sausage sandwich

Man, is this good.

My bread, my sausage, my mayonnaise, my egg squeezed out of my egg hole. Okay I might have gotten a little carried away there. Some egg from somewhere, to be honest, I don't know, I didn't have anything to do with it.

The mayonnaise was made during the time the sausage patties fried, which was fast. I learned the 16 oz measuring cup is a perfect fit for the immersion blender blade to nestle in the bottom which makes it possible to whip a single egg yolk. Fascinating to drizzle oil and see it turn thick right there. Ordinary American yellow mustard, ordinary cider vinegar. S/P. The result is near to soft ice cream. Even more so had I added 1/4 teaspoon sugar. There's just enough left for one or two more things.

Some kind of aged cheddar cheese that's white.

No onion this time because I'm enjoying my one superpower of minty fresh breath and I don't want any alliums weakening that right now.

tomato and bib lettuce salad

I am soooo lazy today.

The kettle's on the boil, and I'm so eeeeeasily called away.

Psyche! I don't have a kettle, but I AM lazy. What a good day to use that bib lettuce and garden tomato. I'll dig out my best olive oil and that ridiculously expensive aged balsamic. Formaggio duro di Parma broken into bits. Not cut, that would ruin it!

Calm yourself, Boy, remember you're being lazy.

"Fine."

*whispers*

"Broken, not cut."

Sea salt.

huevos, chile, tortilla

Huevos rancheros, if you like.

Los padres de mi amigo Roberto son de México. He said his mother makes the best tortillas evah. So I invited my friend and his mother (and his two sisters and another person, siempre hacen cosas en groupas) to demonstrate how to make tortillas.

Utilizamos la manteca de cerdo para la autenticidad -- She was totally authentic with lard. Oof. ~~~~~ I hear, and I obey.

Presently I'm cooking for one person. This makes four tortillas, obviously double for eight tortillas:

1/2 cup very hot water (some recipes use milk, pero la madre del Roberto usada aqua caliente)
1 tablespoon lard
3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/3 teaspoon salt
1 Cup A/P flour

Mix, knead, let rest for fifteen minutes. Divide into four segments. Roll the segments into balls. Heat a cast-iron pan or a griddle to medium hot. My friend's mother and his sister patted the dough in their hands to a thick disk. I cannot do that. It's a technique that I have not mastered so I roll them out.

Coooooooooop ooooooouuuuuuuut. I know, but I can't help it.

Fry one at a time (unless your griddle is large enough for more) without spray, the tortillas have sufficient fat of their own. They quickly bubble. Flip. I like to press them flat with another pot but I'm sure that breaks some kind of rule or something. They cook within one minute.

These tortillas are much better straight out of the pan than anything I've ever bought.

Go on, try it, I'm tell'n ya, there's no comparison, and it's easy as eating pie. And fun!

Quick green chile. So-called because of the abundance of green chiles, but the concomitant abundance of tomatoes turns the mixture to mostly red. So there you go, green chile that's actually red. Go figure.

This can be done many ways. They're all good. Do what you wish, it's hard to go wrong.

* 2 LBs or so of pork shoulder, pork butt, pork roast, pork this, or pork that. Whatever. Cut into reasonable chunks. The size of chunks you'd like to lift with a piece of torn tortilla as a spoon. That's torn tortilla, not corn tortilla, although there's nothing at all wrong with corn tortillas, in fact, they're really very good.

Brown the chunks of pork in a stewing pot in batches to cover the bottom. Reserve the cooked pieces of meat in a separate bowl until the all the batches are done. Then brown the onion and garlic in the same pan, then you can start adding back the pork and the rest of the ingredients. Cook until the pork is tender, which is faster than you might think.

* 1 large white onion, diced

* 2 or 3 cloves of crushed garlic

* 1 teaspoon cumin

* 1 teaspoon coriander

* 2 teaspoons Mexican oregano

* 2 teaspoons thyme

* 1/2 teaspoon S/P

* 1 frozen package Hatch green chiles

* 1 small can diced jalapeños

* 1 small can diced chipotle in adobo

Okay, here's the thing. The Hatch chiles were purchased last year from a roadside vendor that roasted them on the spot in one of those gigantic rotating roasting thingies while we waited underneath a tent. I liked that. I chatted it up big time with the ladies under the tent. I surprised them with the range of my chile usage knowledge and the depth of my understanding. They weren't expecting all that from a gringo, especially a male, and said so. They wanted to marry me, I could tell. The chiles have been sitting at the bottom of the freezer this whole time. (I think there's still one package left) They're not in the best shape. They're frozen with the blackened skins still on. That was probably a mistake. While still a little bit frozen, I removed most of the tough blackened skin but not all of it. It would have been better had I done that before they were frozen, but I didn't think of it at the time. So now I must suffer. <--- I kid, I kid.

This is probably the last time I'll use a whole can of chipotle in adobo for this amount of stew. It's not the best batch I've ever made. I could leave it out entirely and not miss it. The deal is, you do want a combination of chile types so it doesn't come out all one-dimensional chile-wise. A variety ranging from mild to hot is nice. You can easily mix types, fresh, canned, dried, powdered and even hot chile sauces. It's entirely up to you, what you have on hand, and your preferences.

If you're using fresh chiles, and there's no good reason why you must, then burn their surfaces first, either stove top, directly on the burner, in the flame, or in the oven at the broiler. An outdoor grill works very well for this. Put them in a paper bag to steam, then peel off most but not all of the blackened skin. It's alright to leave some of the blackened portions on. It's flavorful, and skin thicknesses and loosenesses vary. It's much easier, and just as delicious to use canned chiles that are already roasted and peeled. In fact, you can do this with all canned vegetables with no sacrifice in flavor or texture or overall appeal.

Including tomatillos is best. I didn't have them this time and so that element is absent here. Tomatillos have a paper shell surrounding the flesh that must be removed. The surface of the flesh is strangely sticky. Chop them to the desired size and toss them in. They are not green tomatoes, but rather something else entirely, although both are nightshades. So I guess the entirely part isn't entirely entire. OK FINE! They're different species, ah'ight? These too can be found in cans.

Tomatoes, if fresh, must be peeled. Otherwise, the skin peels off by itself during cooking and curls up into tight very unpleasant red pins. You don't want that. Fresh tomatoes are stewed down to the texture of canned tomatoes so there's little point in avoiding canned tomatoes. Add them near the end of cooking to maintain their texture. The juice from the cans becomes the liquid of the stew.

The eggs are scrambled gently as making an omelette. Very low heat, the curd gently urged toward the center of the pan with a dinner knife. The liquid egg flows to the area of the pan vacated by the pushed curd. A pile is built up in the center of the pan. Removed from heat well before the surface is set so that a thin layer of liquid egg remains on the surface like a sauce. Tap out of the pan onto a plate without folding. Or, go ahead and fold for double thickness of piled up eggy goodness. Or triple!

Cheese, cilantro. Yippie. TAKE YOUR SOMERSAULTS OUTSIDE!

omelette

Omelette, omelet, whichever you chose, is one of France's greatest inventions.

