This is sort of gratuitous food porn, but it’s become a mini-tradition that when my boys stay over on Friday nights, we have a little dinner party. Recently, I’ve been involved in a sort of man-boy love relationship with Jacques Pépin, except that we’re both old. And I don’t know him. He could, for that matter, have died already. I guess that would make it worse…
Well, anyway, my point is this: Julia Child was a terrible cook. Still, as an icon of the cooking instruction genre, I’ve worked my way through a lot of her material just to see what she could teach me. What she taught me was that she was kind of a brute in the kitchen. I made many (not Julie and Julia many, but many) of her recipes, and in general, well, they weren’t very good.
Somewhere along the line, many years ago, I also got turned on, so to speak, to Jacques. Unfortunately, out of love, I’m sure, he decided to caustically abrade my eyes with a cooking series made with his daughter, Claudine. I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but she should never, ever be allowed to interrupt her father when he’s doing his job. I wouldn’t let my son show up at a client site and start muttering “oh, wow…” when I sliced a tomato. Why the hell would I be slicing a tomato at a client site?! I’m a computer guy! See?! It’s crazy!
Where was I?
So, recently, having thrown in the towel on the late Ms. Child (which sounds weird, as I read it), I’ve started a little review of JP’s stuff (without Claudine… sacrebleu!) Most recently, I’ve been checking out his “Fast Food, My Way” series from PBS. He’s still got it, when he’s not shilling “zees excellahnt peelieur” for OXO or making tarts with packaged cookie dough. I’ve already got a few dishes lined up, and tonight, we went with his Mustard and Garlic Sauce Split Chicken.
Rather than reproduce the recipe here, I’ll let Jacques describe it:
You might wanna zoom up to about 2:20 if you want to skip the intro.
Zees eez… sorry… this is what mine looked like in the pan– a lovely, brand new 5 qt. jobbie from Cuisinart, sponsors of Jacques Pépin’s “Fast Food, My Way”! Coincidence? I don’t think so.
I, uh, forgot to take pictures along the way. Well, suffice to say, this was some bon poulet. I let it marinade in the mustard/oil/garlic/herb marinade for an hour or more, and the final product was juicy and tasty. Two thumbs up, if you will.
The sides were garlic mashed potatoes (potatoes and garlic boiled until soft, add a couple Tbs. of butter and some cream, et voilà! Super fine mashed potatoes) and green beans sauteed with sun-dried tomatoes and shallots. (Incidentally, Jacques makes this point, but it bears repeating: never put your potatoes into a food processor to mash. What you get out is… kind of like… rubbery plaster.)
Then, for dessert, we had these to work with:
Some leftover rhubarb from the pie, a few mealy apples, and a few mushy plums. Righty! Crisp, it is!
First, I chunked everything up and macerated it in about 1/4 c. sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, a sprinkle of dried ginger, and a couple scrapes of nutmeg for an hour or so.
Then, I drained the juices, whisked in a little corn starch (maybe 1 tsp.? I’m a bad measurer), and cooked it until it was thick in a cast iron pan. Then, I added in the fruit and cooked that for a few minutes until it started to get just a little soft.
The crisp was just 1/2 c. brown sugar, 1/2 c. rolled oats, a handful of sliced almonds, 1 Tbs. or so of oil, and a dash of cinnamon. Directions: Mix together.
I spread the topping evenly over the fruit, comme ça:
And baked it at 350F until it was browned on top and starting to carmelize around the edges.
In my other life, I’m a techie guy. I just enrolled in the Apple iOS Developer Program, which mostly only means that I can test my apps on an actual device instead of the simulator, and an app I was working on was to make use of GPS and the camera, neither of which is supported in the simulator.
No, it’s time to say goodbye to my horrible, horrible Motorola Razr and get with the iProgram. I am now the proud owner of another piece of soon-to-be-obsolete technology– the iPhone 4. Soon, I will be tweeting from cafes, wearing tight black t-shirts, rolling up my jean bottoms, and developing the perfect stubble beard. In the meantime, I took some pictures this morning to test out the camera:
Orphan Apple on Chicken Poop Steroids
This is one of the apples that I planted three years ago when a friend dropped off a whole bunch of orphaned, dried out, bare root trees. It seems that living with your roots embedded in a chicken toilet doesn’t do any harm.
Spuds Mackenzie
Just about time to hill these guys! Hehehe… I’m so funny. To me.
Deer Tongue Lettuce
Kinda does look like deer tongues, now that I look at it.
Witty Grape Pun
I’m drawing a blank. In any case, the grapes are starting to grow.
Fukisplosion?
If you don’t know about fuki, it’s a crazy plant that gets these huge leaves and semi-edible stalks. The Japanese love the stuff. I’m not so wild about it, but my ex-mother-in-law insisted I plant two of them in the yard. Now, the thing about fuki is… it’s invasive. Therefore, you need to plant it in a pot to keep it contained. Hopefully, it doesn’t escape the… OH NO!!!
