Impolite Company

Killer Mac-n-Cheese

This recipe is not universal, as it requires a Central Market in your town (preferably across the street from your karate dojo so that you can far too easily pop in after class and grab a container).  CC has this incredible mac-n-cheese blend that you can buy by the pound and cook yourself (they also sell it in smaller cooked portions, great for a meal for one person or a side for two).  What I usually do is buy a pound-plus and then serve it on a couple of different occasions.  This is a super-quick route to great mac-n-cheese--feel free to scoff at me for using the microwave.

1.  Buy mac-n-cheese from Central Market

2.  Take it home

3.  Densely pack about half a pound of mac-n-cheese into a broiler-safe gratin dish--it will be slightly mounded but that's okay; just make sure it doesn't overlap the sides.  Turn on your broiler (I use my toaster oven).

4.  Microwave for around a minute-and-a-half until the macaroni is warm through and slightly bubbly.  It should reduce down to fit the dish as it melts down.  

5.  Sprinkle the top of the dish with a healthy layer of bread crumbs--I've used Progresso Italian Herb bread crumbs because that's what I have on hand and because I like the finer small crumbs rather than something coarser. 

6.  Sprinkle the cajun blend of spices of your choice.  I use a blend called Tchoupitoulas that a friend gave me--supposedly this is Paul Prudhomme's version of Emeril's "essence".  I'm rather liberal with it (as in all things) because I like a little heat. 

7.  Stick it under the broiler.  Since I use the toaster oven, it takes a little longer.  If you're using your oven's broiler you'll need to keep a close eye on it as it will probably brown within a minute or two--you want it brown and bubbly, not black and carbony.  

That's it!  Last night I chopped up some pickled green chiles I had on hand and this was yet another revelation.  If you like the green mac-n-cheese at the Alamo Drafthouse you should try this--I'm thinking that chopping them up and adding them after the microwave step might be an even better way to do this but I haven't tried this yet (the macaroni is a little too lumpy and unwieldy to try this before nuking).

Thai Cooking Class

Austin's Thai Fresh is offering a cooking class this Thursday night at 6:30.  I have other commitments that will not suffer being snubbed but I thought I'd pass the word, Learn About Thai Cooking and Tipsy Cocktails:

Jam Sanitchat, owner of Thai Fresh on West Mary and blogger behind Thai Cooking with Jam, has teamed up with David Alan and Joe Eifler, aka The Tipsy Texans, for a Thai food and cocktail class at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday.

Taters

At the extreme risk of being mocked as "Farmer Graham" by Mac yet again, I present to you the first fruits of my labors, the first crop of potatoes (red lasota) from my back yard.  As I'm sure you'll notice, they are a bit inconsistent.  And I have to admit that on plant number one I did barely better than double my output--one seed potato equaled two real potatoes (with a couple of starch marbles on the side).  But that's all right--I planted the spuds a little too close together and I didn't have the soil prepped as well as I would like in retrospect so I'll just call this a proof of concept run and then the next time around I'll dig my trenches much deeper, with a lot more good compost and with two rows instead of three.  But I gotta tell you, these guys were delicious cooked in olive oil with just salt and pepper.  A little more complex in flavor than a normal tater and what I like to think of as brighter and livelier than what I get in the store.  Of course, that could all be in my brain but as you can see in the picture, even the skins are a little lighter and not so dull:

So what can you do with taters?  According to Sam you can boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew:

Chicken de Provence

Today was a big project day and so I stayed away from all things Impolite.  I've been toying with the idea of installing blinds on some of the windows that let in the hottest sun over the summer and finally did it today.  If I didn't feel weird about taking pictures of my damned windows, I'd have a picture but just trust me that it turned out well.  Did some other things too but the major triumph of the day has to be the chicken I just baked while watching Dollhouse and not paying too much attention to what I was doing.  It was that easy and turned out that tasty.  I'm going to tell you exactly what I did and it will give you the basics for some tasty chicken breasts that you can alter as you see fit.

Chicken de Provence

Three chicken breasts
Preheat oven to 400 degrees
Mix a couple of tablespoons of herb de provence (available at Central Market in the bulk section) with one clove of garlic, two or three tablespoons of olive oil and salt and pepper in a medium sized bowl.
Coat each chicken breast with the oil and herbs by flipping them around in the bowl till all of the goodies are no longer in the bowl but are on the bird.
Place the breasts skin side up in the baking dish of your choice.