Thank you, France.

Cilantro / coriander, native to southern Europe and North Africa to southwestern Asia.

That means the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians all had cilantro, and that makes me love it even more.

Studies show that some people naturally hate it and other people naturally love it and ne'er the twain do meet. My own experience runs counter to those studies, for I am a reformed cilantrophobe. In fact, whereas before I was repulsed, now I look forward to its delightful aromatic KAPOW and find some dishes utterly hopelessly naked without it. From my point of view it's a matter of maturity, but according to Charles Wysocki, behavioral neuroscientist at Monell Chemical Senses Center, it's a matter of genetics. Wysoski took some chopped up cilantro to the annual twins festival at Twinsburg Ohio and learned that identical twins rated cilantro the same way, either loving or hating it, suggesting a strong genetic component. So who you gonna believe, me or a neuroscientist?

Said Julia Childs, "I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor."

Crazy broad, she did have a flare for cooking and for expressions. *genuflects*

* Omelette stuffed with fried rice left over from last night.

I learned to make an omelette from T.V. when I was in my teens. I learned the French way, high heat, dedicated pan (sometimes ruined by excessive heat), clarified butter, and lots of it, for its high smoking point able to withstand intense heat, rapid cooking, seconds of violent shaking to dislodge the curd and build it up toward the center. Lightly stuffed, if at all, seasoned gently with fine herbs, tarragon, chervil, and the like, a very light mild cheese if any, trifolded and tapped/rolled out of the pan onto a plate, its edges deftly and neatly tucked, to appear as a soft puffy little crescent moon. I became expert at this.

But now I do not do that.

Presently my technique uses low heat and gentle cooking. Gone is the fiery omelette-drama of my impetuous youth. I use regular unsalted butter in moderate amount, cook gently and un-stylistically push the curd toward the center of the pan with a fork or a knife, removing from heat before the egg is fully set. I tend to overstuff, which to me is the whole point, and which makes the omelette impossible to fold the customary French way. Rather, it resembles more of a burrito where scrambled egg puffed and in a sheet substitutes for a tortilla.

If I were serving this for brunch, and I wouldn't hesitate, I would prepare a thin wine/cheese sauce to compliment and to carry it right over the top.

Then I'd serve drinks in déclassé Mason jars just to dispel any charges of pretension and to uphold my things-white-people-like cred.

fried rice

Regular short-grained rice cooked the usual way; rinsed, brought to boil in 1.25 X the amount of water, steamed with a paper towel gasket for 25 minutes on LOW as possible, kept covered for additional 10 minutes. Perfect!

Homemade sausage browned then removed to a bowl. Broccoli bits browned in the same pan, removed to the same bowl. Onion, garlic, sweet snow peas singed the same pan removed to the same bowl and reserved. A few minutes before the rice is done, 1/4 cup water and two teaspoons Hoisin sauce and one tablespoon soy sauce heated in that same overused pan. This forms a loose sauce. The rice dumped in, all the vegetables with the sausage also tossed in.

Radish sliced, cucumber sliced, coated with olive oil, sprinkled with vinegar, S/P.

Ta daaaaaa.

So easy, a child could do it.

almond brittle

The only reason this is brittle is because it's frozen. Used too much honey. Well, I guess that taught me a lesson, eh?

I didn't want to use corn syrup so I used honey instead. The honey wouldn't come out of the little plastic bear fast enough so I heated it in the microwave, then it all poured out at once. I dumped the whole bear's worth, about one cup. That was too much. Half the bear would have done.

When I added the vanilla at the very end, POW! It nearly boiled right out of the pot. It was spattering like lava alarmingly. Quite dramatic.

But before all of that I roughly chopped the almonds and heated them in a separate pan. They were reserved in a bowl for the very end.

* 1 and 1/2 cups sugar

* 1/4 cup water

* 1/4 teaspoon salt

* 1/2 cup honey (I used 1 cup and that was too much)

Boil. Do not stir. Swirl if you must, but do not stir. If you over stir, everybody dies. No really, the sugar re-crystalizes and you end up with a mess and must start over.

* heat to 300℉ / 150℃ Here's where a thermometer is handy. Otherwise, candy makers use the soft-ball water test. They stick their finger a knife in the mixture then into a glass of water and test to see if the ball of sugar stays soft or turns hard. The color of the sugar is also a clue to doneness. Brown is nutty flavor, and very dark brown is a horrible disgusting burnt flavor. Plus, burning sugar makes the kitchen stink. So you have those clues working for you.

* 2 tablespoons butter

* 1 teaspoon baking powder

It foams when you add the baking powder. Be prepared for the magma-like mixture to rise up like an open fumarole. If you add a liquid, like I did with the vanilla, then it boils violently and immediately and threatens to overtake even a four quart or four liter pot.

Turn out onto a buttered pan or one covered with buttered aluminum foil. I used a Silpat which is brilliant for this. Stretch the foamy mixture as it cools using two forks. This gives you a chance to arrange the nuts on the tray with the hardening sludge between lumps.

Online sites make a fuss about taking care to soak utensils immediately in hot or boiling water. This is all nonsense. The mess left over, pot, knives, forks, spoons, trays, countertop, etc, are all easily wiped with water. It's sugar. It dissolves in water. Just soak things in the ordinary way.

Although not properly brittle, this is quite delicious. The honey and the vanilla are nice additions. I was making ice-tea heavy with lemon at the same time as this and it occurred to me too late that lemon zest would be great here too. Whatever nuts are used, pecans are my second choice, I think it's an important step to toast them first. They probably cook sufficiently in the hot sugar but I like the roasted flavor imparted by putting a singe on them. Those are the little black bits floating around in mine.

I bet this could be jazzed up with chile flakes or with pepper. Ginger. Or as mentioned, orange or lemon zest.

spaghetti with tomato

Tommy toes. I mean tomatoes. I love 'em. Therefore, when I'm feeling the love, and I mean really feeling it, I think of tomatoes in their natural state. Or maybe I think of them because they're sitting right there on the counter and they seem to be saying to me each time I pass, "Well are you going to do something with us or wait until we go all wrinkly and soft with fungus growing on us eventually and our seeds inside start to grow on their own? Huh? And then you have to toss us down the disposer." Rude tomatoes. No wonder los chavos converge at Bunol each year to throw them at each other in the most outrageous and insane display of undisciplined waste -- on a national scale.

But I digress.

Is De Cecco pasta worth the extra cost when the other brands are so cheap? Yes. Buy a box sometime if you haven't already and gently feel the texture. It's rough. That's because they're extruded through old-fashioned bronze plates. Manufacturers prefer to use newer silicone plates which are much less expensive, quite durable, and easier to replace. But they leave a smooth texture and that bodes poorly for sauce adherence.

They taste really good too.

