The Cooking Critic

This meal is a little foggy to me because I made and took the picture over a month ago. But I do recall it made me inordinately happy. If I remember the rest correctly (and I often don’t), this meal took place after a particularly long drive from work, and I walked into my place thinking, Oh my God I hate traffic, I need a beer, and what in the world am I going to make for dinner? I made Toasted Ciabatta Pizzas with olives and basil, the after-work salve, as it turns out.

This little makeshift pizza made me feel like I was at some upscale sports bar during happy hour having a beer and a snack, but instead I was at home alone, and that’s cool too, because I made this dinner myself (always very satisfying), and it was easy and tasted good. Ain’t a thing wrong with that.

Have you ever heard of using bread to grate your garlic? This one was new to me, but I loved it. Toast the bread, then rub the garlic against it for a surprisingly effective mincing. And I’m sorry that useful information is so boring to read sometimes.

This is an abrupt ending, but it will have to do since I have apartments to look for (kicked out of mine due to “owner occupancy.” Boo!)

My friends and I are a little Hollywood-Forever-movie-night-crazy. We just keep going back. I like these movie nights for many reasons, but one is I can mess up my kitchen trying out a new recipes and not have to worry about cleaning it up before company. Also, it’s a good recipe tester situation. There are plenty of other foods, so if I bomb, it’s not like the group will go hungry.

I made Greek Sandwiches because there are many vegetarians in the group, and they’re like, GIVE ME SOME VEGTABLES—NO, I DON’T WANT YOUR MEAT! So I figured they’d appreciate these little veggies pitas. And they were in fact appreciated. Crunchy and piquant, there a nice healthy change from the traditional picnic fare and seemed in line with a true Greek salad, which I, clearly, am a huge expert on since I am ambivalent toward salads and Greek is one of the few lineages I can’t claim. But I’ve been to Greece, folks! And I’ve heard the cats scream! (There’s no escaping this horrendous noise in Greece for some reason. Screaming cats are everywhere.) In Greece, I noticed Greek salads rarely came with salad greens and consisted mainly of tomatoes, red onions, and cucumber with a big hunk of feta on top. And … (I include an ellipsis to add suspense) my recipe also contains no salad greens. (My talk of salad greens is boring, but I’m going to see it till the end.) Since my deduction powers are strong, I can therefore deduce, my Greek pitas=true Greek salad with the addition of flatbread.

I was a little concerned about the dressing soggying up the pita, so I filled them when we got to our picnic spot. But next time I’ll just save myself the hassle, pre-fill them and risk soggy pitas.

Paul Reubens, Dotty, Francis (or Frances?), the ex-con and the waitress all from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure showed up to greet the crowd. (Adam says to ask someone our age if they’ve seen this movie is like asking, Do you breathe air? I had never seen the movie before, and I think Adam might have been telling me I’m way out of the loop. And did you know Tim Burton directed this movie? Somehow I didn’t until recently. Again, out of the loop.) Here’s a pic of my pita, which is a fun phrase to say out loud (try it!):

I had no idea my thumbs were so ugly. I feel no better off for having this knowledge now. Sigh.

P.S. Recipes are a pain to type up, and I’m not convinced anyone’s actually using this blog as a recipe resource. Besides Maggie, who has tried this Spinach and Rice Soup, which is of no use to anyone now since we are all afraid of spinach, and these Risotto Pancakes. (Thanks, Mags!) But what I’ve determined is: I will only post recipes if they are repeats, which says a lot about the recipe, or if the recipe just blew my mind and I have to share it with you RIGHT NOW, or if it’s super-easy to type up. However, feel free to request I post recipes that I write about and you want to try because I’ll happily oblige if I know someone is actually going to cook it.

THE END.

I love my new air conditioner. Love it love it love it. It is my favorite thing right now (I love it even more than my new white dress that I got from H & M), and it was a long time coming. I ordered my air conditioner online in July of 2005 from evil Wal-Mart, paid far more than I intended once shipping and tax were added, and it didn’t show up until September when summer was over, and I had no use for it. I called Wal-Mart, full of self-righteousness and the knowledge that shipping a seasonal product to a person when the season is over is clearly wrong, and they should make amends.

They felt differently.

