Category Archives: Recipe

Texas rules

When you have a kid, you start thinking about stuff that never registered much before. Like the beauty of a simple sunset and pretty horses and, wait, not that stuff. Stuff like, hmm, when I open my wallet, flies fly out. I wonder if I could lower my weekly French toast bill without compromising on quality?

I used to buy challah for French toast at Noah’s Bagels. It was good bread and made great toast. I think it was about $3.50, and it was baked fresh every Friday. Then one day they changed their formula and gave me a sad, flattened loaf. It was an April 1, I remember, because I wondered whether I was the victim of a many-braided bread hoax, another indignity visited on my people.

So I went to QFC and found they were selling much larger and less misshapen store-brand loaves of challah. The QFC bread was baked in a loaf pan, dyed yellow with annatto coloring, and not much fun to eat by itself, but by the time it in French toast batter, it was basically indistinguishable from the old Noah’s formula.

Then, a couple of months ago, the QFC brand disappeared, replaced with some natural-sounding local brand. It was good, just as good as Old Noah, but the loaves are tiny, not even enough for two weeks of toast. And the price is an outrageous $4.50.

It was time to try abandoning challah altogether and going right back to Texas. I bought a loaf of Franz Texas Toast, the thick-sliced white sandwich bread, and used my regular, Cooks Illustrated-derived batter.

As you’ve already guessed, this toast was just as good as any of the others, and the price is unbeatable. A loaf of Texas Toast is $2, and it has enough slices for three breakfasts. (Sliced bread is fine in the freezer, in a Ziploc, for several weeks.)

Here’s the recipe. Unless you’re partial to highly enriched bread for your French toast, like brioche or croissant, I’m willing to bet this is better than what you make now. All thanks to Christopher Kimball and the state of Texas.

**French Toast**
Serves 2 adults and 1 child
Adapted from The New Best Recipe

5 slices Texas Toast or other thick-sliced white sandwich bread
1 egg
2 tablespoons (1 ounce) butter, melted
3/4 cup (6 ounces) milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/3 cup (1.6 ounces) flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon table salt
additional butter

1. Crack the egg into a pie plate. Whisk in the butter, then the milk and vanilla, then the sugar, flour, and salt.

2. Place a ten- or twelve-inch skillet (not nonstick) over medium heat. Soak the bread slices in the batter for 40 seconds per side, and set them aside on a plate as you finish.

3. Melt 1/2 tablespoon butter in the pan. Cook the bread slices, two at a time, until nicely browned on both sides, adjusting the heat if necessary. I find it takes about 2-1/2 minutes for the first side and 1-1/2 for the second side, but subsequent batches go faster.

4. Enjoy, with fake syrup.

Oats so hardcore, we call them steel-cut

In the beginning, there were groats.

Actually, in the beginning, you have to grow some oats. I don’t know about that part. I do know that at some point you end up with groats, which are whole oats, shaped like grains of rice. You could cook them into porridge at this point, but you’d get something more like risotto than breakfast.

So oats are generally processed further. They can be rolled between big metal rollers to make the familiar Quaker oats in a paper can. If they’re rolled ultra-thin, those are quick-cooking oats. They can also be rolled relatively thick, and then you get something like Snoqualmie Falls or Bob’s Red Mill (these are both Northwest brands; I don’t know if they’re sold nationally, but if not, you probably have a similar local product). Thick rolled oats aren’t too bad.

At the top of the oat heap, though, are steel-cut oats, which are just groats sliced into small chunks. There are two problems with steel-cuts, though: they’re expensive and they take a long time to cook.

I’m going to put on my consumer advocate hat (“consumer advocate” is such a nice way of saying “cheapskate,” isn’t it?) and offer the answer to the first problem. The most common brand of steel-cut oats is McCann’s Irish Oatmeal. It comes in a white can and it won a prize for uniformity of granulation in 1893. I have no reason to believe that McCann’s granulation is any less uniform today, but the price is outrageous–sometimes as much as $8 for a 30-ounce can.

Instead, head to your local health food store, the hippier the better, and look in the bulk bins. Mine carries organic steel-cut oats for 89 cents a pound. Alternatively, try Trader Joe’s, which sells McCann’s but also another brand of steel-cut oats that goes for about $1.25/pound.

As for the cooking time, McCann’s has a page of tips, but none of them really seems like much of a timesaver unless you can remember to soak the oats the night before.

Instead, use Alton Brown’s recipe. Part of the experience of eating oats, it seems to me, is in the anticipation, watching them bubble for half an hour before you even get to taste.

This morning at breakfast I gave Iris a little bowl of brown sugar so she could sprinkle it on her oats. Naturally, she ate the sugar with her spoon.

How do I know when it’s larb?

It had been way too long since our last larb.

Larb is a dish that inspires heated and instant devotion. I can’t explain why. It has a funny name and looks like a pile of meat, which it is. It’s easy to make but messy to eat. All of these things are also true of sloppy joes, but sloppy joes never inspired a 20-page thread on eGullet with quotes like “It is spring, and this woman’s thoughts are turning to fancies of larb.”