These noodles here are cooked perfectly. Per. fect. ly. I stood there and taste/texture-tested, one by one, feeling the crunch, deciding when they're right on the edge of too much crunch and at that point removed from the boiling water to the pan with the olive oil/butter//onion/garlic sauce along with some of the salted noodle liquid. This formed a thin sauce. The diced tomatoes were dumped in last and heated through but not cooked. Parmigiano and basil to finish. Pepper, of course.

catfish,hushpuppies

These catfish pieces were in the freezer for-eh-ver. They had ice crystals stuck all over 'em. They looked bad, real bad, real real bad, I'm tellin'n ya, they were so bad even my cat looked at me with an expression of quizzical disgust. Wait a minute. I don't have a cat. I must have imagined that part.

So I can't believe how good they turned out. This gives me hope for the future of ice-frosty fish.

* A/P flour into a bowl

* equal amount of corn meal into the same bowl

* S/P/cayenne into the bowl

* 1 egg into another bowl

* equal amount of milk with the egg.

* mix

* dredge

* drench

* re-dredge

Hot oil 350℉ / 175℃ until a light golden brown. More of a dark golden rod brown. No wait, a sienna brown. No, wait, wait, wait, a saddle brown, that's it, a saddle brown. Definitely a saddle brown. Maybe a cocoa brown. Okay, forget about the color, just cook 'em 'til they're done.

blackberries, whipped cream

Did you know an immersion blender whips 1% milk and 2% milk but not whole milk? I do not understand this. The low-fat milk types veritably double in volume and their whipped versions do genuinely alter a cup of coffee, but the foam is too light and loose to be of any use here. This is heavy cream. Anyway, heavy cream under a few moments of immersion blender abuse with a mere 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract and the same amount of sugar.

Almonds zapped for 45 seconds then processed to coarse powder in a coffee grinder.

I'm developing a taste for mint. Never much cared for it before but now I like to keep it around. You never know when you'll become suddenly overtaken with an urge for a mojito. My grandmother had spearmint growing all over the place on one side of her house. She seemed quite satisfied with it taking over, but my brother and I were all, "so what."

crackers and blue cheese

This was dinner.

The cheese is some kind of Swiss blue. The tone of the cheese guy's voice was not recommending by his answer to my questions, "Well, if you like it strong ... then okay." I do like it strong. I mean, come on, what's the point of blue cheese otherwise? I was actually looking for Stilton, the creamy kind that comes in a crock. Not to be found in the places I've looked here in town. But I haven't given up. I must broaden my search. Oh, I can find plenty of the hard kind, but that's not what I want. Maytag matches any of those. Including this. I'm not complaining, mind you, it's just that I know what I want for my crackers, and it is dinner.

* 2 cups A/P flour

*1/2 cup WW flour

*1/2 cup olive oil

*1/2 teaspoon salt

* 3/4 to 1 cup water

processed

rested

rolled out thickly this time

seasoned on top

scored but not cut

docked with the tines of a fork

baked at 375℉ / 190℃ for 11 minutes (mine needed a few extra minutes to dehydrate completely)

yield: two standard half baking trays plus a little extra that made about 1/3 of a tray.

flatiron steak

Flatiron, Butler's steak, Oyster blade. Shoulder top steak cut from the chuck. The area has a serious flaw -- tough connective tissue, fascia, running through the center, that must be cleverly removed before anything can be done with this. It benefits greatly from marination.

Well then, marination it is. In amounts to suit you. The surplus can be reserved to form the basis for a sauce.

* Olive oil

* wine

* parsley (I used cilantro because I'm all, eh, with the parsley)

* chive ( I used onion because I wanted something stronger)

* pepper

* sea salt

* dry mustard

That's what I used for the marinade and for the sauce. If I would have thought of it I'd have included rosemary. The sauce had extra beef broth, fresh wine, and finished with butter. It made an excellent sop for the leftover bisonburger buns from yesterday which served very nicely as today's bread.

The steak is rubbed and stuffed inside a Foodsaver™ bag, the air sucked out to compress the marinade against the meat. I left it in the refrigerator overnight. It might not have needed to be that long. The bits scrapped off, patted dry, rubbed with oil, set into a very hot cast-iron pan. Seared on both sides, finished under the broiler for a few minutes. Less than you might imagine. Removed to a plate, the hot pan repurposed to put a sear on the broccoli. Water thrown into the hot pan to steam the broccoli because it wasn't going fast enough. The surplus marinade then boiled in that same pan already used twice. See? One pan!

The pan cannot be cleaned in the ordinary way with strong detergent. It gets special treatment to preserve its carefully cultivated no-stick patina. I take it down to the river and rinse it out -- the cold clear-water high-mountain river that flows through my imagination.

bison burger

My buns are better than your buns. That's right, I said it. As a matter of fact, I pity your buns. You'll notice they're not spongy non-nutritious foam-bread.

My burger is better too 'cause it's bison and other wonderful flavorful stuff.

This mayonnaise is actually aioli and it's simply incomparable. It's made from fresh egg yolks and not the egg whites like commercial mayonnaise and that come from organic cage-free eggs that were squished out of a cheerful and self-satisfied chicken's butt. I'm imagining.

This burger is so good you might not even want to call it a burger.

Today I was sent a coupon for a free McDonald's hamburger. I hold no ill-will toward an incredibly successful international corporation that meets a demand so excellently, but still, I automatically go, "HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. You gotta be kidding. Stop it, you're killing me over here." I wouldn't bother with those buns or those burgers or that mayonnaise unless I was in some sort of pinch or suffering a lapse of questionable judgement, because I pity them!

The buns are easy as throwing a package into a shopping cart.

* 3/4 cup warm water into a bowl

* 3/4 teaspoon active yeast

* 1 and 1/2 cup white flour.

* 1/3 teaspoon table salt or 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

* 1 or 2 tablespoons whole wheat flour, enough to create a loose dough that's not sticky.

Mix ingredients. Allow to rise at room temperature to double. Dump from bowl onto a work surface. Divide into thirds. Shape into flattened discs. Place on parchment paper or Silpat. Cover with an inverted plastic storage bin. This acts as a proofing box.

Run errands.

Preheat oven to HIGH.

Slide parchment paper or Silpat onto cooking tray if it's not already on one. Bake buns for about 12 minutes. Check for internal temperature to be 200℉ / 93℃. (Mine were 195℉)

wild Pacific salmon, black-eye peas, white rice

Avec sauce l'orange et du citron.

I made a real lunch that took planning and created a propper mess.

Preparation time: 12 hours.

Kidding. No, seriously. Dry beans were soaked overnight. Does that count for preparation time? It only took thirty seconds. Oddly, the beans cooked more quickly than the rice. Thats because they're small no doubt.

