Home of the Snarkmaiden

Indeed the world is full of wonders, and horrors, and I try to take note when I stumble across one. I've got several rattling and rolling around my head like marbles now, so I reckon it's time to share them out to make room for more.

First, a horror. I thought it was fine when my buddy Jenn got Seahawks logos put on her most recent manicure. That's cute, in a my-house-has-wheels sort of way (sorry, Jenn!). But a trip to the West Hill Fred Meyer revealed that those people have no business being given a free hand with blue and green food coloring in the pursuit of game-day snack sales. Yes, folks, those are bright Seahawks Green-and-Blue deviled eggs. You can pretty much feel the cancer cells forming just looking at those dyes, can't you? A finer waste of a chicken's fertility, I have yet to see.

On a more positive note, I have discovered that I can make hot buttered rum or hot toddy with Hal's new Keurig. Hal had been hankering for a Keurig pod system hot beverage machine for a couple of years now, ever since his previous employer got one at work, so this year Santa and I got him one for Christmas. I wasn't expecting to have much use for it, myself, not being a super big coffee drinker, but it turns out that you can run the machine without a pod in it to get a really quick cup of hot water, which means that with a batch of rum batter, some bourbon, and a cinnamon stick on hand, I can get a hot buttered bourbon as easily as a cup of coffee. And while I've been recovering from this nasty upper respiratory grunge the past couple of weeks, I have found the ability to have a hot toddy at more-or-less any time has been a real boon.

Hot Toddy Recipe

1 T honey
2 lemon wedges
1 jigger cheapass bourbon
4 ounces steaming hot water
1 cinnamon stick

In a glass mug, squeeze in the juice of your lemon wedges, add honey, bourbon, and cinnamon stick, and drop in the spent lemon rinds if you wanna. Add hot water and stir until blended. Enjoy. This is surprisingly tasty for such a simple thing, and the heat, the lemon, the honey, and the booze are all sovereign for making sore throat and cough feel a lot better. If you haven't got lemons, half a small lime works great too, as does half a mandarin orange. I imagine a small quantity of almost any acidic juice would work well.

And a while back I was having breakfast at the local greasy spoon with Hal and watching the silent Northwest News channel because it's the sort of greasy spoon that has an obligatory television set and I happened to be the one sitting facing the tube, and there was a commercial for some sort of special bag for microwaving baked potatoes in, and in the way of television commercial demos for dubious products, there were a bunch of other things this special bag was supposedly good for, including reviving hardened bread -- just slip it in the bag and microwave for a few seconds and it comes out magically restored. Well, while home sick and wanting something to eat I discovered that all the bits of baguette in the house were rock-like, and since I was feeling too crappy to go to the store for more bread, I thought I'd try microwaving the bread briefly just in its own little paper bag sleeve. Yep, this works fine. No need to add water, just zap the bread for 15 seconds or so, and magic, it's back to being soft if somewhat more chewy.

And last, but certainly not least, and perhaps equally chewy, I have long been experiencing various forms of discontent with the way the term "privilege" gets applied these days and Will Shetterly has a marvelous piece that distills a number of those discontents with remarkable clarity. Privilege is not just the absence of oppression, it isn't privilege if the majority of the population has it. Privilege is something that is experienced by a tiny minority, as a direct result of power and wealth. If you want to talk about how people who aren't oppressed don't always notice the way other people are oppressed, find a different word. But by all means go read Will's piece, and by all means also his take on recent discussions of author "privilege" versus the privileges of fanfic authors, which was how I tumbled on Will's earlier piece.

I've puddled around with trying to make a decent own dipping sauce for Trader Joe's gyoza, and never been quite happy with the result, but I think having knuckled under and finally added sugar, I may be closer to something like what I was wanting. Here, mostly for my own reference, and that of anyone else who may care, is today's recipe:



Pretty Good Dipping Sauce

1/4 C Soy Sauce
Juice of 1/2 good sized lime
2 heaping tsps minced garlic
1 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp Gourmet Garden Ginger Spice Blend (or comparable quantity fresh grated ginger, if you got it)

Whisk all ingredients together. Dip your damn' gyoza. Nom.

I've never found a printed recipe for the cocktail that a bartender at the local restaurant Cactus used to do. Last time we were at Cactus, it was no longer on the menu. Anyway, I was reminded that I should at least write down my best guess at what goes in it so it doesn't go totally lost:

Whiskey Tropicale

Bourbon whiskey
bitters
lime juice
mango juice or mango blend
ground nutmeg

Shaken with crushed ice to blend, strained to serve. Why no, I don't have any proportions. I think I have generally used a mixed mango-passion fruit juice from Trader Joe's but keep meaning to try with straight mango from Looza. I'm pretty sure the original was not a blend juice but just straight mango. No idea what whiskey they used, but I've been happy using the Bulleit bourbon.