They only offered me a measly $20 discount, which they never made good on. And while I’ve heard all sorts of horror tales about Wal-Mart from the book Nickel & Dimed and the movie Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, I felt a little more outraged when it affected me personally. (That’s normal, right?) Therefore, all people should boycott Wal-Mart, if not for their general evilness, then for me and my tale of un-air-conditioned woe and sorrow!

So, anyhoo, the air conditioner was stored in my garage that September and was finally brought out of hiding when its services were needed last month. It should have been released from hibernation earlier, but previously when I opened up the box the air conditioner came in, I found its size and booklet of instructions very intimidating, so I kept putting off its installation. It took an outrageous heat wave and the help of my friend Rob to bring to fruition what should have taken place a year ago when I first ordered the damn thing.

I made Banana Bread after the air conditioner was installed simply because I can (also because I owed Rob an edible thank you, and I needed to make a July breakfast item for my blog.) The oven was on, the air conditioner was pumping, and I felt cool as can be … whenever I was in my bedroom anyways. My air conditioner doesn’t quite pump enough to cool as many square inches as it claims to on its box. But if I strategically place three fans throughout the house to push the cool air into various areas, you can almost feel a difference. And sleeping is way easier in a cool, air-conditioned bedroom than in a hot, muggy one.

Assessment: I’ve made and enjoyed many banana breads in my day, and I’ve determined that this one from the Junior League cookbook is the best. I don’t say that lightly. And since topping always makes bread taste better, I added a Streusel Topping from Family Circle. I blame the heat for the fact may streusel melded and never reached crumbly status when I mixed it together with a fork. My technique could also be at fault, but I prefer to blame the heat (and Wal-Mart too while I’m at it–why not? I’m sure I could think of a way to blame Wal-Mart for my banana bread inadequacies if I thought about it long enough.)

Also, did you know boys love banana bread? I ended up making muffins since my bread pan ran off (the floozy!), but at least this way I got to snag a few muffins for myself and share them with some male friends. Jim said he doesn’t normally care for banana bread, but he devoured mine and especially liked “the stuff on the top.” And Matt, who doesn’t like any food at all, more or less, said the muffin he ate was “like a golden biscuit.” So boys apparently love banana bread. Who knew? And here they are pictured on some hand-me-down plates from your mother.

Lately the phrase “coconut cream” has a strange, hypnotic effect on me—I basically feel compelled to test any recipes that contains the ingredient. This was the case with Lime-and-Coconut-Soaked Chicken with Cilantro, and it certainly helped that the dish listed only six ingredients total.

My recent coconut cream obsession has come from a fling I’ve been having with the piña colada lately. Frothy and potent, it’s my hot afternoon drink of choice and has made coconut cream a staple in my pantry. I also have another coconut cream infatuation: the Thai soup tom kha. Made of coconut cream and lemongrass broth, it’s rich and borders on buttery, and I find it pretty much impossible to go into a Thai restaurant and not order it.

My grilled chicken recipe did not list lemongrass as an ingredient, but it was recommended as an addition in italics. I figured a tom kha-like marinade couldn’t be a bad thing, so the marinade was thrown together one warm evening that was, despite the recipe’s original draw, sadly void of lemongrass. While coconut cream has reached staple status in my kitchen, lemongrass has not. So the marinade was made with only the official ingredients listed in the recipe proper (coconut milk, chicken, lime, cilantro, salt and pepper.)

Assessment: Since I had successfully paired a lime chicken with polenta previously, grilled polenta became the companion to this chicken as well. My friend described polenta as “filler, like yucca,” the latter being a Caribbean potato, more or less. And then he went on to say I best not rave about this meal on thecookingcritic.com. I lashed out by calling him an uncultured polenta amateur. He reminded me of his art degree and all the culture it implied. I harrumphed.

While the grill gave the polenta a nice flavor, I have to say I much prefer my polenta fried—perhaps this isn’t such a big surprise. The chicken, on the other hand, had a pleasant, mild flavor to it, but I had hoped for something with a little more oomph. Marinating it over night might have helped, and I think it would have benefited from being skewered next to some pineapple. But all in all, I prefer the similar-but-better-tasting Lime-Cilantro Chicken I made before and will probably turn to it next time I grill up some chicken.

