A baking and gardening journal. Mostly.
By Iron Chef Lefrovers
If you happen to be free this Thursday morning and in the Fremont neighborhood, you might want to stop into the Book Larder on Fremont Ave. for a talk with Gail Simmons, of Top Chef fame. She and the boys will be in town promoting her new book from 9:30 – 10:30.
I may just have to come down with a case of something.
by A.J. Coltrane
Photos from Hops & Props, a benefit/ beer event at the Museum of Flight.
Next year we’ll skip the VIP dinner. Too much talking by the speakers. Too little drinking and tasting. Ostensibly it was a Pike beer and food pairing. It was mostly a lecture, and a numbing one at that. I think we sat there about 25 minutes before we were allowed to taste the first actual beer, and the event ran over its alloted 1 hour timeframe due to the windbag element.
I’m always the most amped about the piston-powered planes. The black plane on the left is either the same model that the Red Baron piloted, or a very close relative.
A view of one of the buffets. The sandwiches were mostly bread. I think they might have attempted to be a little “classier” the last couple of years as compared to this year, but after some beverages I’m not arguing with a tasty corn dog.
A portion of the coat check line. The moral: Don’t bring a coat to these events.
I think the last couple of years there were more people that came to the event for the airplanes. It seems to have shifted to more of a beer crowd, and some of the lines were really long.
Having said all of that: I’d highly recommend this event — it’s probably my favorite event every year.
By Iron Chef Leftovers
I don’t have a great ego when it comes to cooking, but I am pretty good at it. Contrary to what some people think, I really couldn’t be a professional chef nor would I want to – I enjoy cooking and it is my relaxation. Baking on the other hand is not something I am good at – where I excel in cooking a savory dish is that I know how flavors work together, I can improvise and improve a recipe on the fly and I can adjust the dish during the cooking process to correct it, baking it’s the opposite. I hate that you can’t tell if you got it right until the finished product comes out of the oven and by that point it is too late to do anything about it. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the science behind baking and why ingredients do what they do, but I hate the lack of improvisation that baking delivers.
Why do I mention this, well up until a few weeks ago, my greatest culinary failure had been a tiramisu that I forgot to add the egg whites. I realized this after I put the entire thing together, when it was too late to add the egg whites, but fortunately, I was able to save it by putting in some cream and running it though an ice cream machine and I ended up with tiramisu ice cream. It turned out to be edible at least.
A few weeks ago, I had a few bananas that were well past being edible (they were black), perfect for banana bread. I remembered there was a really easy recipe for it on cooksillustrated.com, so I went there to grab it. Instead of printing it out, I wrote down the ingredients. Unfortunately, Mrs. Iron Chef came home as I was doing this and I got distracted. I picked up where I left off and this is what I wrote down:
I looked at the ingredients list and thought it looked a little strange, but I figured that it was right, so I proceeded to put everything together and bake the bread. It smells wonderful in the house the entire time it is baking. After and hour I check for doneness and pull it out of the oven and think, it looks a little odd. I finally pull it out of the pan and onto the rack and think, it looks really flat. I let it cool, it settles and looks like this:
I know at this point I screwed it up. I taste it and it tastes good, but the bread is so dense that it is practically inedible. You could probably build a house with this thing it is so dense.
So what did I screw up? I left out one simple but very important ingredient – the leavening agent, in this case, baking soda. The leavening is what causes baked goods to rise by adding gas to the batter as it cooked. When you don’t you get something that is dense enough to collapse in on itself and form a black hole.
In case you are wondering, here is the actual recipe, and I do recommend it. It is quick to assemble and produces pretty good banana bread. From cooksillustrted.com:
Makes one 9-inch loaf
Greasing and flouring only the bottom of a regular loaf pan causes the bread to cling to the sides and rise higher. If using a nonstick loaf pan, on which the sides are very slick, grease and flour sides as well as the bottom.
Ingredients
* 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
* 3/4 cup granulated sugar
* 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon table salt
* 1 1/4 cups toasted walnuts , chopped coarse (about 1 cup)
* 3 very ripe bananas , soft, darkly speckled, mashed well (about 1 1/2 cups)
* 1/4 cup plain yogurt
* 2 large eggs , beaten lightly
* 6 tablespoons unsalted butter , melted and cooled
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
1. Adjust oven rack to lower middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease bottom only of regular loaf pan, or grease and flour bottom and sides of nonstick 9-by-5-by-3-inch loaf pan; set aside. Combine first five ingredients together in large bowl; set aside.
2. Mix mashed bananas, yogurt, eggs, butter, and vanilla with wooden spoon in medium bowl. Lightly fold banana mixture into dry ingredients with rubber spatula until just combined and batter looks thick and chunky. Scrape batter into prepared loaf pan; bake until loaf is golden brown and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, about 55 minutes. Cool in pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.