Well, not bad for a first try.

I don't know if I should confess this (or if not, which part is more dubious) but I've never in my life made that classic of American cookery, the Campbell's cream-of-something casserole, or what I believe the Minnesotans refer to as 'hot dish.' But today I had one of those wild hare moments, and wanted something with rice, chicken, and cheese. Since I had some leftover chicken that needed using up, and a few sorts of cream of whatsit in the cupboard from the last time I had a fit of funeral potatoes, I figured, what the hell? So I looked up a recipe online, diddled it a tiny bit to fit what I had, and, again, mostly for my reference, today's experiment:

1 can Campbell's Cream of Chicken with Herbs
1 1/4 cans water
1 cup uncooked long-grain white rice
1 package Green Giant Antioxidant Blend vegetables
1 1/4 chicken breasts, pre-cooked plus whatever else I could pick from the carcass, diced small
1/2 cup shredded garlic Cheddar cheese
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan mozzarella blend
small handful fresh basil
some fresh-ground pepper

Whisk the soup and water together in an 11 x 8 x 2-inch baking dish, mix in rice, chicken, most of the garlic Cheddar, basil, pepper and frozen vegetables. If you're smarter than me, you break the vegetables up better before opening the bag. It's harder to break them up once they're in the soup. Top the rice mixture with the rest of the Cheddar and the Parm/mozz mix. Turn the oven on to 400 (hoping for eventual 375) and pop the whole mess in on a cookie sheet in case anything wants to bubble over.
Bake for 50 minutes or so.

All in all, this was tasty, but the rice was undercooked because I didn't preheat the oven. I should have upped the baking time. Alternatively, next time I could use a round casserole dish and partially pre-cook the rice in the microwave to cut the cooking time, given that I'm using pre-cooked chicken. Next time add more basil. Otherwise very worthwhile. Kudos, Minnesota.

ETA - 8/27 - Tried this again last night with pre-microwaving the rice for about 12 minutes. That works quite well (though I need to keep the water level lower so it doesn't boil over in the microwave next time) and the oven time can be reduced to 30 minutes, no problem -- could probably go less. Veg this time was the Roasted Red Potatoes, Green Beans & Rosemary Butter Sauce Steamers, and not worth seeking a repeat. Not actively bad, just too bland and starchy and not enough crunch or variety in the vegetables. But sometimes you cook with the vegetables you want, sometimes you cook with what you have in the freezer...

So dinner was particularly nice today, and I was especially pleased with my experimental variant on the Asian-style dressed salad:

1/2 Small white cabbage chopped small
1/4 of a sweet onion, ditto
1/3 bunch cilantro, ditto

Tossed together thoroughly, and dressed with a mixture of sesame oil (both regular and toasted), rice vinegar, minced garlic (jar kind will do, but lots of it), soy sauce, and tiny bit of sugar, all whisked together. Poured over the greens and tossed again with a goodly blessing of sesame seeds on top and allowed to marinate together while I made the schnitzels.

I was also pleased to discover that for pounding out the pork, a rolling pin works just fine in lieu of a meat tenderizer, which I don't have and don't want to waste precious drawer space storing anyway.

The cool tang and crunchy complexity of the salad made a really nice counterpoint to the fresh, crisp-coated meatiness of schnitzels. Panko breadcrumbs work a treat for the second dredge. Must do this again some time.

While this morning I realized that physics still works. I came to my desk to find my teacup from the day before standing in a pool of tea. Yes, I had left most of a cup of tea sitting overnight, but the cup is newish, and not cracked, so why the puddle? Well, the cup also still had the tea bag in it (this is what happens when I fetch myself a fresh cup at 4:30 in the afternoon, when the tea barely has time to cool to drinking temperatures before it's time to leave work), and perhaps most significantly, the paper tag was off the end of the tea bag string. Overnight, wicking had done its mysterious magic, pulling tea up out of the cup and over the rim to where it could then freely drip down the side. Presumably this doesn't normally happen because I don't leave nearly so much tea sitting untouched overnight.

And also this morning, on the way to the train, I spotted the first clutch of baby ducks of the season down on the creek. For a while now all the visible ducks have been a group of bachelor drakes, so I figured the paired ducks were off doing what mated pairs do, and now we have confirmation. They're just ordinary mallards, though the duck of the parent pair was some sort of hybrid, since she had a very dark head and a white blaze in the middle of her breast. And of course the babies are, inevitably, charming. I do really love my little walk through the neighborhood down to the train. Now that it's light again especially, there's always something interesting to see.

