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Cookbooks (for Rob from Brighton).

Anyway, Rob asked a question in chat that would have led to a long non-baseball answer, so I offloaded it here:

Hi Keith, any suggestions on good cookbooks for beginners? I’m not looking for recipes so much as I’m looking for basic principles and techniques–the how’s and why’s of cooking.

Here are a few suggestions:

  • Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition. This was my starter cookbook. It’s pretty comprehensive both in terms of included recipes and ingredient descriptions. The more recent edition took out a lot of useful content, unfortunately.
  • How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food. Another comprehensive-primer book, one I’ve bought for many friends who told me they wanted to learn to cook. I actually don’t own this one; I tend to only buy genre cookbooks now, like The Cuisines of Spain.
  • I’m Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0. I learned to cook primarily via Joy and from Alton Brown, mostly through his TV show, Good Eats. Food Network shows Good Eats reruns daily, so if you watch those and get this, his first book, you’ll be in pretty good shape.

Feel free to add your own suggestions for Rob below.

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Cranberry daiquiris.

Here’s the recipe, since some folks have asked for it. It’s from Bon Appetit’s November 2004 issue, but for some reason, it’s not on epicurious. I made one or two tweaks, including adding the cloves.

Be careful. You can get completely hammered on these rather quickly, and drunk cooks don’t make good turkeys.

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cinnamon stick
2-3 whole cloves
1/2 tsp orange peel
1/2 cup cranberries
1/2 cup light rum + 6 Tbsp light rum
6 Tbsp dark rum
6 Tbsp cranberry juice
6 Tbsp lemon juice

1. Dissolve sugar in water in a medium saucepan over moderate heat.
2. Add the cinnamon stick, cloves, and orange peel and bring to a boil.
3. Add the cranberries and cook until they begin to pop.
4. Cool, discarding spices, and pour into a glass container with 1/2 cup light rum. Chill.
5. Strain liquid, saving cranberries for garnish. Add remaining ingredients to pitcher and chill thoroughly.
6. Serve over ice, garnishing with drunken cranberries.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Cranberry sauce meets cranberry daiquiri.

I’ve never bought cranberry sauce. The stuff in the can is just weird – like Jell-O for grownups. I live in one of the biggest cranberry-producing states in the country. And it’s way, way too easy to let someone else do it.

Cranberries are culinary wonders – they’re very high in antioxidants, and because they’re high in pectin and acidic, they only need sugar and water to form a thick jam or preserve. Yes, what we call “cranberry sauce” is nothing more than cranberry jam or preserves. Of course, no one says you have to stop at sugar and water. If cranberry + rum is good in a mixed drink, why wouldn’t it be good in sauce?

This yields at least three pints, and sometimes as much as a cup over that. You can kick it up further with whole spices – leave a cinnamon stick or some star anise pods or a few cloves in the pot and remove them at the end of the cooking process. For smaller spices like cloves, however, you’ll probably want to tie them in a little satchel of cheesecloth. Finding them in a dark, thick liquid like cooked cranberry sauce is not easy.

Cranberry Sauce with Rum and Chambord

8 cups cranberries, rinsed, checked for leaves/stems
3 cups sugar
1¾ cups water
½ cup dark rum
¼ cup Chambord (raspberry liqueur)

1. Place a small saucer in your freezer. Really.
2. Combine all ingredients in a large, heavy pot or saucepan (a Dutch oven works well) over high heat. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently and occasionally skimming any thick foam off the top. Boil until the mixture reaches 220 degrees, or until a large drop placed on that frozen saucer and placed in the freezer for three minutes comes out solid. (Turn the heat on the stove down while you wait to check the sample in the freezer.)
3. The sauce can be stored in a sealed container in your fridge for at least three weeks, or you can put the sauce up in sealed mason jars if you know how to safely can foods.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Thank you.

(This was originally posted on Thanksgiving 2008).

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and thank you for reading what was originally intended as nothing more than an outlet for miscellaneous thoughts on books and a way to share notes on restaurants with friends of mine who travel. From those tiny, unambitious beginnings, the dish now reaches over 12,000 people per month, many of whom are regulars. I’ve written 400 posts (this one is #401), and you’ve left over 5,000 comments.

I feel very fortunate to have a dedicated and thoughtful readership, many of whom have followed me from behind the subscriber wall at ESPN.com to read what I write on topics other than baseball. It’s been a wonderful experience for me; I know I’ve improved as a writer, since now I have an obligation to you to finish every thought and check every fact (although I know I still make my share of mistakes), but I’ve also come to know many of you via your comments, via email, via Facebook, and occasionally even by meeting in person. I was concerned at one point that increasing my contact with fans would mean being in touch with lunatics; as it turns out, that’s exactly what happened – most of you are complete lunatics, and I wouldn’t have you any other way, because I am clearly a lunatic too.