Bake for 20 minutes and pull it out and take a look.  It won't be ready, so put it in for another ten minutes.  Pull it out and take a look.  It still won't be ready so put it in for another ten and then pull it out and take a look.  It'll be starting to look done and so you can check the internal temperature (though it probably won't be done yet).  It wasn't done for me and so I put it in for another 8-10 minutes and then it was golden brown and delicious.  If I'd had a good Meyer lemon at this point I would have finished it by squeezing half a lemon over the three breasts but I didn't so I didn't.  But you might could if you wanted to.

Credit where credit is due--I took the timing and the temperature setting from a recipe in The Joy of Cooking (my latest and greatest cookbook purchase) but otherwise the recipe is mine--simple and straightforward and inspired by how incredible the herb de provence blend smells.  Why the hell do we so frequently screw up food by making it too complex?

Freezers!

As I've been approaching the beginning of the tomato harvest around here, I've been doing a fair amount of thinking about how best to handle the surplus.  I mean, it's just me and a boy can only eat so many tomatoes in a given day.  Plus, there's that bed full of potatoes in the back yard (currently the size of marbles and so I'm still not entirely certain they'll make it to a reasonable size) that I need to figure out how to address when they're ready to be harvested.  So I've been thinking about the freezer (especially since I don't want to jump headlong into canning just yet--maybe in the fall) and the need to clear it out and make room for an organized bounty of tomatoes, tomato sauce and potatoes in various forms.  Interestingly enough, Mark Bittman has a new post on better using your freezer, Freeze that Thought:

But if you conscientiously use the freezer in two ways, you’ll value it as never before. The first: take raw ingredients you have too much of — or whose life you simply wish to prolong — and freeze them. The second: take things you’ve already cooked — basics like stock, beans, grains and the like, or fully cooked dishes — and freeze them.

To the extent that you do both of these tasks regularly, and keep your freezer organized, you’ll make your cooking cheaper, more efficient and faster.

Raw Milk Survey

A friend of mine just recently lost her shot at a supply of raw milk when the State of Texas stepped in against the producer--in this case, I guess they stepped in against the cow and its majority owners since my friend owned a share in the cow, a loophole used by raw milk folks so that they can get around some of the regulatory barriers.  So I know there are raw milk people out there, I'm just not sure if any of them read this blog.  If so, there's a survey of raw milk consumers over at The Ethicurean that one of the posters is trying to get people to respond to in view of a presentation at an upcoming symposium looking at raw milk.  The post is Take the Raw Milk Consumer Survey:

As many as 3% of consumers may prefer their milk unpasteurized, a growing trend that has spurred federal legislation to allow raw milk to cross state lines. As demand grows, we have seen an increase in raw milk blogs, regulatory action in states such as Connecticut and California, and even an increase in raw milk conferences and conference panels. The raw milk discussion remains polarizing. Of the two prominent raw milk symposiums so far this year, one was made up exclusively of raw milk opponents and sponsored by the International Association for Food Protection, and the other was made up exclusively of raw milk advocates.

"Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about"--Troy McClure, "Meat and You, Partners in Freedom."  (Thanks, Serious Eats!)

An Essay on Healthy Eating

It's more than just picking up "organic" products, it involves making the shift away from overly processed foods and the average two pounds of animal products that we consume every day (can that be true?) and to more fruits, vegetables and grains, whether they're organic or not.  At least that's what Mark Bittman of the New York Times writes and I tend to agree with him.  Granted, I favor organics, particularly when it comes to dairy products and I've got a thing for locally produced stuff.  But my love of the local has a lot of different reasons behind it, some related to economics, some to protecting food supply and some just based on quality issues.

The most efficient and far-reaching change we can make in our eating habits that will help our personal health and the health of the planet is to shift away from eating huge amounts of meat everyday.  I still hit the Whataburger now and again and I'll probably never stop eating meat altogether because it's a good treat and it also provides things that are hard to get otherwise without a fair amount of menu planning.  But I have largely turned away from meat as a primary source of calories and I feel a whole lot better as a result.  But why listen to me, I'd like to invite you to read the full essay by Bittman that the following snippet is taken from, Eating Food That's Better for You, Organic or Not:

To eat well, says Michael Pollan, the author of “In Defense of Food,” means avoiding “edible food-like substances” and sticking to real ingredients, increasingly from the plant kingdom. (Americans each consume an average of nearly two pounds a day of animal products.) There’s plenty of evidence that both a person’s health — as well as the environment’s — will improve with a simple shift in eating habits away from animal products and highly processed foods to plant products and what might be called “real food.” (With all due respect to people in the “food movement,” the food need not be “slow,” either.)

From these changes, Americans would reduce the amount of land, water and chemicals used to produce the food we eat, as well as the incidence of lifestyle diseases linked to unhealthy diets, and greenhouse gases from industrial meat production. All without legislation.