Larb is a Thai meat salad. The Thai word isn’t actually pronounced “larb,” so much as “laaaap,” with the pitch of your voice falling during the vowel sound, and the final consonant unvoiced. I’m sure you wanted to know that. Anyway, I spell it “larb” in English because it’s the funniest of the common romanized spellings.

You can larb chicken, fish, pork, beef, lamb, tofu, or pretty much any protein that cooks up crumbly. Here’s how I make it. Improvise at will.

**LARB GAI**
Serves 4 as part of a Thai meal, fewer otherwise

1 pound boneless, skinless chicken thighs (or ground chicken, if you can get decent ground dark-meat chicken, like at a butcher shop or Whole Foods)
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1/2 cup thinly sliced shallots
1/4 cup lime juice from 1 to 2 limes
2 tablespoons sliced scallions
1 teaspoon crushed red chile flakes or minced fresh Thai chiles (more to taste)
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
2 to 3 tablespoons roasted rice powder (see note)
cabbage leaves (optional)
sticky rice (optional)

1. If you’re using chicken thighs, place them in the food processor and pulse them until well ground but not quite paste, about ten one-second pulses.

2. In a bowl, combine the ground chicken, fish sauce, shallots, lime juice, scallions, and chile. Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium-high. Add the chicken mixture and cook until no longer pink, about five minutes. You’re not browning the chicken, just poaching it in the lime juice and fish sauce.

3. Turn the chicken mixture out into a large bowl. Drain off a bit of the sauce if stir in the cilantro and rice powder to taste. I like a lot of rice powder. Serve hot or at room temperature, optionally with sticky rice and cabbage leaves for making little larb wraps.

**Roasted rice powder:** Heat a stainless skillet over medium heat. Add a handful of Thai long-grain sticky rice (also known as glutinous rice or sweet rice). Toast until golden brown, 5 to 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Transfer to a plate and let cool. Transfer to a spice grinder and grind to a fine powder. Keeps for weeks in an airtight container at room temperature.

Go vegan! (briefly)

Yesterday Iris and I had a great visit to Pike Place Market. Our main goal was to get some mussels for dinner and check out the new bun bakery, and we were successful. Mostly.

Usually we buy from Pure Food Fish, but I figured mussels are mussels, so we bought from Pike Place Fish, the fish-throwing guys. The guy bagged up our mussels with a little ice and then–I don’t know how I didn’t see this coming–shouted “bag of mussels!” and flung the bag to the guy behind the counter, who caught it with a loud crack. “They must do this dozens of times a day,” I thought. “They wouldn’t have just broken a bunch of my mussels.” Of course, when we got home, there was a stunning level of mussel breakage. Moral: stick with Pure Food Fish.

The new bun bakery is the second location of [Belle Epicurean](http://www.belleepicurean.com/), the sticky bun artisans who started out at the University Farmer’s Market a couple of years ago and have now colonized downtown. I wrote about them for the Seattle Times. Their new Pike Place location, called Belle’s Buns, sells sweet and savory buns and coffee. It’s near the donuts, across from Delaurenti. Iris and I got a green apple bun, and Howard, one of the owners, gave us their new citrus bun to try. Laurie ate the citrus for breakfast, so I can’t comment on that, but the apple bun was very tasty and topped with a paper-thin apple slice. I was going to warn that it’s extremely sticky, but I guess it is a sticky bun.

Iris and I ate the bun while standing in front of the donut machine, which was probably a little rude. Someday I want to conduct an experiment and see just how long Iris will watch the donut machine before she gets bored. When I try to drag her away from it, she says, “Just one more.” She says this at least sixteen times before we actually escape.

I was ready to head home, but Iris reminded me, “Get some tomatillos.” So we popped over to El Mercado Latino and bought some. In the summer we get incredible yellow and purplish tomatillos from Alvarez farm at the farmer’s market, but winter tomatillos are still pretty good. Unlike tomatoes, tomatillos transport and hold quite well. As long as the tomatillos you find are firm and unblemished, go ahead and buy them.

They also sell tomatillos at my local QFC, but the turnover is too low. If they’ve gotten a recent delivery, the quality is fine, but they often sit around for a week and get a little shriveled and moldy. If your supermarket has the same problem, try asking when they get tomatillo deliveries. The other day Iris and I were at QFC and they had lady apples, something I had heard of but never seen. They’re tiny green apples, the size of large cherries. I don’t know what you do with them, though they seem to be a Martha Stewart favorite. Anyway, I showed one to Iris and asked, “What’s that?”

“Tomatillo?” she asked.

We brought home our loot and I made *moules marinières* and fried potatoes for dinner, the ones from Fine Cooking with smoked paprika. This was Iris’s first experience with mussels, and she enjoyed pulling them out of the shells more than actually eating them, but she did eat a few. I neglected the cardinal rule of mussels, which is to get the bowls really hot before serving, so they were not as good as they could have been.