By Iron Chef Leftovers
I really don’t like Alice Waters. Yes, she is one of the original eat local/sustainable gurus, but there are few people who are as full of themselves as she is. She loves to name drop and really has the opinion culinarily that she is right and everyone else is wrong.
I bring this up because there is a site, food52.com that holds an annual cookbook competition called “Piglet”. It is basically a head to head competition between 16 books to determine their “Cookbook of the Year”. Each battle is judged by a celebrity chef (red flag right there), with the winner advancing to the next round. This year, the finale was Momufuku Milk Bar Cookbook vs. The Art of Living According to Joe Beef. In case you don’t know, Joe Beef is a restaurant in Montreal (and currently #1 on my list of places that I want to go to eat in North America) and Momufuku Milk Bar is a restaurant in NYC, owned by David Chang, who is equally full of himself as Alice Waters.
I will be honest, I don’t own either book (although I do have Joe Beef on my Amazon Wish List), so I really can’t say which is the better book. My issue is with the comments made by Alice Waters. I figured this competition was in trouble when the write up started this way:
I am always so hopeful that young cooks with a lot of passion and talent will write books that help to transform the North American diet in a positive way. That is why I have to admit that I am more than a little disappointed in the two finalists for this year’s Piglet.
Fine you are disappointed because neither of these books follows your manifesto to the letter. You would think after getting her personal feelings out of the way, she would be a bit more objective. You would be wrong:
Not because the authors are not talented, both obviously are, but because both books seem to contribute to feeding our addiction to sugar and fat.
Thanks for playing Ms. Waters. You just lost all of my respect for falling into the “fat is bad” camp. This is for another post, but fat is not inherently bad for you (it will make you feel fuller quicker, which is why people tend to overeat “low fat” foods) but it of course depends on what kind of fat you are consuming. Do you realize that 1 tablespoon of pasture raised pork fat has more omega-3 fatty acids than olive oil, and don’t even get me started on how much better it is than hydrogenated fats. Fats also allow you to get more nutrients out of your food. Most of what your body needs is fat soluble, and the lack of fat is why many vegetarians end up with health issues, your body can’t process raw vitamin D without the fat to help break it down.
As she continues, she really has nothing positive to say about either book:
Sadly, it is in the ingredients that Milk Bar really loses me — it seems that they don’t have real ingredients in their pantry. I understand the creative appeal of turning something bad into something surprising but I can’t support the choice of highly processed ingredients when fresh and organic ones are increasingly so readily available. Across the board the Milk Bar recipes are too rich, too sweet, and just too intense for me. The fact that “Crack Pie” is their most famous recipe is quite telling.
…
Many of the recipes in The Art of Living According to Joe Beef are heavy-handed and high in fat, but not all of them.
Here finally just sent me over the edge:
Appropriately, the decision between who wins the Piglet award this year between Joe Beef and Milk Bar came back to crack, and ultimately, I would rather be building a garden from a den than to be an addict.
So basically, she votes for Joe Beef because of a single story. Nothing to do with how well laid out the recipes are, or the flow of the book, or, putting her feelings aside, how difficult or easy it would be to make the recipes at home for your average cook. There is a reason why Tony Bourdain said, “Alice Waters annoys the shit out of me.” I completely agree with him on that one.
by A.J. Coltrane
An improvised bread. I would highly recommend using a scale instead of measuring cups when baking breads — the process becomes dead simple, really nearly impossible to screw up. Once you have a feel for what the baker’s percentages should be (the relative weight of the ingredients), recipes aren’t necessary anymore.
| Ingredient | Baker’s Percentage | Weight | Approx Volume |
| Bread Flour | 75 | 300g | 2-1/4 cups |
| Wheat Flour | 25 | 100g | 3/4 cup |
| Water | 65 | 260g | 1 cup + 5 tsp |
| Sea Salt | 2.5 | 10g | 1.5 tsp |
| Yeast | 1.75 | 7g | 2 tsp |
| Sugar | 1.5 | 6g | 1.5 tsp |
Process: I kneaded the ingredients for six minutes in the kitchenaid, covered the bowl with a towel, and allowed the dough to rise for a couple of hours. I put a Le Crueset in the oven to preheat with the oven to 450 degrees. (This is the same process that I use for the Lahey No Knead method, referenced many times on this site.) The bread was set in the pot, slashed, then allowed to bake, covered, for 22 minutes. The lid of the pot was removed and the bread was baked for another 20 minutes. The bread was then moved to a cooling rack.
The postmortem: 25% of the bread flour was swapped out for wheat flour. The combination of the wheat flour, the 65% hydration, and the sugar made for a relatively dense interior. I think the bread may have benefitted from the slashing going a little deeper than it did — it may have allowed a little more expansion in the oven. Still, it tasted good, and was virtually no work, so I’ll call that a win.