My mother likes to send me forwards. Some of them are adorable (like the old tortoise that adopted the baby hippo left motherless after the tsunami), some addictive (pictures of celebrities as children), some occasionally pointless (sorry, Mom, I still love you!) and some completely invaluable and amazing. Ziploc Omelets fall into the final category.

She timed the omelet forward well since I was looking for something to fulfill my monthly breakfast recipe promise to the world. I’m sure the world would have noticed and been very angry with me if the promise went unfilled….

Ziploc Omelets may sound a little baffling, so a quick explanation: they consist of an egg mixture zipped up in a Ziploc bag then cooked in boiling water for thirteen minutes. And this may lead you to wonder, as I did, why would anyone make omelets that take thirteen minutes when you can make omelets in less amount of time the normal way? My short answer: the novelty of it! Also, maybe you can make omelets the normal human way, but I cannot. I can’t flip them without them falling apart. Inevitably, I give up and make a scramble.

I decided to make a Spinach, Tomato, and Feta Omelet, as described in The Foster’s Market Cookbook, substituting Trader Joe’s Artichoke Jalapeno Dip for the artichoke aioli mentioned in the recipe. Then I fretted about how much spinach to include because I am astounded every. Single. Time. When I see spinach cook and shrink to ridiculously tiny quantities. I threw a large handful (or thereabouts) of chopped spinach into the Ziploc bag along with the ingredients and wrote my name on the bag as instructed. This is recommended if you have a Ziploc Omelet party, as people are apt do sometimes (people are so crazy), so everyone can keep track of their personalized omelets. No one else was at my Ziploc Omelet party, but I wrote my name on my bag anyways:

(Bear with me as my omelet goes through its awkward, ugly stage.) Next, I put it in boiling water and worried about whether or not it would cook through since it was floating. I think I didn’t push all the air out of the bag as instructed.

But it did indeed cook. And as promised, the omelet rolled out of the bag just like the instructions said it would. As a bonus, I was please to see I accidentally used the perfect amount of spinach.

You may notice it resembles a small log. No matter. I slathered on some artichoke dip, topped it with sautéed tomatoes, and had myself a substantial little omelet log.

And here’s the inside:

Color me impressed.

Assessment: Despite my doubts, thirteen minutes in boiling water makes for a perfectly cooked omelet, and Ziploc Omelets get my seal of amazement—they’d be a great activity/conversation piece for a brunch. And I also liked the suggested omelet combination from Foster’s Market as well as Trader Joe’s artichoke dip on this, even if it was a bit of an intense flavor fight between the dip and the feta in the places where the feta had grouped together in the Ziploc bag.

Overall, I highly recommend this. Please let me know what you think of the Ziploc technique if you try it (or even if you don’t.)

I had already started a story in my head about how I called multiple grocery stores in the Los Angeles area asking about red velvet cake mixes, no one knew what I was talking about, and isn’t that strange? But as it turns out, red velvet cake, a mild chocolate cake dyed red and typically served with cream cheese frosting, is a Southern phenomenon, which baffles me since it’s not as if red food coloring and chocolate cake are indigenous to the South. And while I couldn’t find any reason why Southerners are partial to the cake, I did figure out how it came to be: the term “red velvet cake” comes from the fact that the cocoa used in the 30s-40s (or thereabouts as far as I can tell) made the cake reddish-brown. Modern cocoa has more alkaline in it and no longer produces this color, so red dye is added to achieve the hue instead. (Thank you Wikepedia.)

But I doubt my brother cared about the historical and cultural relevance of the red velvet cake when he requested it every year for his birthday growing up. Today he turns 28. I was going to use red velvet cake mix to make some cakey cookies (I’ve done this before with lemon cake mix), and ship them to him. But since California doesn’t carry red velvet cake mix, he got Heath Bar Chocolate Chip Cookies instead, mainly because I’ve been wanting to try them.

Still, I did have Michael in mind. I called Mom and Dad and quizzed them on Michael’s favorite flavors. Their response, “Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe peanut butter?” When I think about it, I realize Michael doesn’t voice his opinion on foods so often. I believe he likes a balsamic vinegar linguine with bacon and goat cheese that I make, but besides that and red velvet cake, nothing else comes to mind. His main concern when we made food in our family was the ease in making it and the ease in cleaning it up. In fact, when we were pre-teens and assigned to make a meal once a week, I’d go about making homemade breadsticks and strawberry chicken. When Michael cooked, he made something along the lines of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. His specialty was baked chicken fingers well-seasoned and doused in butter. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy them.