Beans:

* Chopped bacon into a pre-heated pot.
* When the bacon bits are almost done, add chopped onion.
* When the onions and bacon are really really almost almost almost done, add chopped garlic. Heat through, remove to separate bowl or plate. The point here is to reserve as much of the bacon fat as possible. Some goes along with the bacon/onions, some stays in the pot.
* Season the oil in the pot to suit your tastes. Consider bay leaf, brown sugar, but reserve to the end molasses if you're using that. I used coriander and cumin and my own house mix chile flakes with a touch of brown sugar, S/P.
* Here's the thing about beans. Some people say do not add salt until the very end because that makes them tough. That's nonsense. Salt does not do that, acid does. Let me repeat that, I said, ACID TOUGHENS BEANS!!¡¡!11ONE!, not salt. It does that by altering the PH in the liquid and beans respond to acid by hardening their outside surface. Here, waitaminit, let's see what McGee says. Read read readie read read.

Read read readie read read.

Read read readie read read.

Read read readie read read. Goodness, McGee does go on about beans.

Read read readie read read.

Read read readie read read.

There. I am now an expert on beans. Passed the exams and am now a certified beanologist. Here's what I learned about beans and acid. But first, I learned something entirely unexpected and, to me, rather interesting.

A remarkable sign of their status in the ancient world is the fact that each of the four major legumes known to Rome lent its name to a prominent Roman family: Fabius comes from the fava bean, Lentulus frm the llentil, Piso from the pea, and Cicero -- most distinguished of them all -- from the chick pea. No other food group has been so honored!

Cooking. Liquid. Texture. Here we go,

Three substances slow the softening of beans and therefore make it possible for the cook to simmer beans for hours or reheat them witihout disintegrating them. Acids make the cell-wall hemicelluloses more stable and less dissolvable: sugar helps reinforce cell-wall structure and slows the swelling of the starch granules: and calcium cross-links and reinforces cell-wall pectins. So such ingredients as molasses -- somewhat acid and rich in both sugar and calcium -- and acidic tomatoes can preserve bean sturcture during long cooking or reheating, as for example in baked beans.

Says here salt speeds cooking.

I had a little too much liquid for my small amount of beans. I removed the lid and let it boil down. Returned the bacon/onion/garlic. Added a splash of cider vinegar at the end. See? Oil/vinegar=dressing. This has a teaspoon brown sugar so it's a sweet dressing. Could have just as well been honey or a fruit, say, mango. Banana! Beans and banana. That's an actual thing, a Brazilian thing.

So there's that.

Rice made the standard way. Nearly twice, but not quite, the amount of water by volume than rice. Brought to hard boil then reduced to a tedious slow simmer, covered for 25 minutes. EXACTLY! Removed from heat and without uncovering allowed to steam another 10 minutes. EXACTLY! Then the cover removed. IMMEDIATELY AND NOT A MOMENT LONGER!!!!! Or everybody dies, and this kitten here gets it. And the roof caves in, and the nursery destroyed.

Seriously, these are simple instructions, but they must be followed or the failure will be your own fault. It's what a rice-steamer does. Nothing gets me worked up quite as much as watching an Iron Chef who for reasons of discretion must remain nameless but whose initials are Robert William "Bobby" Flay, oops, continually lift the lid on the pot of rice he's cooking for his New Orleans Cajun throw down then wonder like the dummkopf he can sometimes be why his rice is bolloxed. I mean, come on!

So there's that.

Wild Pacific salmon fried in butter flesh-side down first. Flipped before it was half way done. Removed before it was cooked through.

Sauce. Orange juice splashed directly into the messy pan. I was going for an orange-colored sauce but my pan had so much flavor gunk in it that it changed the color to not very pretty. Acidified further with half a lemon. Thickened with corn starch whisked in. Tasted. Added salt. Ran through sieve becuse some days I'm impossibly refined and I don't seem to mind messing up a bunch of kitchen tools. Like I said, I've got a proper mess going on over here. On those days I go, "what the hell, let the dishwasher get it." Oh wait, that would be myself.

handmade Graham crackers

Graham-style crackers made at home. By Sylvester Graham, who apparently despised refined white flour, devised his own way of milling the components of wheat separately, the endosperm ground finely, the germ and bran ground coarsely then recombined to form -- voila! -- Graham flour, the panacea for all that ails, a cure-all for a new generation, who are now all quite dead. I'm depressed already.

Snap out of it!

This is a short dough. Lots of butter in there. Lots of brown sugar too, and I would imagine that would vitiate whatever health benefits Graham attained through his specialized uniquely milled wheat. Dontchya think?

I used light brown sugar instead of dark brown sugar and I must say these crackers are lacking a certain depth. It could be because of that, and it could be because I'm totally jaded by strong spices. I suppose that could be made up by including molasses. Babies would love these. They're great with milk. I think I'll pick up some mascarpone to smear on top to jazz 'em up a little. Online recipes vary greatly. Some use an abundance of molasses other mix the cinnamon in the dough. I followed my intuition in accordance with my insane cracker-making skillz. I substituted 2 cups of my own whole wheat and that worked out fine. I think with dark brown sugar they'll be even better, and with entirely white flour you'll be well chuffed with the results.

3 cups flour

7 oz (nearly one stick) frozen butter cut into cubes

3/4 teaspoon kosher salt. (I could have used more. Maybe 3/4 teaspoon regular table salt will do)

1 teaspoon baking soda. (Do you see an acid in here anywhere? Is molasses an acid? Is brown sugar considered acidic? Why the baking soda? What's it for? I do not have the answers to these ponderous questions.)

1/2 cup honey

1/4 milk. These two liquids are combined to add to the flour as it processes.

Cinnamon and white sugar combined for the topping. Use your own judgement here. I used about 2 Tablespoons white sugar, one teaspoon cinnamon. Just like Cinnamon toast. Which was one of my favorite things as a kid. I thought my mother was brilliant for inventing it. What? She didn't invent it? Damn. There goes another delusion.

Cut the butter into the dry ingredients. Add the liquid ingredients until a dough forms.

Bring the dough to the work surface and adjust as necessary (mine needed more flour)

Lay out a sheet of plastic wrap, dust it with flour, press the dough ball into a flat blob, cover and refrigerate for a about an hour or so. The idea is the have the flour autolyze and the ample butter to re-harden.

Divide the dough in two. Return one half to the refrigerator. Roll out 1/2 the dough. I like to do this directly on Silpat mat because they're excellent for this. If not Silpat then parchment paper. If not parchment, then just forget the whole thing! I jest. If not those two expedients, then carefully lift onto a slightly dusted cookie pan. Maybe there's enough butter in these to prevent sticking, I don't know, I never tried that, I mean, talk about living dangerously.

375°F / 190°C for 11-15 minutes. Watch them like a hawk. Like a hawk that has his eyes on a vole in the distance. A hungry hawk. That's it, a hungry hawk with great eyesight watching a careless vole who is frolicking around getting lost in the wonder of its environment and has momentarily let down its guard. A hawk that is so ready to swoop and strike that it's not even funny and the whole world can feel the tension and the drama. Because nobody likes burnt Graham crackers.