Ah well, join the club fuki. Fuki, meet spurge. Oh, and this is alstroemeria, they’ll be battling you for underground dominance. Meanwhile, blackberry and clematis vitalba will go for the above ground strangle. Good luck, everyone.
So, there you have it, the pictures are decent– ridiculously better than my Razr, whose camera was essentially useless. Still, they don’t hold a candle to my “real” camera, so it looks like I’ll be toting that around a while longer. In the meantime, I’m off to get some of those thick-rimmed retro glasses and a Vespa.
One of the few things I recall growing in my yard as a kid was this patch of rhubarb back on the northeastsouthwest corner. Don’t know if it’s still there, but it seemed like a fixture over the years. I used to love breaking off the stems and dipping them in sugar to eat. So, when I got my own yard, rhubarb was one of the first things I planted. I planted two kinds, the red and the green. The red ones are fatter, more tender, and taste better. So, of course, the green ones grow like hell, and the red ones barely survive each year. Ah, well.
Today, I decided that I was going to use some of that stuff if it killed me. And just to ensure that it killed me, I made this pie, which with rhubarb, requires a LOT of sugar to taste good. I know. I wrote a whole book about how sugar was killing us. If you kept up with the accompanying blog posts, though, you may recall that I said I’d make an exception for homemade pie. Consider this is a big exception.
Rhubarb Custard Pie
2 c. chopped rhubarb
4 eggs
1 1/2 c. sugar
2 Tbsp. heavy cream
1 tsp. vanilla
1 single shell pie crust (like the one here, but add 1 Tbsp sugar)
Preheat oven to 350F.
Thinly slice the rhubarb, and put in a largish bowl with 1 c. of the sugar.
Rhubarb: The Green Kind
Allow the rhubarb to macerate for about 30 minutes. It should give up enough liquid to make the sugar into syrup.
Syrupy Rhubarby Juice
Drain the rhubarb and reserve the liquid.
Mix the four eggs, cream, and the remaining sugar well. Stir in the reserved juice.
Strain this custard mix into another bowl.
Put pie crust into the pie plate, and layer in the rhubarb.
Scattered Rhubarb
Pour the custard mix over the top.
The Strained Custard Going In
Bake until the custard sets, which for me was about 45 minutes. Try not to overcook it and make scrambled eggs out of it.
PIE!!!
Cool and serve.
Don't pass up the opportunity to add some more sugar in the whipped cream!
One of my most popular posts, to this day, is this one about Growing Potatoes in Tires. That was three years ago now. I thought it might be worth revisiting this whole thing. My opinion these days is that most of us are missing the point about this whole “hilling” thing.
Hilling potatoes is one of those nearly religious practices in the garden. People build bins and towers, of tires (tyres) and other materials and then stress out about making sure that the stems don’t convert from some infinitely extendable potato making material to hard, green, useless leaf producers.
The only problem is that there’s no real evidence that repeated hilling does much of anything beyond controlling soil moisture, giving the tubers room to expand, and blocking out the sun (thereby preventing the spuds from turning green and slightly toxic). That said, it would seem reasonable to limit oneself to one hilling after the plants get established (about 6-12″) and then go back to worrying about bugs and terrorists and stuff.
Consider this a request. I’ve done quite a bit of research on the topic, and I’m completely unable to find anything other than anecdotal evidence that obsessive-compulsive hilling or specially constructed potatominiums do anything useful. As I’ve said a few times before, the thing with potatoes is that they’re actually kind of hard NOT to grow. Once you plant the damn things in your garden, unless you get every last one out of the ground, you’ll likely have potatoes in that location for the next several seasons. If you’re aware of any studies on the subject, I’d love to see them. I don’t mean a picture of a guy next to a box with 50 lbs. of potatoes falling out.
Anyway, people seem to feel compelled to advocate for this or that way of growing them because, dang if they didn’t get a whole pile of potatoes when they hilled/didn’t hill/put them in tires/built a bin/whatever. To the contrary, there’s also quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that all these towers and tires and stuff simply act as hosts for rodents and diseases.
Personally, I’ve tried a few different things, and the most important factors as far as some years in the garden have demonstrated, are:
soft, loose soil
good selection of cultivars
at least one/MAX TWO hillings to keep the tubers covered, the weeds down, and the soil drained and cool
reasonable fertilization (not too much… nor directly on the roots)
Beyond that, just try to give them consistent moisture and a couple of light fertilizations throughout the season, and you’ll get a big pile of potatoes, and you won’t spend all your time second-guessing yourself or wondering if you just gave away half your crop.
Free Potatoes
There’s a picture of a big bucket I pulled out of the ground two years ago after I hadn’t planted any! As I said then:
“The best thing about these potatoes, besides their fresh potato-y goodness, is that I didn’t plant any this year. They just came up all over the place. Apparently, I didn’t get them all last year (and some made it through the composting process). It’s like finding a forgotten $20 bill in your jeans– except your jeans are dirt and the twenty is potatoes. But besides that, it’s exactly the same.”
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