The Deadly Hamburger

Zoinks!  A new study is out saying that folks who eat 4 ounces of red meat, which includes both beef and pork, have a an increased chance of mortality within the next ten years of up to 30%.  Four ounces.  That's a quarter of a pound, which means a Quarter Pounder (or a Royale with Cheese**).  Jill Richardson wrote about the original story, which was in the Washington Post, over at La Vida Locavore and had this to say about the situation, Red Meat Kills:

This doesn't come as a surprise to me, but it's always nice to back up hunches with facts. What I think WILL be surprising to a lot of people is how little red meat (4 oz/day) made a difference. Four ounces is within the Food Pyramid's guidelines for how much meat you should eat daily, although they do encourage you to "choose [fish, nuts, and seeds] frequently instead of meat or poultry." (The Food Pyramid does NOT tell you to avoid beef - just "choose lean cuts" of beef.)

So put down that burger!  But keep in mind that this doesn't really mean that if you eat a burger a day you're going to die within ten years but that your chances of doing so increase.

**Jules: Well, if you like burgers give 'em a try sometime. I can't usually get 'em myself because my girlfriend's a vegitarian which pretty much makes me a vegetarian. But I do love the taste of a good burger. Mm-mm-mm. You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in France?
Brett: No.
Jules: Tell 'em, Vincent.
Vincent: A Royale with cheese.
Jules: A Royale with cheese! You know why they call it that?
Brett: Because of the metric system?
Jules: Check out the big brain on Brett! You're a smart motherfucker. That's right. The metric system. What's in this?
Brett: Sprite.
Jules: Sprite, good. You mind if I have some of your tasty beverage to wash this down?
Brett: Go right ahead.
Jules: Ah, hit the spot.

Mmmmmm, IMDb!

Rocket Omelet

I have a tendency to throw things together that happen to be in the fridge in a seemingly haphazard fashion at times.  Especially for breakfast, when I've pushed the envelope and spent more time on the computer without eating than I should have.  And the brain starts to fuzz out and I start typing gibberish.  That happened last week so I wandered downstairs, looked in the fridge and realized I didn't have any tortillas for my normal basic breakfast taco.  I panicked.

Looking through the fridge I saw an unused bag of arugula (or "rocket" which I've taken to calling it in my mind 'cause it sounds so funny--hence the title of this post), a chunk of pepper cheddar cheese leftover from an event at the dojo, and some eggs.  I did the math and figured out I could have an omelet in my belly in about four minutes and so the decision was made.  Butter in the pan, eggs beaten in the scrambling mug, rocket washed, cheese sliced;  then the eggs are in the pan, swirled around for a nice round coverage (it's a little six inch pan, perfect for a one-egg omelet) and wait till the egg is firm with no more runniness (which means there's some nice browning on the other side I can't see), lay down the cheese first so it has a chance to melt, toss on the rocket, wait just long enough for it to wilt around the edges and then fold onto a plate.  Budda-bing, budda-boom--breakfast is served, faster than a drive-thru window.

Something Green with Potatoes

Note:  this post is not about Shane MacGowan's teeth.  I'm just sayin'.

I ran across a recipe for Green Mashed Potatoes via Mark Bitten, who writes a food column at The Times a few weeks ago and thought to myself that it sounded interesting.  So last week, I had a bunch of collards and kale sitting around looking bored so I ran out and bought a couple of russets and decided to give it a try.  It turned out very well, though I did make some changes to the recipe along the way. 

I didn't trust mashed potatoes without more fat in them (I inexplicably failed to use the proper amount of olive oil and so they were pretty dry) and so I added in a cup of chicken stock.  I also find it very difficult to imagine eating greens without plenty of garlic and then, of course, how can you have garlic without onions, so I sauteed a half a yellow onion I had on hand and added in some green onions for good measure.  And nothing goes with greens quite so well as crumbled bacon, so I cooked up a couple of slices and crumbled it up and added it to the recipe.  Plus, I had some Monterrey Jack cheese sitting around and so I added five or six ounces of shredded Jack to the potatoes.

Despite the possible Italian provenance of the recipe, it seemed quite appropriate for St. Patrick's day.

Speaking of MacGowan and The Pogues:

Live Shrimp!

I've been a dork most of my life.  Take the title to this post, for instance.  When I was on Spring Break from WOLBI I went to Florida with a couple of friends.  Along the way, we passed any number of "live shrimp" signs and somewhere along the line we began to read them as revolutionary exhortations rather than commercial propositions.  It may not make sense without hearing it, but the signs were trying to say "live" with a long "i" sound (like in the word "bite") and we were subverting this intent by reading it with a short "i" sound (as in the word "give").  Che Tempura and the Society for a Democratic Shrimp Society!  Chant along with me:  nerds, nerds, nerds, nerds, nerds... 