All of this has made me so hungry for, guess what, Graham crackers and milk.

miso with curry

Sliced alliums, purple onion and garlic, into a pot with olive oil. Seasoning including a small amount of green non-descript curry powder. Dried mushroom powder, because I saw the tin sitting there and thought, "That might be nice." The work surface has flour on it remaining from the Graham cracker dough so I scrapped off about 1/2 teaspoon and added it to the powdery, oily, oniony mixture that's cooking. My thinking at the time was, "Eh, why not thicken up this a little bit?" Saki, about 1//2 ounce dumped in unceremoniously, followed by commercial chicken stock. One, clump of dried Asian cellophane noodles kind of like Ramen. One tablespoon pale South River miso. Basil torn on top. That's it.

Mexican breakfast

* All the chicken broth that was in the refrigerator, with enough beef broth to bring the liquid to 1+3/4 cups, thereabouts.

* Seasoned with all the things that make me think of Mexico except for cilantro and coriander which I'm totally out of. Inexcusable! Bay leaf, oregano, thyme, and most importantly cumin. No chile. What? That's right, no chile. None. Nada, Zero. And that runs so counter to impulse and intuition that I had to argue with myself not to use it this time.

* Pinto beans turned into powder. Enough to fill the cap of the coffee grinder, however much that is, probably 3/4 cup. The liquid was already boiling, the bean dust thickened the liquid immediately. The heat was turned back to nearly nothing.

Tortillas:

* 1 cup whole wheat flour.

* 1 cup A/P flour. I do not recommend this combination. The more A/P flour used, the softer the tortillas. The more WW flour used, the more brittle the finished tortilla.

* 2 Tablespoons lard worked into the flour

* 2 level teaspoons baking powder.

* 1 teaspoon salt.

* 1 cup hot tap water, thereabouts, enough to bring the dough together, mileage will vary, knead dough briefly, let rest for ten minutes.

* roll out, or press and patty-cake out flat like a Mexican mamasita, una mujer muy experta en la fabricación de las tortillas.

* fry in a heavy pan on medium without oil. The fat within the tortilla will prevent them from sticking.

Here's the thing about the eggs. Add enough milk or cream, half/half, whatever to really liquify the beaten eggs. Consider the eggs to be a sauce that curdles but never fully solidifies. Cook on exceedingly gentle achingly low heat. As the eggs mixture curdles, push the solids toward the center of the pan and allow the liquid egg to run into the evacated area, there to slowly solidify. Stand there and watch it the whole time. Remove while still wet.

For the best scrambled eggs you've ever eaten, add leftover homemade mayonnaise or aioli directly to the egg mixture and let it melt while cooking. The mustard and acid will transform the sauce/eggs into something spectacular. I did not do that this time because I am not in the mood right now for being spectacular. At this moment I'm more interested in the beans.

The beans. They're incredible. I do not know why this technique isn't famous. It should be.

black bean dip, cheese crackers.

This was dinner. The advantage of grinding dry beans in a coffee grinder is that they cook fairly instantly. Sure beats soaking and cooking for hours. Oh, does my culinary experimental nature know no bounds? I hope not.

Butter with seasoning, diced onion and garlic. Chicken broth. Slightly over double the liquid to the bean powder.

In this instance, I added a few tablespoons ground corn too because I wanted to impart a country grits flavor to the beans. That worked nicely, but it altered the texture to resemble polenta, which tends to harden as it cools. I don't care much for that. This could be improved with with a more daring dangerous fat, say, bacon, or possibly with lard. I originally intended to include chunks of uncured ham but I forgot to add it. It seems to me any herb will work. I added cayenne at the beginning with the oil, and pimento at the end, but your chiles of choice in any form will work.

Of course it doesn't have to be my delicious overly-seasoned cheese crackers either. Regular tortillas would be wonderful.

I'm going to do this again.

cheese crackers

These are the best crackers in the world. No brag, just fact. If you like cheese crackers -- and who in their right mind doesn't? -- then you'll love these. (I have a friend who's not in his right mind. He once stated flatly, referring to Cheese Its, "nobody likes those." Oof. That was the day it was confirmed that I pal around with babbling idiots. The remark delivered orbiter dicta hit me with the force of a body-blow, and challenged me to reassess my entire associative life.)

* 1 cup chickpea flour * 1 cup whole wheat flour * 1 cup A/P flour * 2 measured teaspoons baking powder, optional, but I wanted these crackers to be light. They are. I could have maybe even gone 3 level teaspoons. * 4 oz sharp cheddar cheese * 2 oz Parmigiano Reggiano * 4 oz butter So this batch is a very short dough. That means it contains a lot of fat. We like fat. We're all for it. * 1/2 cup heavy cream (it's all I had on hand) * 3/4 approx. milk, sufficient for the processor to bring the dough to a ball that banged around the processing bowl. The dough was divided into three sections. The trim was reprocessed with a touch more milk and and rolled out. That amounted to four trays exactly. Except the last tray also had trims. That tiny amount remaining was also rolled out with no concern for it being in the shape of a square. It made about 1/4 to 1/3 of a tray. 400˚F / 200˚C for 10 minutes The main thing to understand is that all these ingredients, their amounts, temperature, and time are fungible. Swap out any liquid, any fat (you can even omit fat), baking powder (omit if you wish) and grain, as I have here, swapped legume for grain, and whole wheat for A/P, cream and milk for water. That book that I mentioned earlier down there ↓ in a previous post, the one that I can not recommend bothering with, instructs to bake everything at 350˚ / 175˚C, which is too low to suite me. On the the other hand, if I were to roll them more thickly then I'd probably want to give them more time to dehydrate. Incidentally, the book was written before Silpat silicone baking mats were available, and it doesn't mention parchment paper, either of which I would deem indispensable. It also instructs to cut each cracker then lift it to a baking tray, which is patently ridiculous. Score the entire sheet, then slide it onto the baking sheet using the parchment or the Silpat. Then break apart the baked sheet along the scores. See? A little common sense goes a long way. It's hard to believe those authors made all those crackers without discovering a few baker's techniques. Oh, yeah, the dough. Purdy, innit?

Cocoa puffs, banana

I gathered all my culinary skill and poured that milk like a pro, one-handedly, no spillage, from a gallon. I brought out my brand new 8" chef's knife, sharp as knives come, and sliced that banana with the confidence of a samurai and the silent swift deftness of a ninja.

)) wha ((
)) wha ((
)) wha ((
)) wha ((

Which is the same thing as

))) whap (((
))) whap (((
))) whap (((
))) whap (((

Except without the Ps and with less sound waves.

It turns the milk to chocolate! That fills my heart with joy and wonder.

cold roast, mashed potatoes, red pepper sauce

Cold comfort. Leftover roast unheated. Leftover mashed potatoes with brown reduced wine sauce turned red by roasted red bell peppers, the kind that come in a jar.

The seasoning on the meat is Brittany sea salt, crushed tellicherry peppercorn, and cayenne pepper.

The sauce is a glorified gravy. This sauce is so good it'll make ya wanna smack yer mamma. But I don't recommend that, especially my mamma because she smacks back, and I mean hard.

* Butter melted in a pan until the foam disappears.