So thank you for reading, commenting, calling me out when I’m wrong and backing me up when I’m right, and telling your friends about the dish. The site is what it is because of your participation and feedback. The BBRAA won’t relinquish the RBI until we pry it from their cold, dead hands, but perhaps we’ll make more progress in ridding the world of bad food and subpar literature.

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Bluefin tuna.

I’m never sure how seriously to take enviro-scare articles in the mainstream media, although this bit on the threat to bluefin tuna populations seemed somewhat well-researched, keeping the hysteria to quotes from researchers. The article refers to the northern bluefin tuna simply as the bluefin tuna and notes that it has nearly been fished out of existence, with the global population dropping by an estimated 90% in the last thirty years.

Bluefin toro, when it’s fresh, is among the best kinds of sushi you’ll ever have, up there with yellowtail belly and Pacific salmon in my book. Bluefin toro, a fatty cut from the tuna’s belly, falls apart in your mouth, like a very high-quality steak cooked rare, but without the slightly grassy flavor. It is, however, quite expensive – I’ve paid $10 a piece for it before and I’ve seen it cost more than that. I rarely have it, and if living without it for a few years will help restock the oceans, I’m fine with that.

Here’s what I’m not fine with:

Several smaller ICCAT members such as Guatemala and Panama had initially backed a proposal supported by the U.S. and environmental groups to halt all bluefin fishing for nine months of the year, and to crack down hard on violators. But European officials persuaded them to instead adopt a reduced quota of 22,000 tons in 2009, and 19,950 tons in 2011. That certainly represents a sharp drop from last year’s estimated global sales of 61,000 tons of bluefin tuna — and even from this year’s official quota of about 29,000 tons — but it’s still far above the 15,000 tons that marine scientists advise is the limit that can be fished without without the species becoming extinct.

You know, the Europeans do like to lecture us on environmental issues (Kyoto comes to mind), but damn if they don’t change their tune when their own self-interest is at stake. I often say, half-jokingly, that I’ll turn down my thermostat and buy a car with better gas mileage when Russia, Brazil, and Nigeria stop cutting down all of their trees. (Nigeria has already wiped out over 90% of its original forest stock. Good work.) Maybe I should add to that quip one about only giving up eating bluefin toro when the Europeans agree to stop overfishing it.

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Good Eats Baklava.

Last week’s episode of Good Eats, “Switched on Baklava,” was one of his best in terms of delivering real instruction, including:

* How to blanch almonds
* How to clarify butter
* The difference between cassia and true cinnamon
* Working with phyllo dough
* How to make your own rose water (okay, you really never needed to know this, but it was cool)

It’s a welcome turnaround from the season opener, “Oh My, Meat Pie,” handily the worst episode in the history of the show. I was a little shocked to see AB cut into his baklava with a paring knife since the knife’s tip would likely scratch the surface of the nonstick pan, but then again, I don’t see myself making baklava any time soon, since I can’t stand pistachios. Even if you’re like me and don’t ever plan to make the stuff, it was worth watching for a few good cooking tips, especially the part about clarifying butter.

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→ December 5, 2008
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BBRAA stuff (from November).

Three lost posts, which I’ll just consolidate into one:

So if you scrutinized the NL MVP voting results, you might have noticed two things:

1. Pujols was listed on every ballot, but one voter had him seventh. That was Milwaukee writer Tom Haudricourt, who put Howard first and had Sabathia and Fielder ahead of Pujols, as well as three Brewers in his ten names.
2. Someone omitted Ryan Howard entirely. That was Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star writer Rich Campbell, who covers the Nationals.

I’ll save other thoughts on the results of this vote – and tomorrow’s, which should be really interesting – for my chat this Thursday.

Edinson Volquez appears on three NL Rookie of the Year ballots, even though he’s not a rookie. It wasn’t even something esoteric like the days-on-the-roster rule; he threw 80 innings for Texas prior to 2008, and the cutoff is 50.

I think the truth about my rejected membership is that I failed the board’s intelligence test – I have some.

UPDATE: The three voters who included Volquez were Jeremy Cothran of the Newark Star-Ledger, John Klima of the Los Angeles Daily News, and Jay Paris of the North County Times in San Diego.

Other – um, harsher – takes: Dugout Central, The Slanch Report, Shysterball, Epic Carnival, Fanhouse.

It’s Pedroia.

Named on 27 of 28 ballots … not sure how I feel about his omission. It could go either way – an anti-stathead/anti-twerp vote, or someone like antone, who looks at production (but not versus replacement-level?) and sees Pedroia’s production as not really MVP-caliber.

UPDATE: Just found this fisking of Paul Sheridan’s anti-intellectual whine today about Ryan Howard not winning the NL MVP award.

