurice Sendak, complete with the young, pajamaed king, and monsters sporting guitars and martinis.  I was not able to get a picture of it.  I suggest stopping by to see it for yourself.

For the appetizer we ordered the Hot Wings.  We got the Buffalo sauce and bleu cheese dressing.

Wings Over America

The wings arrived looking so good that I forgot to take a picture before digging in.  The sauce had a nice zing to it, and the skin wasn't rubbery like it can sometimes get.  The dressing was bleu cheesy and creamy, and adorned both the celery and wings nicely.  Extra napkins were a necessity.  Fingers were licked.

Just as the wings were coming to an end, the main coarse showed up.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

The Fish Arrive

Albacore Tuna Fish & Chips?!?

Really?

Well, yes.

The taste is light for tuna, so it doesn't throw one for a loop.  The batter was fried to a nice crisp, and I only tasted the oil a little, and not in a bad way.  The fish was flaky, but not as flaky as cod or haddock.  The tuna gave it a unique texture.  All and all, I give it a 9 on the Rose & Thistle scale.  It was that good.

The Tartar sauce was savory, which is the way I like it.  There was just a hint of sweet.  No doctoring was necessary.  Its one of the best tartar sauces I've had.

The fries were okay.  I've had better there before.  They were a little limp, even though they were dark enough to be crispy.  They didn't quite pass the salt test (where great fries need only salt), and I found that ketchup was necessary early on.  It's possible that placing the fish on top of the fries is what wilted the fries a bit.  I don't recommend the practice.

All in all, the fish won the day.  The Trillium Café is a place to end your pilgrimage if you seek awesome Fish & Chips.

--The Impatient Chef