By Iron Chef Leftovers
Seattle is on the short list of places for the next season of Top Chef. Seattle is really overshadowed by San Francisco and LA as a culinary mecca, but you have some really cutting edge stuff coming out of here (the Modernist Cuisine Crew) and some fantastic chef doing amazing stuff with local and seasonal ingredients. It would be a real boon to Seattle’s culinary reputation if they get Top Chef, although somehow I see an elimination challenge involving digging up a geoduck.
I bring this up because I read an article on boston.com that the Boston mayor is pushing for a twitter campaign to have Top Chef come to Boston. I lived in Boston for 12 years and I am back there a couple of times a year on business, so I am still pretty in tune with the Boston dining scene. Let me tell you, cutting edge and memorable are 2 words you won’t hear me use to describe it. Staid, stogy and mediocre are the ones I would use. Yes, there are some great restaurants in Boston (check out my review of what may be the best one here), but generally most places are generic and dated. Folks in Boston are not cutting edge when it comes to dining out nor is there the push for local/sustainable/organic that you would expect to see from a city with that many institutions of higher learning.
You want Italian in Boston, everyone will tell you to go to the North End. What you will find is 30 restaurants all serving “classic” Italian dishes like lasagna, chicken parm and veal piccatta. There are a few “trendy” places there, but their menus are equally as lackluster. You won’t find any place like Altura, or Assiaggio or even Swingside café there, and the North End is “the” Italian neighborhood in Boston.
If you want the best food in Boston, you have to go very high end, which in most cases excludes the bulk of the dining public (Zagat’s has the Legal Seafood restaurants ranked 1-10 and they aren’t at all cheap; everything in the top 25 is $30+ entrée type places). By contrast, the #2 and #3 rated food places in Seattle by Zagat’s are the sister locations of Paseo, where nothing is more than $15. The number 4 place? Mashiko, one of 2 sustainable sushi places in the US where you can easily fill up for less than $25 a person. Paseo and Mashiko are both amazing places to eat.
You want gastro pub, forget it in Boston. You won’t find a Quinn’s or a Tavern Law there. Great burger joint? None that I can think of in Boston (although there are a few pretty good ones around).
My favorite quote from the article:
But so far, Boston — a.k.a. the land of the bean and the cod and the home of the first gastronome to put cream in the chowder — has been terra incognita for “Top Chef.”
Right there to me is the reason to NOT shoot in Boston.
Top Chef has been to New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco and Austin, all culinary hot spots. Seattle and/or Portland are due. Boston, meh, not so much. Heck, I would love to see them shoot in Montreal before they shoot in Boston. They could have an amazing challenge just by dropping the chefs in either Marche Jean Talon or Marche Atwater and letting them go to town.
By Blaidd Drwg
You know you are in trouble defensively when a statement like this is made:
Sources said that there is a good deal of sentiment within the Yankees organization to go after Raul Ibanez — who wants to play for the team — to be their designated hitter against right-handers, partly because they believe he can give them some days of outfield play.
Although Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui are also available, they are generally regarded as unplayable defensively, sources said.
That is from an espn.com article on the Yankees trading AJ Burnett to the Pirates. Raul Ibanez was a terrible outfielder when he was with the Mariners and 5 years younger. I wonder if anyone in the Yankees organization has actually watched Ibanez play in the field. Damon, Matsui and Ibanez are all guys you don’t want out in left field for you team if you can absolutely avoid it. Besides the Yankees already have a more than serviceable outfield rotation with Curtis Granderson, Brent Gardner, Nick Swisher and Andruw Jones. Where and when do they think they will need Ibanez in that mix?
In other “old guy” baseball news, Tim Wakefield has finally decided to retire after pitching so long for the Red Sox that I believe he was Ted Williams’ last active teammate.
by A.J. Coltrane
Pictures from the February 17 game, Seattle Thunderbirds vs Tri-City Americans.
By Iron Chef Leftovers
Seattle Met Magazine has an interview with Le Gourmand Chef/Owner Bruce Naftaly in which he announced that Le Gourmand will be closing its door in June of this year. Le Gourmand is expensive. Dinner for 2 will run you close to $200 with drinks. Mrs. Iron Chef and I have been there twice and let me tell you, it is worth every penny that you pay.
It is not a fast meal; you are probably looking at 2 to 3 hours for dinner. Le Gourmand is French using Northwest seasonal ingredients. Chef Naftaly has been doing the local/seasonal/well-sourced thing since before anyone ever thought it to be trendy.
The menus change based on what is available on any given week, the ingredients are impeccably sourced (Chef Naftaly can tell you where any specific thing he uses comes from if you really want to know) and they are masterfully prepared, flavor bombs that come out of the kitchen looking like works of art. It is not a Tuesday night quick dinner place, but a place to go for a special occasion romantic dinner and a meal that you will remember for years to come. Heck, I still can taste the rabbit saddle in the mushroom sauce that I had 2 years ago at Le Gourmand. I can also probably tell you exactly what was in it from memory.