* 2 fresh bay leaves. This is a lot of bay for a small amount of liquid, but it's not going to be soak very long.

* 1 sprig fresh sage, a few leaves

* 1/4 diced onion, about 1/4 cup

* 1 clove garlic sliced thinly

* S/P/C

* 1 cup red wine boiled down to 1/2 cup

* 1 and 1/2 cup beef broth boiled down to 3/4 cup

1/3 teaspoon flour whisked in vigorously

Simmer all this until it's sufficiently reduced and concentrated then strain into a tall mug or mason jar. This goes faster than you might imagine.

3 commercial bell peppers from a jar buzzed into the strained mixture.

chickpea polenta, white fish with sauce vierge, poached egg

New American Breakfast, nineteenth in a series, where unnecessary starches especially grain is foresworn and everything else is accepted.

Well, it's 5:00 PM and just about time for breakfast.

Yesterday was a late lunch and an even later dinner and more cocktails than I usually have in a month. Three.

I'm glad that my friend called me for dinner because it gave me a chance to deliver the card I made which cancelled the need to post it, and that erased the need to get up early to make it to the PO before things get busy. This is the first time I was present, no wait, the second time, I was present to gauge the reaction of the recipient which I can say was, eh.

Pois chiches polenta, poisson blanc avec sauce vierge, oeuf poché. Now that's how one would up jazz up what amounts to leftover fish.

Garbanzo beans, chickpeas, the dried kind that come in a bag or from the bulk bins. Also sold in cans all over the place. They're unavoidable. Used the world over, by friends and enemies alike. A powerhouse of a legume there. Apparently. We used to have a housekeeper who put them in everything. This turned my impressionable formative mind against them because to my thinking they had no business in my salad. But I have since matured and changed that childish opinion.

I would have liked to mill them into flour but they're too large for the slots of the Nutrimill. I thought of smashing them with a hammer and putting the broken bits into the feeder. Instead, I replaced the new coffee grinder that wore out from undisciplined abusive overuse with another new coffee grinder. They're so cheap on Amazon, we could go on like this forever. Now the New new grinder turned those hard garbanzos into dust in no time flat. No need at all to drag out the mill. This powder was intended for crackers, but there it sat, urging me, daring me, challenging me to use it like cornmeal or grits. Polenta. Behold: I have invented chickpea polenta, and for this I will be awarded the highest honors, and acknowledged as the guy who completely challenged culinary convention. Unless, of course, somebody else beat me to all that. In that case, never mind.

* 3/4 cup water
* 3/4 cup chicken broth
* [into that, the herbs that I have that seemed good to use. Fresh tarragon, bay, and sage leaves. They were added to the liquid, boiled for awhile, when they filled the kitchen with their scent, they were removed and discarded. It would have made a fine if thin soup right there. ]
* 3/4 cup chickpea flour
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* 1 tablespoon tahini
* 1 tablespoon honey
* 1 smashed/diced garlic clove
* 1/50th teaspoon s/p/c house mix, where c=cayenne. Possibly 1/20th, it's hard to tell.

Boil the liquid. Add everything. Stand back because it quickly becomes volcanic. Hardly no cooking required at all, actually.

It totally works. This was fun to watch come together. It's easy to imagine it flavored otherwise.

Smeared in a thin layer all over a plate.

* fish and vierge sauce held over from yesterday's lunch
* egg poached in acidified salted water, the extra giggly albumen trimmed around the edges of a slotted spoon.

But I'm not positive about this qualifying for the NAB series. Chickpeas are not grains but they are seeds and grains are seeds too. Here's how I see it.

So no, chickpeas are not grain. Or are they? You know these botanical classifications are entirely arbitrary anyway -- divisions made in accordance to somebody else's thinking, and that change as the thinking changes, with no concern at all to my own thoughts and efforts about developing grain-less New American Breakfasts, so ordered to help counter the problem of overweightedness which is broadly acknowledged as a national pandemic. Pandemic. How's that for hyperbole? Obesity is not even an actual illness. Still, anyone whose been to a public pool, or a VFW picnic, or a bingo parlor, or a fourth of July BBQ, or even a gay bathhouse where one could see more fat flabby gelatinous asses than on BBW bathing suit runway and where one could reasonably expect at the very least a modicum of vanity, let's just say anywhere and everywhere, could confirm that it's a problem that needs addressing.

Okay, so I might have exaggerated there a little bit again. The point I'm getting at is maybe we should leave off the chickpeas, I don't know. I think they're actually healthy.

lemon trees from seeds

I didn't make this and eat it, I drank it.

I've been making the most delicious iced tea lately. It verges on lemonade.

* two random Celestial Seasonings tea bags

* three watchyamacall it regular tea bags. Oh, what is it, Luzianne, this time but it could just as well be Lipton's

* 1/2 cup sugar

* 1 whole lemon

I heat a small pot of water nearly to boil, add the sugar to dissolve. Put in the tea bags. That's half of it.

The entire lemon squeezed into the 2 quart pitcher. When the tea darkens, I squeeze out the bags and dump the sweetened tea into the pitcher then fill it with filtered water. Done. It cools to room temperature, goes into the refrigerator.

Usually I drink the entire two quarts in one day. Rarely does it last longer than that, as the one that I have now has.

So that's a lot of lemons.

They're purchased by the bag-full from different sources. Some have a lot of pips. Oh, those annoying pips. Seeds to Americans. Discarding the seeds causes me some kind of nearly undetectable unease. I cannot quite put my finger on it. I allow my mind to free associate. I'm transported briefly to a period between kindergarden and first grade. With clarity I recall my father turning over to me dozens of tiny clay pots. They're positively delightful little toys, the way they stack so perfectly. I'm intrigued by their red bisque coarse perfection. I stack them different ways. Smash a few, of course, com'on, I'm a boy, we have to see how things break. Wonder why they each have a perfect little hole on the bottom. Wouldn't they be better without a hole? Why do they want the contents to fall out? This didn't make sense. I don't like that hole. I fill them all with dirt, and sure enough, some of the dirt falls out the holes. This is going to be a mess. I plant every seed that I encounter. Apple seeds. Orange seeds, mostly, but also grapefruit seeds, watermelon seeds, peach seeds, plum seeds, grape seeds, everything good that I like except vegetables because who in the heck wants vegetables?

Our house had an oriel window with a bench facing onto the front street. It was akin to a greenhouse extension. My parents, bless them, tolerated me lining the whole thing with my little clay pots. There were dozens of them. I think, nearly fifty. Can you imagine having a child such as myself with continuously multiple on-running experiments constantly interfering with your own sense of interior design? I can not imagine that myself and that's why I love my parents. They were true parents to me in every single encouraging sense and without exception.

But we moved frequently, and that overturned a lot of experimentation by fiat. I was always being undermined by the fait accompli of relocation. In this case, the plants survived one relocation but then we moved overseas so I turned over my best specimens, by then transplanted to larger pots, to my grandmother whose careless neglect I found hard to forgive. She killed my orange and grapefruit trees by leaving them outside in the Pennsylvania cold. I never looked at her the same since.