But back to the glories of toffee. The reason cookies with toffee candy appeal to me (and hopefully my brother) is because my family went on a toffee bar craze when we first discovered Skors. I’ve always preferred the Skor to the Heath bar, which is why I used it in this recipe despite the fact the recipe is called “Heath Bar Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Perhaps I like Skor simply because I met it first, and it introduced me to the world of toffee. But I’ve always thought it tasted better too, and I felt vindicated when an examination of the ingredients of the two candy bars revealed Heath had more unpronounceable ingredients than Skor. It also revealed both candy bars are made by Hershey, which I thought was very strange.

I suspected Michael must have the same fondness for the Skor bar that I do since we grew up in the same Skor-obsessed household, so I decided these cookies would be up his alley. And here’s a picture of my brother pretending he can operate machinery. He’s got a bit of a Burt Reynolds thing going on these days.

Happy birthday, Bear!

Assessment (of the cookies, not my brother): When I first tasted a warm Skor Bar Chocolate Chip Cookie, I determined they’re better in theory than in actuality. The toffee distracted rather than added to what is primarily a chocolate chip cookie with oatmeal and walnuts mixed in. But I adjusted my opinion when I tried the cookies cold. The toffee added something more when the Skor bits solidified into a buttery crunch rather than when they were sticky and oozy. So my final verdict is: if you’re bringing cookies somewhere with you, than try out these chewy Skor cookies (an adjustment involving 3/4 cup butter and ¼ cup shortening might have helped the texture of this cookie). But if you’re mixing up a batch to eat out of the oven, stick to the tried and true regular old chocolate chip cookie—they’re hard to beat.

Maggie wants the world to know she isn’t a mooch. If you look over my posts in the last couple of months, it may look like she’s constantly stopping by on the off chance that something just came out of the oven, and why doesn’t she join me for dinner? But I must set the record straight. Not only did Maggie have Shahan and I over for a meal recently, she, in fact, had me over for dinner long before I ever returned the favor.

Maggie planned the meal, set the date and I said I’d bring an appetizer—the Vegetable-Avocado Salsa I made was an easy choice. I’d been eyeing the recipe for a while; the small picture of it in the upper left-hand corner of my Complete Outdoor Living Cookbook has been beckoning to me for a long time what with its festive colors and all. I even tried once to convince my non-avocado
-enamored mother to make it and bring it to a gathering because I wanted her to report back to me on how it tasted. On top of all this, I also had some Trader Joe’s avocados—despite my love for the avocado, I always have a hard time using up the four that come in a bag, and this salsa was a way to check one of my list. The dish required no oven either, a major bonus due to a recent heat wave and lack of air-conditioning in my apartment.

So I chopped and chopped and chopped the vegetables into fine little bits but left out the avocado initially because it makes the dip soupy if it joins the party but then sits around too long. I called Maggie and told her I’d be a little late because I needed to pick up a jicama on the way to her place. Maggie responded, “A jigga-what?” And I said, “It’s a bulbous, root vegetable that has the crunch of an apple but is mostly flavorless.” “Oh,” she replied.

I picked up my jicama and added both it and the avocado to the dip at Maggie’s place. And we happily munched on the dip then happily ate up Maggie’s red wine-themed meal. I’m not sure how I only just recently discovered intimate dinner parties are a great way to spend an evening, but I did. First we had cocktails with the appetizer, next we had wine with our meal served al fresco on the patio—it included a salad topped with blue-cheese stuffed mushrooms, eggplant parmesan and strawberries soaked in red wine sauce served over ice cream. As far as I can tell, the latter is the perfect summer dessert: wonderful, unusual and no stove or oven required (the heat has made me obsessed with the last criteria of late). After the meal, Maggie read our Tarot cards, which determined Shahan will never ever find love or happiness. I fared slightly better, though the multiple reference to “moving houses” made me nervous since there’s a For Sale sign in front of my apartment complex right now that I’m not pleased about at all. But the tarot cards predicted that in the end I’d be happy with the move. Perhaps my new place will have air-conditioning?