I like Swedish meatballs, but they're kind of a pain in the butt to make. Lately, though, I've been picking up a few little tricks to make them less trouble, and a lot more worthwhile. I guess sometimes you have to move to America to improve on a Swedish recipe.

The main trick -- the one that makes the end result so much more worth it -- I learned from Alton Brown: add a third meat. Lamb, that is. Normally Swedish meatballs are made with a half-and-half mixture of ground pork and ground beef. If you add ground lamb to the traditional combo, the resulting meatballs are a revelation. The lamb somehow adds meatiness and depth to the flavor without making the end result overtly lamb-y. I'm now speculating whether lamb meat includes more of the umami amino acid than other meats because it's just the savory, brothy, meaty goodness that characterizes umami that you get when you add the lamb. Anyway, it's just marvelous. I don't normally go into rhapsodies about my own cooking, even when it's good, but this added lamburger business makes for incredibly tasty meatballs.

The other two tricks are mostly about making the physical process of making all those itty bitty balls of meat less taxing. The two things I dislike most about making meatballs are the iceblock fingers from mixing meats, and sheer, mind-numbing tedium. My fridge keeps meat cold enough that hand-mixing the meats together (which is what all the recipes call for) leaves my hands so cold I have to wash them repeatedly in very hot water just to warm them up again. And while there's a certain zen pleasure in rolling the meat into small, evenly-sized balls, it gets a bit same-y after three or four dozen. The probably-obvious solution to the first: mix up the meat in the KitchenAid mixer. Works brilliantly. It's fast, produces an even distribution and best of all, no frozen fingers. As for rolling out individual balls, it's Alton Brown to the rescue again: use a tool. A 1" mechanical ice cream scoop produces nice, uniformly sized proto-balls that just have to be lightly swished into shape between your palms and dropped on the prep plate. No muss, no fuss.

Updated Swedish Meatballs:

1 lb ground pork
1 lb ground beef
1 lb ground lamb
1 egg
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp white pepper
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp Mrs. Dash


Place cast iron fry pan on medium heat. Add just enough high-smoke-point oil to coat the bottom of the pan lightly. Plop all your ingredients into mixer and run on medium speed until homogeneity is achieved. *Use small ice cream scoop to dish out equally-sized balls of meat mixture, roll lightly, and put aside on a prep plate until a panful of balls have been made. Drop these one by one into your heated frying pan, shake pan to roll around, and go back to making more meatballs. Continue periodically to shake the pan to get the meatballs to brown evenly. Remove when the meatballs are cooked through, and add the next batch to the pan.

Repeat from * until all the meat mixture has been used up.

Goes nicely with mashed potatoes, plus leftover cranberry relish and haroset.

So, I think I have uncovered the secret to getting the salmon hash right. The trick is in pan searing the salmon separately and then adding it back into the hash at the end. ( More details behind the cut )

In comments betnoir asks about a recipe for glögg -- a traditional Swedish drink in the Yuletide. As I mentioned to her, easiest is to just buy a bottle of mix from Ikea -- or Cost Plus, for that matter. But doing it yourself is about equally trivial. It's just mulled wine. Here's approximately what I learned at my mother's knee.

1 jug cheap red plonk of your choice - burgundy or port, usually
2-4 sticks cinnamon
10-20 whole cloves
5-8 whole cardomom kernels
1 cup sugar
a handful of raisins
6 blanched almonds
1/2 each thinly sliced lemon, lime, and orange

Pour the wine in a large cookpot, add the sugar, spices, raisins, citrus, and nuts and heat until steaming, stirring periodically. Heat at steam point for 5-15 minutes to let spices steep. Serve in glass mugs.

As with most other Swedish recipes I know, there are oodles of variants. Googling, I see that lots of recipes include between a 1/4 cup to a full liter of plain vodka. Our family never added vodka, but depending on how much you want to put your guests on their butts, you can add that much vodka. Lots of the recipes I see use just citrus peel rather than whole slices, but I think the slices look pretty floating in the wine, and besides It's How My Mother Did It. You can vary the amount of sugar to taste, and can either steep the spices in vodka overnight and discard the spices and just use the vodka, or make a spiced simple sugar syrup and then add the wine, vodka, and fruit at the end. I see at least one recipe including a bit of ginger. And you can play with how many or few citrus types you use.

But the basic core is this: red wine, Christmas spices, raisins, sugar, and citrus, mixed together and heated 'til steaming. The rest is endless variation to suit your tastes and larder.