Probably you’ve forgotten the title of this post by now amid the mussels and buttery buns and lard-fried potatoes, but we’re almost there.

I use tomatillos a few different ways–I’ve made a sauce for salmon and some good pork chile verde, but my far my favorite thing to do with them is make a simple roasted tomatillo salsa. The recipe is from Rick Bayless. To say this is the best salsa I’ve ever made would be understating it: this is the best salsa I’ve ever eaten, by a huge margin. You have to like things spicy and sour, though.

Obviously I’m not shy about using various animal products in my cooking, but there’s no denying that a big bowl of this salsa and half a bag of tortilla chips makes a completely satisfying vegan meal. And vegan cooking is a diversion in the same way lipograms are. (Lipogramming is writing with arbitrary letters of the alphabet omitted, like trying to write without the letter E. Like vegan cooking, it’s an interesting idea that gets old fast.)

I know chips and salsa doesn’t sound like a meal, but trust me, it’s easy to eat a large amount of this salsa. If you have a vegan friend coming over, go out tomatillo shopping.

I have another favorite vegan meal: peperonata con bruschetta, toasted rustic bread with stewed bell peppers (omit the pancetta for the vegan version, obviously). And possibly others that I haven’t noticed are vegan yet.

**ROASTED TOMATILLO-SERRANO SALSA**
Adapted from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen

*This salsa has a short shelf life. By the end of the day after you make it, it’s over. Luckily, it won’t make it that far. Iris likes to eat this by dipping a chip, licking the salsa off the chip, and redipping. She’s not the first kid I’ve seen do so; once at a 2nd birthday party, I saw two boys stand next to the salsa bowl for twenty minutes, making it through a total of maybe four chips.*

1 pound tomatillos, husked and rinsed
5 serrano chiles
2 large cloves garlic, unpeeled
4 ounces chopped yellow onion
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
1 heaping teaspoon salt
sugar to taste

1. Adjust oven rack to top position and preheat broiler. Place tomatillos on a foil-lined baking sheet and broil 5 minutes, then flip each tomatillo and broil 5 minutes more. Set aside to cool.

2. Heat a cast-iron or stainless pan (not nonstick) over medium heat. Add the garlic and serranos. Toast, turning occasionally. The chiles will take about 10 minutes and the garlic about 15 minutes. Transfer to a plate, and when cool, stem the chiles and peel the garlic.

3. Puree chiles, garlic, and tomatillos in the food processor until well mixed but a little chunky. Rinse onions in a strainer, then stir into the salsa along with cilantro, salt, and sugar. Go very easy on the sugar at first; you may not actually need any and probably won’t need more than 1/2 teaspoon.

I created a monster

Last night I was off [tutoring](http://www.826seattle.org), and I left Laurie and Iris with plenty of carnitas. Laurie told Iris she was going to heat some up.

> **Iris:** And some brussels sprouts.

> **Laurie:** No, just pork and tortillas tonight.

> **Iris:** And brussels sprouts!

In a few years when Iris decides she’s unwilling to eat anything other than cheese pizza, I’m going to make her read this over and over.

Laurie made some peas instead, and Iris pronounced them “too buttery.” I’m off to the store for more brussels sprouts.

Now, about those carnitas. They’re incredibly simple to make, and worth doing so frequently. I learned to make them from Jaymes, an [eGullet](http://www.egullet.org/) regular from Texas. Here’s a thread where she discusses her carnita technique in detail.

I should note that by taco-truck standards, these are fake carnitas, and real carnitas are more like what would be called pork confit in a fancy restaurant: pork poached in lard. But these are way easier to make at home. Here’s how I make them:

**CARNITAS**

2 pounds pork shoulder
Vegetables (see below)
Flavorful liquid (see below)
Salt
Salsa
Shredded cabbage
Tortillas

1. Cut the pork into small cubes. I generally aim for half-inch. Place in a saucepan with the vegetables, flavorful liquid and a sprinkle of salt.

2. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, for two hours. Your goal is to get the pork tender and have the liquid evaporate at the same time. Feel free to increase or reduce the heat, partially cover, or add more liquid, as necessary. It’s not an exact science, and it’s hard to screw up.

3. Once the liquid is nearly evaporated, raise the heat to medium. Cook, stirring frequently, until the bottom of the pan gets a little encrusted and the pork a little crispy. Add salt if necessary. Serve with salsa, shredded cabbage, and warm tortillas. And brussels sprouts, obviously.

**Notes**

**Flavorful liquid:** Good choices here are a combination of citrus juice, broth, and something alcoholic. I usually go for the juice of half a lime and half a lemon, a bit of chicken broth, and a slug of tequila, rum, or beer. You don’t need to immerse the pork completely in liquid, because it will release a lot of liquid as it starts cooking.

**Vegetables:** Definitely onions and garlic (one medium onion is good for two pounds of pork). A minced poblano, chipotle (canned) or both. Herbs, especially Mexican oregano and cilantro, will not hurt.