What kind of shrimp do you buy when you go out to eat?  Me, I don't usually give it much thought though I often have these niggling doubts in the back of my mind that maybe some shrimp are better than others (actually, it's a little more informed than that--I know many of the farming practices are bad but haven't really looked at all the reasons why).  I just ran across an article that gives a pretty good breakdown of why shrimp farming practices are pretty bad, Choosing Wisely:  Shrimp:

While shrimp farming sounds good on paper, in practice it is riddled with problems. Primarily, the problems come from the high concentrations of shrimp that are farmed in one area. This high-concentration scenario makes these shrimp farms equivalent to aquatic Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), with many of the same problems as their terrestrial cousins: 1) toxic levels of concentrated waste, 2) problems with infection leading to the administration of antibiotics, antifungals, and other chemicals, 3) destruction of the surrounding habitat to produce or collect adequate food supplies, and 4) the direct destruction of fragile mangrove swamps and other coastal areas for farms. While many of these issues have been addressed by certain shrimp operators, as a rule the farms are incredibly destructive. Wild shrimp are a much better bet.

I like that the author ends by putting the argument into some context and showing different levels of concern with different shrimp populations.  We should also take into account the amount of petrochemical input to get out there and catch the shrimp.  Some day we'ere going to get to the point as a planet where eating animal flesh truly is a luxury and is priced accordingly.  I'm certainly not ahead of the curve on this; though I have cut back a great deal it's something I continue to think about and consider.

OJ: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

Not Simpson, the juice (no, no, no, not "The Juice", the juice).

Most of us are learning the lesson over and over again that if it's in a carton, a can or box, it's probably not terribly natural and it probably isn't nearly as good for us as the packaging might imply.  Well, you know, except for orange juice.  OJ isn't just for breakfast anymore and anything that looks as damned cheerful as OJ has to be good for you, right?  It's as wholesome as Anita Bryant (oops, bad example).  It's as wholesome as a good breakfast to start your day! 

But OJ isn't the exception to the rule, as Alissa Hamilton has set out to show in her new book, Squeezed:  What You Don't Know about Orange Juice and she talked about it in the Boston Globe recently, Q&A with Alissa Hamilton:

HAMILTON: It's a heavily processed product. It's heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

Austin Restaurant Week

It's coming!  Starting Sunday, Austin Restaurant Week begins and will run March 1-4th and 8-11th.  Restaurant Week is a chance to focus on some of the best Austin restaurants, with each of them offering a three-course meal for either $25 or $35.  Looking at the restaurant list, "best" restaurants seems to largely mean expensive high style joints, places that are generally out of my budget.  But if you you've got some extra cash lying around and there's one of these places that you'd like to try for a change, the fixed price might bring some of them a little bit more down to earth.  There are a couple of more reasonably priced spots on the list, such as The Woodland and Botticelli's (though they've gone with the $35 menu for this event, I've eaten there before without breaking the bank).

If you're interested, check out the restaurant list here and you can click on their Restaurant Week menu:  participants.

Weird, Tasty Vegetable Combination

I think I should insert here at the beginning that the combo seemed weird to me because I'd never seen it before.  Maybe you guys eat it all the time?

I generally stick to the tried and true combinations when it comes to cooking around the house:  spinach, tomatoes and kalamata olives love to hang out together, you bring out the best in leafy greens by adding some bacon and onion to the mix, you know, that kind of thing.  But a little while ago I was hungry (and feeling kind of stupid for want of food) and wandered downstairs to the kitchen to see what I could see. 

What I could see was a whole lot of vegetables on the lower shelf of my fridge, plus more veggies in the crisper drawers.  And no apparent theme to tie anything together, no real classic fall-back combinations.  For want of anything better to do, I julienned some carrots, sliced up the white portion of some green onions longways, and chopped up some collards.  I sauteed them in some butter (first the carrots, then the onions and then threw the collards in at the end) and a little salt and pepper.  After the carrots and onions were just a little bit brown, I threw in some cooked penne pasta that was sitting around in the fridge with nothing to do and as soon as that was heated thru, I ate lunch.  It was surprisingly tasty for such an ad hoc combination. 