Adjustments: I used a jalapeño instead of a serrano chile but will try the spicier latter next time. And I used frozen corn instead of fresh since I’m on a freezer initiative right now. I ignored the instructions to make your own baked tortilla chips and instead bought some blue corn Tostitos.

Assessment: Shahan called this dip “a winner” and declared it a great fancy alternative to traditional salsa or guacamole. The different textures are wonderful: soft avocados, crunchy carrots and crisp jicama (of course, now I’m looking for recipes to help me use up the rest of the jicama). Be sure to salt and pepper the salsa appropriately since the seasonings help the flavors meld. Also, Vegetable-Avocado Dip is very beautiful. And while this dish wasn’t difficult to make, there is a lot of chopping, so I’m going to say it’s relatively easy with an emphasis on the “relatively.”

My father had a request for Father’s Day: a story about his father. Surprised, I asked, “A non-fiction story?” “Of course a non-fiction story,” he replied. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was so confused—people order up stories from me all the time. If I can create an article on bathroom fixtures, a boring subject I know nothing about, surely I could write a memoir about my grandfather, a man infinitely more interesting than bathroom fixtures. Still, it was a daunting task to pull off a decent gift of a story about someone so close to me in just over a week. But here’s Dad’s promised story. And here he is with me on the first day of being a father (or maybe the second)—he’d like you to think that he did all the work and my mother was just there to take pictures:

To give this piece some focus, I determined I’d cook a food in honor of my grandfather (who my brother and I called Daddy Drew when were young and just Drew as we got older). The foods that came to mind were: gumbo, mincemeat pie and dog food, in that order. Gumbo because of his Cajun heritage, but then, the month of June doesn’t exactly shout out for a hearty stew served over rice, even with the dank overcastness we’ve had lately and especially with the pounding heat that followed. Then I contemplated a mincemeat pie, a dish often made with dried fruit preserves and no actual meat. I was surprised when I discovered Drew’s affinity for this dish a few years ago, especially since I recently had encountered this dessert in Wales and was so put off by the word “mincemeat,” I didn’t even try it. I can’t say the thought of making one is anymore appealing to me now, although I’ve since tasted it and discovered that there were, in fact, no traces of meat in it. But if I’m going to spend time in the kitchen creating a pie, it certainly isn’t going to be filled with mincemeat. After rejecting making a mincemeat pie, dog food came to mind because Drew once claimed to have eaten it and that “it didn’t taste too bad.” But then again, Drew was known for tall tales. That and big sneezes. And an extremely competitive nature that kept my brother and I from ever beating him at ping pong. But since I wasn’t about to do any experiment cooking with dog food, I decided to write about carrots. Because he hated them, and I did too for a long time, and it was strangely bonding.

Carrots typically showed up at Sunday suppers at my grandparents, and Drew would simply ignore us when we’d jokingly suggest he eat some. I too turned my nose up at carrots for a long time. I think I refused the puréed version as a baby, which carried into an aversion towards cooked carrots and their mushy texture as an adult. I’ll eat cooked carrots now if they’re served, but I can’t say I ever go back for seconds. Raw or barely cooked carrots are a completely different story for me, but I don’t know if Drew’s dislike of carrots had nuances.

So I began my quest for a carrot recipe both Drew and I might have liked. I flipped through my recipe books and found a carrot terrine— “a ter-what?” he would have said. A response that it was a cold, molded pâté probably would have gotten an “I don’t know about that.” Then I came across a carrots Vichy recipe, which is traditionally made with water from Vichy, France. This would have been met with strong opposition—my grandfather was a man who fundamentally opposed bottled water since perfectly good water came out of the tap. Requesting a specific bottled water would have prompted stories about growing up during The Great Depression. Next I considered a carrot soup, a light delicate thing that I was surprised to find I enjoyed when served it at a wedding, but Drew simply would have skipped that course of the meal. In the end I determined the best dish to make with carrots was a carrot cake, a cop-out if ever there was one.