UPDATE #2: Evan Grant is the one voter who didn’t include Pedroia, and he said he’ll try to blog about his ballot later today. He did send it to me, and it’s a mix of favorite players of both camps.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,
→ December 5, 2008
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Snow Falling on Cedars.

I meant to write up David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars over a week ago, but I got sucked into Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel and kept putting off the review, in large part because Cedars was so blah. It’s a heavy-handed story about racial prejudices on one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state a few years after World War II; a man of Japanese descent who was raised on the island and fought for the U.S. during the war stands accused of killing another local fisherman, and it’s not entirely clear whether the accusation is more than just racially motivated.

While the core story is interesting – I continued reading to find out how the core mystery would be resolved – the novel itself is clumsy and amateurish. Guterson’s prose, which gets plaudits in pull quotes from reviewers, is atrocious, particularly his dialogue, which might as well have been pulled from a Law & Order: SVU episode; there’s one passage where an atheist soldier tells a military chaplain that he’s an atheist, that he’s the exception to the rule about there being no atheists in foxholes … who talks like that? No one I’ve ever met, and trust me, Harvard was full of people who spoke in unusual rhythms and keys.

I also found that Guterson’s back-and-forth technique damaged the flow of the present-time plot line, the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, and the subplot involving the man who runs and writes the island’s newspaper and Kabuo’s wife, with whom the writer (Ishmael) had a love affair when the two were teenagers. The long and sometimes long-winded flashbacks decapitated the tension that Guterson built up during some of the courtroom scenes. He might have actually been better served cutting back and forth more frequently to keep the digressions shorter.

Guterson also overplays the race card. Rather than letting the main stories – the criminal case, and the rise and fall of the romance between Ishmael and Kabuo’s wife – tell us the story of race, he puts his feelings on the subject into the mouths of his characters. It’s certainly realistic that Kabuo and his wife would complain about racism, but the extent to which they bring it up pushes the book slightly into “preachy” territory.

As for Jonathan Strange, I’m just debating how high up the Klaw 100 it’ll be at the next revision of the list.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Chicken stock.

A couple of weeks ago, Whole Foods ran a two-week special, selling entire broiler-fryer chickens for 99 cents a pound, which amounted to roughly $4 for an entire bird. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts typically cost at least $4.49 a pound, and since the entire breast of one bird usually runs 1 to 1.5 pounds, it was cheaper to buy the entire bird and butcher it myself than to just buy those boneless, skinless, tasteless breasts anyway.

Of course, when you buy the whole bird, you get the thighs, legs, and wings, all of which have more flavor than the breasts do. You get the giblets, most of which I just put down the disposal, but I suppose you could use them for gravy if you’re so inclined. But the best part of buying and butchering your own chicken is what you get after all of that other stuff is gone: The bones, and bones mean stock.

For each bird, I’d keep the carcass (the bones and bits of meat after all of the “parts” are removed), the wings (not enough meat to worry about and very good for stock-making), and the neck (the one part of the giblets packet that I don’t toss) and stick them in the freezer for the next stock-making day. I also keep parts of various vegetables in a bag in the freezer – the top rings (not stems) and bottom bits of peppers, the white parts of celery stalks, etc. – that are all also stock-worthy. This avoids the expense of buying lots of vegetables just to put them into stock.

(If you’re wondering about that whole butchering-the-chicken part, I’d eventually like to shoot a video I can use here to demonstrate how easy it is. I’ve done it with a timer and I can butcher a chicken into its eight pieces – two each of breasts, thighs, legs, and wings – in about four and a half minutes. That’s under five minutes to get parts that would easily cost you $10 more if you bought them already butchered, plus you get the bones.)

Making stock requires no cooking skill at all other than patience and the ability to not turn your damn stove knobs up to 11. Dump everything in a pot, throw an upside-down steamer basket (preferably a crappy old one – I have one that’s just for making stock now) on top, skim a few times, wait 5-6 hours, cool and store. Nothing in there you can’t do if you have the time.

Anything frozen can go right in the pot without defrosting.