All of this artistry comes out of a kitchen that really isn’t significantly bigger than most people’s home kitchen.
Le Gourmand has been around 27 years with Chef Naftaly cooking practically every meal. In addition to that, one Sunday a month is dedicated to a cooking class (well two of them actually) which Chef Naftaly somehow manages to cram 12 people into an already crowded space and then shows them the secrets of the Le Gourmand kitchen, preparing a 3 or 4 course meal over 3 hours. The cost for this privilege, $75 per person, including wine, or to put it in perspective, the same price as other places like Dish It Up, charge for their cooking classes.
I have attended a number of these classes and I have found Chef Naftaly funny and personable, willing to explain everything he is doing and why he is doing it and more than happy to give you the secrets of his restaurant to create at home, albeit probably less successfully than he can.
While I hate to see a Seattle icon close after so long, Chef Naftaly has decided it is time to move on. He wants to write a cookbook, which I will be the first in line to buy when it comes out, and he has decided to continue to teach cooking classes, which I would be more than happy to continue to attend.
If you have had the pleasure in dining at Le Gourmand, go back for one last hurrah. If you have not, I can’t recommend enough that you should go before the doors close. You won’t regret it.
In other sad Seattle restaurant news, there was a fire at DaPino’s in Ravenna, causing 20,000 dollars in damage. You may not know Chef Pino Rogano or his work by name, but chances are you have had either his sausages or cured meats at any number of the fine Italian eateries in Seattle. Heck, he probably makes the best sausages in Seattle done by someone not named Batali and has been doing it for over 25 years (and I personally think Pino’s salami is better).
On the bright side, I believe Canlis is still standing and serving dinner and Paseo reopened after their 6 week vacation, so all is right again with the world.
by A.J. Coltrane
Recommended Game: Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 3.
Specifically, the Team Deathmatch mode, since most shooter campaign modes bore me. (Except for Borderlands’, which needs it’s own writeup.)
Why I like It: Multiplayer Team Deathmatch pits two teams against each other in a race to get to 75 kills of the opposition.
The thing is, the game’s leveling system encourages running around like crazy, shooting everything in site and getting shot frequently in return… but if I did that I’d lose every encounter to some tween jacked up on Red Bull and pixie sticks (with a liberal assortment of other recreational stuff tossed in.)
As a fossil, there’s really one way to compete with a Twitchmaster 2000 — skulk around corners and wait for them to run into your sights. Then blast them with a silenced weapon. Skulking has the added advantage of allowing for more precise aiming; weapons inherently become more accurate when you’re not moving much.
The reason this strategy works is because whenever anybody fires a non-silenced weapon they show as a red dot on the minimap, so they can often be seen coming and prepared for. That, and opponents are often so impatiently charging around that they don’t bother to check corners — they’re just rushing to the next highlighted enemy on their map, so they’ll just cruise right on by if you’re reasonably concealed and quiet.
The silencer is essential to the strategy for two reasons:
1. It hides your location on the map, so the opponents don’t see a red dot and sprint to your spot. (It’s one thing to show up on the minimap when you don’t plan to be there ten seconds from now, but since skulking involves moving a lot more slowly, so it’s essential to keep a low profile.)
2. It often allows for multiple shots at an enemy before they figure out where the shots are coming from. That’s a good thing too, since it’s hard to hit a sprinting target sometimes.
Note that this is not considered an “honorable” way to play. Etiquette says that you’re supposed to run around like everyone else and not be a buzzkill crouching in the shadows. The slow, stealthy approach irritates the hell out of the Twitchmasters. (I know, because I hear them bitching when they’re not muted.)
…and it’s part of the reason I enjoy the game.
———
The essential parts of the build:
Type 95 Assault Rifle – Red Dot Scope and Suppressor. (Use “Attachments” to allow for both.)
Perks – Blind Eye, Assassin, Steady Aim.
This build is invisible on the minimap. The Type 95 is a high accuracy burst fire weapon — it forces me to not “spray and pray”. The burst fire encourages me to be more accurate, and I’m able to stretch the ammo a little further, which is important since I’m not dying much. The 95 also hits hard — it’s a two-bullet kill at close range, so I can deal better with goofballs with (short range, high damage) submachine guns. The Steady Aim helps in close quarters, and in situations where one or both parties are surprised and not scoped — I hate losing shootouts just because I walked around the corner at the same time as somebody else who is using a better short-range weapon; Steady Aim and the Type 95 help to even that playing field. All around, it’s a build with few weaknesses, and it has the benefit of stealth. Hard to beat.
FlatbreadGarden 