Still, my decision to make a Super-Moist Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting wasn’t completely void of logic. Drew was a man, after all, with a fierce sweet tooth; cookies tended to disappear when they were in his house, and he didn’t seem to mind the nickname Cookie Monster at all. I reasoned, too, he might have liked carrot cake since it has some vaguely similar qualities to mincemeat pie, both being spice-heavy and not overly sweet (if you just forget about that cream cheese frosting for a while.) Also, carrot cake isn’t strange and foreign. It would have been far easier to get him to eat a cake than a terrine.

True to its name, this carrot cake was moist, and my friends raved—thankfully since some mishaps were involved in making it (the frosting oozed out of the center and the top layer of cake started sliding to the right all because of the heat in my un-air-conditioned apartment). But would Drew have liked it? It’s hard to say. He was stubborn in both his likes and dislikes. He was opposed to anything unnecessarily fancy—the carrot cake is borderline on this front, made from the humble carrot but whipped into a two-layer cake appropriate for special occasions. Had he seen my kitchen after making the cake, he would have grumbled about how he didn’t understand why it was necessary to use every bowl in the house, but then he would have started doing the dishes without another word.

But I think, like the cookies, the cake might have disappeared when we weren’t looking.

Drew (1920-2006) with my brother

The writers of Easy Summer Food said that Pappa al Pomodoro, a Tuscan soup, “once tasted, [is] never forgotten.” I have to disagree. I’ve forgotten about it over and over again. It was sitting in my fridge for well over a week, and when lunch or dinner rolled around, and I started contemplating my next meal, I forgot I had a completed option waiting for me.

A little info on Pappa al Pomodoro: it’s a thick soup, served hot or cold, composed primarily of tomatoes and mashed-up bread. This may sound strange, but think of the bread as a pasta substitute. Oregano and basil add flavor . . . but not nearly enough. Still, it looks pretty, doesn’t it?

Assessment: Despite my lukewarm reception of this dish, I halfway considered posting the recipe because it’s easy and pleasant-tasting if not outstanding, and perhaps my use of canned tomatoes instead of the “ripe red tomatoes, preferably on the vine” didn’t do it justice. But eating it cold, I was reminded of Panzanella (me and the crazy words today), which is a Tuscan salad of tomatoes and bread. The list of ingredients for Pappa al Pomodoro and Panzanella are very similar, but Panzanella made a much stronger impression on me, so I’ll just save my typing for that recipe. Be on the lookout. And if you want to make a tomato soup, make this tomato-dill one.

Until this past Memorial Day, I’ve never attempted to make corn on the cob. There’s really no excuse for it, other than I don’t own a barbecue, so I don’t host barbecues, so I don’t make corn on the cob, which has barbecue associations for me. All the same, I think about making corn on the cob a decent bit—there are a few recipes I’ve often admired from afar, one involving a lemon-chive butter and another with a chile-salt rub. Since many of my past barbecues have involved one boyfriend or another at the helm of the barbecue, I’d run my fancy corn-on-the-cob aspirations by him first. Inevitably I received a stare that seemed to say, why would you make a lemon-chive butter or a chile-salt rub when you can have excellent corn just by throwing it on the grill or tossing it in boiling water? Or maybe the look simply said, please don’t make things more difficult than they need to be. But since boiling or grilling regular old corn doesn’t exactly capture my imagination, I lost interest in the project and couldn’t be counted on to assist with the corn. I typically ended up making dessert.

So when a Memorial Day barbecue was announced with no boyfriend in sight, I went about making the dressed up corn I’ve always contemplated: not one of the recipes mentioned above, but a Cherry Tomato and Corn Salad made from corn on the cob that’s easy to make, easy to transport and easy to eat.

Assessment: Despite the many eases associated with this corn salad and though it pains me to admit it, I have to say I see the old boyfriends point with this one. Fresh corn on the cob is really good, so why make any adjustments to it by adding a dressing that might be best described as faint? The taste of the salad was pleasant enough, but I think I might prefer my corn slathered in butter. (Of course, I also adore butter more than any person should, so you might not want to listen to me on this one.) But corn salad does have some advantages you may want to consider: A) It’s a great portable dish that requires no last minute prep and will keep you out of the host/hostesses’ hair and B) You don’t have to worry about corn all over your face and teeth like you do with corn on the cob, a difficult food to eat gracefully. Also, you could easily substitute frozen corn for the fresh and speed up this already speedy recipe even more.