50 Best Food Blogs

This is not my list and I make no claims as to whether it's "locavore cool" or if it meets any sustainability threshold.  Hells bells, I just like food and this seems like a pretty cool list of places to learn more about it.  As someone notes in a comment at La Vida, if you want politics mixed in with your food blogs, you'll probably need to go elsewhere (such as La Vida).  If you don't like some of the components of recipes, use your noggin and re-source them to something local.  Just enjoy them.  Tip of the biggest possible hat you could imagine (or maybe a tip of Aretha's Inaugural Hat) to the beautiful people at La Vida Locavore for pointing the way and hip-hip etcetera to The Times Online for putting together their list of 50 of the World's Best Food Blogs.  Go there and eat, drink and be merry:

Real Ale Brewing Company

There's an article up on Austin360 about the fine people who brew my beer of choice, Rio Blanco Pale Ale.  They also brew up a number of other tasty beverages but I always go back to the pale ale--it goes great with Texas 42 and all kinds of food, too, Blanco Brewery Keeps it Real:

Since moving from the Blanco town square to a custom-built brewery on the edge of town a couple of years back, Real Ale has grown steadily, about 100 percent per year, according to Farbstein. Its Firemans No. 4 blonde ale — the first batch brewed at the new brewery — was a solid hit with thirsty Texans from the beginning and now accounts for about 60 percent of all the product Real Ale ships. They're brewing twice a day three days a week, employ 19 people full time and have designs on expanding into craft soda, distilled spirits and around-the-clock operations. By any measure, Real Ale has become a significant presence on Texas' craft beer landscape, brewing everything from the light and refreshing Firemans to Sisyphus, a sublime seasonal barley wine.

By the way, thanks to the Thursday night guys for getting me hooked on Rio Blanco.

Grass Fed Beef

Just as a little PSA for those of us in Austin--the People's Pharmacy carries a decent selection of cuts of beef from Ross's Farm.  They give a very good breakdown of why grass fed is the way to go with beef on this page of their website:  Why Betsy Ross Beef?  As they say on their "Vision" page:

We want to produce healthy, excellent meats for our family, friends, and customers, to return the land to a balanced state in terms of soil fertility, quality forages, animal health and enhanced quality of our lives.

Then we want to be able to sustain this balance and it's profitability. We have just begun the journey. The way is not clear and it is not easy. We owe our thanks to those who have purchased our Grass-fed beef and to many who have helped us at the farm. We admire those who are ahead of us in this journey and hope to learn much more as we continue.

Many thanks to Texas Locavore for consistently reminding us how many great, fresh, local options we have in the Austin area when it comes to good food.  Check them out when you're wondering what's good and local.

Good Smeagol Always Helps

There once was an incident involving some "hard" boiled eggs at a Seder celebration in the not too distant past.  It wasn't harrowing by any stretch but it was enough to be noticed and filed away in my brain.  Cruising through the list of things The Feed Demon thinks I should read for the last time today I hit this headline, Another Way to Boil Eggs.  Cool.  Which meant that there must be another column out there entitled How to Boil an Egg.  The existence of these two articles was enough to raise a little cross reference alert in my brain, triggering a quick look-up in the archives and a memory of The Incident.  So, in the spirit of cough-choke-Gollum offering the Hobbitses a nice wriggling fishes, I hope that this treasure trove of egg boiling information will prove helpful to a Reader who shall rename Nameless. 

Newflower Farmers Market Opens in Austin

I just got back from visiting the newest grocery store in my neighborhood, the Newflower Farmers Market ("Sunflower" is the name in other states).  Today was the first day they've been open and it was the madhouse you might expect, with some radio station broadcast truck parked on the corner, a parking lot packed to the brim and balloons for the kids.  I don't normally rush out to embrace the new stores when they open but from their website I had the impression that they were trying to be the budget-conscious version of Whole Foods.  It may have just been wishful thinking because going back to their website now, there's really nothing more than a slight effort to draw that connection.  And you could probably make a similar connection if you stayed in certain departments--the packaged products such as snack foods, juices and so-forth are pretty similar in theme to a Whole Foods selection.  But for me, the heart of a grocery store is the produce and I daresay you wouldn't think Whole Foods from looking at their produce.  But it sure as hell isn't any Wheatsville!

Eating Organic on a Budget

What, should I start a "Lifestyles" category?  Nah, this is just a little blurb.  The Organic Consumers Association blog had an open question and response posting in their Dollar Stretcher column that lays out some good basics (and some more detailed and complex) ways to buy organic on a budget.  I thought there was some good advice in there so I'm going to link to it, Organic Foods on a Limited Budget, and give you the question that started the conversation:

Does anyone know how to save money on organic foods? I am very health conscious and have recently decided it was best for my two young daughters and me to make a real effort to eat foods without preservatives and hormones. Unfortunately, recent trips to local markets show how expensive it is to do just that. I had hoped Dollar Stretcher readers might have some advice on how to save money on organic/natural foods.