Chicken stock

6 quarts water (the better the water, the better the stock – I buy spring water for this)
1 chicken carcass, including wings and neck
2 ribs celery, cleaned and snapped in half
1-2 carrots, washed well (or just peeled) and cut in half
1 red or green bell pepper, seeded and stemmed, or just various pepper parts
(You can use pieces of hot peppers too. I’ve used jalapeño and poblano pieces before.)
1 medium onion, halved, or half a large onion
2 peeled garlic cloves
A few sprigs of parsley and thyme
2-3 sage leaves
1 bay leaf
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
1 pinch celery seeds
1. Put everything in a stockpot or other large pot capable of holding at least 10-12 quarts. Place a steamer basket upside-down on top of the contents to hold everything under the surface of the water. Bring to a simmer – not a boil, but a gentle simmer – and cook for at least four hours, skimming any scum off the top (every half hour should work). Overcooking it will prevent the liquid from dissolving the collagen in the bones, so take it easy on the heat.
2. When you start to see a thin, clear film on the surface, congratulations – you’ve made stock. That’s gelatin, the thing that distinguishes stock from broth and makes soups taste like soup instead of flavored water. The film will usually appear sometime between the fourth and fifth hours of cooking. I usually let my stock go for another hour or so to make sure I’ve leached all of the collagen out of the bones. Six hours is about the max time you need to do this; if you’re nearing that point and don’t see any gelatin, you probably have your heat on too low.
3. You need to cool your stock quickly. Empty and clean your sink, close up the drain, fill it with ice (two bags should do the trick) and add cold water to fill the sink about halfway. Place a pot or bowl capable of holding at least six quarts in the sink and strain the contents of your stockpot through a fine-meshed strainer into the empty pot. Chill in the ice-water bath until the temperature of the stock drops enough for it to go into the fridge – at least to 60 degrees, and preferably all the way to 40.
4. Chill several hours of overnight. Remove any fat that has congealed at the surface (but don’t discard it – you can cook with it!), portion the remaining stock into containers and refrigerate or freeze. It’ll last in the fridge a few days, but you can keep it for months in the freezer.

You may want to use a bit of damp cheesecloth to strain the last of the stock and remove any dirt or off bits that have settled at the bottom of the pot while it chilled.

You may also notice the absence of one ingredient: Salt. Don’t salt your stock – add salt when you cook with it. If it’s salted, and you reduce it as part of any recipe, you’ll end up with an overly salty finished product. You can add many different herbs, spices, and vegetables, but avoid any members of the cabbage family (including broccoli), which will give the stock a strong and not-desirable flavor. I’ve used mustard seed, cloves, tarragon, and leeks, among other items. Think “aromatics” and you’ve got the idea.

I’ll post some recipes using chicken stock over the next few weeks, but it’s great for basic soups, for moistening stuffing at Thanksgiving, and for reducing and using to thicken some sauces. Any decent cookbook should have soup recipes that start with chicken or some other stock as their bases.

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The Painted Bird.

Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy) is an awful book. Not a bad book, but an awful one, easily the most graphic book I have ever read in terms of depictions of violence and of violent sex. It’s made worse by the fact that the narrator is a child, aged eight at the start and around twelve at the end, whose innocence is manipulated and destroyed by the people whom he trusts.

The Painted Bird, set during World War II, tells the story of a young boy whose ethnicity is unclear but whose swarthy color and dark hair makes him a potential target for the Nazis. His parents send him to live with a sort of foster mother, but the woman dies and the boy flees, moving from village to village and from one violent situation to another. He is beaten, nearly killed several times, turned over to the Germans twice, witnesses several murders and rapes, and becomes a sort of sponge who absorbs – or just accepts – whatever he’s told about life, or the way the world works. He is almost dispassionate about his suffering; the language of the novel occasionally shows fear when he’s near death, but is otherwise an almost stylistic monotone, reciting the horrors he sees in the way Melville described whales in Moby Dick.

The book reminded me, more than anything else, of The Road (Oprah’s Book Club) . The styles are not similar, and McCarthy’s book has substantially more emotion, but I can’t help but think that McCarthy was somewhat inspired by Kosinzki’s novel. Both books involve a young protagonist moving along an uncertain path towards an unknown destination that might be death. Food and shelter loom large, and there’s constant danger from almost everyone they meet. The protagonist of The Painted Bird is always carrying a “comet,” a tin can with a flame in it that’s used as a light, a heat source, and a weapon; The Man tells The Boy that they are “carrying the fire.”

The primary difference, of course, is in tone. I had a hard time getting to the father-son love story at the heart of The Road because the setting is so bleak. Now, looking back on McCarthy’s book after reading Kosinski’s, it’s much clearer, because Kosinski’s book is completely devoid of love, or much of any feeling at all, other than occasional dread. McCarthy’s book is telling a story; Kosinski’s book feels more like a protest – he wants you to be outraged – but also as a catharsis for the author, whether the experiences were his or just those of people he knew.

I make that last point because there’s apparently a controversy about Kosinski’s work, including whether his work is original and whether he lied about his experiences during World War II. The edition I have is old, from 1976, and predates the plagiarism claims, but he does make it pretty clear that he is not claiming that the work is autobiographical and is dismayed by critics who wish to turn the novel into a work of autobiographical fiction. Neither controversy is mentioned in his entry in Encyclopedia Britannica (although it does claim the novel is a fictionalized account of his experiences during the war) or in TIME‘s capsule on the book from the TIME 100 posting.

Bottom line: I don’t think The Painted Bird is a bad book, but I would in no way recommend it. But after reading it, I appreciate The Road, despite its oppressively bleak setting, a good bit more.

Next up: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

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