I'm back.

Well then. I see it now. Plant the lemon seeds. Bang. There they go directly into the dirt. So too the next lemon. And the next lemon. And the next lemon. And the next lemon. And so on until no more seeds will reasonably fit in the pot.

Weeks elapse. Nothing happens.

Why are not my seeds germinating? Yo no lo comprendo. Je ne le comprends pas. Could it be the seeds are two-year germinating seed, they type designed by evolution to delay, to spread out and deflect the threat of ecological hazard? Like passion flowers do? Should I nick the seeds or abrade them to allow water to access their innermost inside interiors? Huh?

Reads internet. Readie, read, read, humity hum, readie, read read. Sure enough. That's the trick. Peel the seed, carefully with an x-acto knife, like a banana, and get to the seed which is really underneath that harder outside coating, known commonly to crossword solvers everywhere as the "aril." That's what I'll do -- remove the aril. Or at least damage it.

I'm all set for phase II of the lemon tree from seed experiment. I wrap the seeds in wet paper towel, place in a sandwich bag and transport them to the warm sunny window next to the first experiment. Wait. What's that? Green I see? Whu? No. Yes. You di'int. You did. Oh, you tricky little bastards. You waited until I lost patience and found a shortcut, and then you show yourselves!

I am going to love you like a precious thing.

Update: The stripped seeds from a second lemon showed me I probably wasn't going far enough. By accident I ripped off the brownish under-outer-shell to reveal the ultimate naked innermost inside interior penetralia that feeds the embryo of the seed and that is easily broken in half, which happened to one of them. Oops. I believe this is the portion to aim for.

This is a little trickier to get at. I learned that by making careful slash through the length of the seed then using my fingernails to strip off the shell, like a banana, except how a monkey peels a banana, not how a human peels a banana, that is, straight through a center break like the alien bursting through a victims chest. This is where fingernails take over, and ah got no fingernails, see?

So if I can do it with those pathetic shortened things, you should be able to do it with whatever talons you got.

white fish, sauce vierge

My heart is filled with joy and warmth toward all of humanity.

Today at the fish counter I go, "That white fish next to the wild salmon looks muy delicioso."

Guy behind the counter, a handsome chap, looked a little out of place there, "It does look muy delicioso," in pitch-perfect gringo-accented Spanish. I love it when people echo my mixed language. It connects us instantly.

"What is it anyway?"

"Dunno. Just got here and it wasn't marked." He shuffled fish-tags as one would examine a deck of cards. "I have no idea what it is."

"Whatever. I'd like to take the one nearest you."

Still looking for a tag, becoming distressed because other people were waiting. He paged for help. Another guy arrived but by then the other customers dispersed so now it was me and those two workers. One of them goes to the back to look for a similar package, comes back empty. They concurred to give me the fish for free.

FREE, I said.

But I have no idea exactly what type of fish it is. It doesn't matter. It's tender, flaky white.

First, the rest of the red bell pepper, cut into strips, burnt briefly in a trace of oil, and removed to a plate. The pan is now ready to toast the crushed peppercorns and coriander seeds.

Sauce vierge, literally, virgin sauce. So-called because it's pure, no mucking about. Chosen for this fish because I, myself, am so goddamn pure and simple.



Uh oh.

You're supposed to use a couple plum tomatoes, I used one heirloom tomato. Nice substitution there. Nearly zero seeds.

* black peppercorns + coriander seeds crushed in a stone smasher. Mortar and pestle, that's it, except I don't know which is which. At any rate, there's more control over granular size than there is with the coffee grinder. Plus dragging it out builds up one's arm muscles. Extra plus you get to pound and make a bit of noise. Heat this in the pan the bell pepper strips were singed .

* 1/4 cup olive oil, to kill the smoke from the heating seeds. Give it a minute to flavor before adding the allium members, whatever you've chosen.

* Shallot segment + garlic clove, finely diced. Just to heat through. No point in sweating them to death. Sufficient to flavor the oil and to take the edge off the garlic, about a minute.

* tomato, finely diced. Heat cut off, warmed through, not cooked. See? It's a virgin and it stays that way, diced yes, heated yes, but not cooked.

Man, I'm tellin' ya, French people sure have strange ideas about virginity. Anyway.

* lemon. It must be lemon. It cannot be lime, It cannot be citron. It cannot be rice vinegar, or champaign vinegar, or cider vinegar, or wine vinegar, or raspberry vinegar, it MUST be lemon. It must be a perfect lemon, or just forget about the whole thing.

Kidding.

* basil + flat-leaf parsley, at the very very very end. I used cilantro because that's what I have, and I'm not that big on parsley anyway, so disinclined to have it on hand. I know, I know, it's fundamental, but so?

I love the way this coats my lips like melted lip-balm. I like it so much I'm reticent to wipe it off, and so sit there with a milk-mustache except it's flavored olive oil. It's unctuousness coats the entire mouth on contact and the delicate fish slides right through, but that unction is cut with lemon and it carries the flavors of spice and herb, the aromatic herbs having prepared the way. It is wonderfully simple, it is simply wonderful. I resist the impulse to lick the empty plate -- because what you think I am over here, unmannered?

Fish pan-fried in olive oil. It tightened up and was it taking too long to suit me so I brought out the lid, dumped 1/2 cup water into the pan, and covered it. Let it steam for a minute, then removed it. It was cooked perfectly, if I may say so. But only about half the people I know would accept that determination. The half that wouldn't agree, frankly, do not know whereof they opine. Inlanders, I say, without the first clue how seafood is to be treated.

[When I was questioning the fish at the counter, the guy goes, "Dya wanna try some?" I honestly thought he intended me to sample it raw. So braced for spontaneous raw fish, I go, "Really? Raw?" He goes, "No. No. No. I meant, would you like to take some home to try." And I'm all, what's the fun in that?]

This is so easy to eat, honestly, I could consume ten times this amount and not be full or tire of it.

Is it worth the trouble of making the sauce? Yes. No trouble at all. I tasted the fish by itself, and I must say that it's nothing special, but this sauce alters everything amazingly.

green salad, Asian dressing

Where sauce = dressing.

I've been making this dressing, or some version of it, ever since I was a little bitty bouncing boy … twenty-one years of age. Hey, I was a waif, ah-ite?

I couldn't be arsked to measure anything because, numbers, eh, they're not my bag, Man. But if I would break down and measure sometime, say in my dotage carefully reading along scripted instruction, it would turn out like this:

There was about half the dressing remaining in the bowl after I tossed the salad. So this makes an excess for one decent sized salad, and by decent I mean huge, and by huge I mean huge for one person not huge for ten people.

I LOVE those red peppers burnt in a pan. Done in strips with a little oil, it's no problem at all. Takes only a minute. Do not peel, leave the black on for FLAVAH!

As a kid I would have rejected that idea. Burnt, ick. But now as a Western chile-eat'n guy I'm totally cool with it. You have to hand it to those Central Americans and Southwestern EE.UU. Americans, they sure do know how to handle chile peppers and not just the hot ones. This is best done on an open fire but that technique is discouraged by city ordinance and the apartment lease agreement where I live downtown.

The same pan and oil can be used to put a singe on the courgette, zucchini if you like. I prefer to roll it while I'm cutting so the discs come out at irregular angles and with areas of uneven thicknesses on each disc. That is so cool! The result is a tossed and tumbled carefree cut that is thoughtfully achieved.

Speaking of cuts, I lost a chef's knife. Now I ask you, how does one lose an 8" chef's knife? This confounds me completely. Today Melody and I looked e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e for it, even in illogical places. Finally Melody concluded it was accidentally thrown away, and I must say, it's beginning to seem like that must have been what happened. So I bought another one. A much better one.

Oh, I forgot to mention. Cilantro and mint again. That is one great combination there, so great I enhanced it further with double the amount of basil. So the greens in this salad are bib lettuce, I think it's bib, kind of thick for bib, and all those herbs. It's so aromatic you get high just smelling it. Okay, that's a lie, you don't get high, but you do get a lot sweeter. I feel so perfumy with minty-fresh breath. That's my one super power -- minty fresh breath.

mung bean crackers, mango salsa

As stated, I'm all about sauces now. Crackers without sauce? Inconceivable!

Salsa = sauce, gravy, dressing, relish.

Incidentally, "mole" mo-lay, also means sauce, mole being the generic name for several different sauces, the most famous containing chocolate. It's Mexican Spanish from a Nahautl word for concoction. It could just as easily be called "brown sludge" because that's what I always see, no matter how delicious.

Mango salsa:

Mango chopped finely
diced onion also chopped finely
grated fresh ginger
lime, but I got no lime, so I used lemon
cilantro
mint
scant 1/4 teaspoon sugar
scant 1/8 teaspoon cumin
my house mix of Brittany sea-salt/tellicherry peppercorn, and cayenne pepper.

Now how 'bout that? Mint and cilantro. Wow! Is that stuff ever good. I want MOAR!

I went to the bulk bins at Whole Foods and rummaged around for odd grains. I love those bins but I must admit to being a little bit disappointed with my local Whole Foods. They seem big on rices. I was looking specifically for triticale, a cross between rye and two types of wheat. Blasphemy! Frankenfoods! Genetically manipulated! Oh wait. We've been doing that in slow motion for millennia. Never mind then, all is well. I see Triticale on Amazon in grain form, flour and flakes. But all that makes me wonder, as far as crackers go, how different could it be from just mixing rye with wheat?

I was also looking for teff but the neighborhood WF is also teff-less.

I bought Quinoa flour (keen-wah). After I bagged the flour I then noticed the grain. I'd prefer the grain and mill it myself. Flax flour, azuki beans (red, Japanese) and mung beans (green Chinese) and something else. Oh yeah, kemet wheat grain.

The kemet surprised me. The grains are huge. I figured they'd be tiny considering it's an earlier version of wheat. Egyptian wheat. Not like spelt or anything, actual genetic wheat. The size of the grain makes me think it's a modern hybrid version of the earlier grain. You know how they do, to make each grain stalk more productive.

Did you know Kemet is the Egyptian word for Egypt? Well it is. Trust me, I know these things. Imagine, naming Egyptian wheat grain "Egypt." Why, the audacity! Here lemme break it down for ya, it goes like this: I drew that myself. The zig-zaggy thing is a piece of crocodile skin. It stands for the consonant sounds "k-m." The owl means a lot of things but here it stands for the consonant "m." This type of redundancy is characteristic of hieroglyphic writing. It's reaffirming the m in k-m, not repeating the sound. You just have to know when the letter is repeated and when it's not. The little half circle stands for the sound "t." It is supposed to represent a loaf of bread, in fact, it's first in category X, loaves and cakes, in Gardiner's list of Egyptian signs. Just to show you how fundamentally it's thought to be bread. But I dispute that categorization. That's right, I said it. I dispute the sainted Gardiner whom every English-speaking Egyptologists who followed has studied and at whose feet they worshiped. Here's why I am so bold. The sound t is indeed used for the word bread, in fact, that is the word, t, probably with some unknown vowel either in front of or behind it, and so it's used quite often because bread figures so broadly in offerings, and offerings figure so importantly in Egyptian life, but the sign itself never does represent bread pictorially in art. All the other bread signs that follow in Gardiner's category X, also pronounced t, do appear pictographically in art, not just in words. As hieroglyphics blend into art painted on walls and on papyrus, and chiseled in stone, you could expect the sign to at least be stacked up with all the other breads on the offering tables, but it never is. Moreover, color is also a symbol. Egyptians had three types of black and all three types mean different things. One type blending into blue, means something entirely different from the shiny jet black of the universe void. And those two mean something different still from the soft flat matt black of the Egyptian mud. In Egyptian painting, when all the colors are used, which isn't always, that sign is inevitably painted black. Not a toasty bread-brown, but black. And not just any ol' black either, the dull flat black of mud. The color that tends to fall off the walls and leave a blank spot that sometimes appears unpainted. This group of signs for Egypt, k-m-t, means "the Black Land" and that t is colored the black of Egypt itself. The Red Land refers to the desert. So. that little half circle, I believe, does not represent bread at all, rather, it represents a mud mound. The type of mound one can reasonably expect to appear as the annual flooding recedes, a welcome sight indeed. The primordial mound. Nobody knows what the vowels are that go in-between the consonants so it's anybody's guess. Generally guessers guess "e" except in those cases where a better guess is available through some other cross reference. The full circle with the cross in it that looks like a wagon wheel means "town," or "city," or "state." It's a determinative sign meaning "a named place." It is not pronounced. So there you have it. Kemet means Egypt in the ancient Egyptian language.

I milled all those grains and beans including the kemet one at a time in the Nutrimill. I'm a little self-conscious using that thing when people are around because it sounds like a gigantic vacuum cleaner. Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. It takes a long time to wind down and then sounds like a jet aircraft when the milling chamber is empty. Now I have bags of all kinds of off-the-wall grains to experiment with making crackers.

These are mostly mung bean crackers and they're, er, a little bit different.

I love them. Not everybody will.

2 cups mung bean flour
1 cup brown rice flour
1 cup white A/P flour
1/2 cup vegetable oil
pile of cilantro
4 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons Sriacha sauce
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seed oil
2 level tablespoons wasabi powder (the harsh fake kind)
1 level teaspoon baking powder
1 cup water.

This produced a sticky dark green mess that bogged down the processor and required adjustment. I added another handful of A/P flour and 1/3 cup more water on the work table. Abandoned the processor and kneaded the mass there on the work surface.

The first tray was a little bland for my taste. Insufficiently salty, insufficiently hot. The following trays I sprinkled liberally my house S/P/C mixture. and pressed it in with the rolling pin. That fixed it nicely.

The crackers forfeit their lovely green color through baking.

The aromatic quality of cilantro, so outstanding fresh, all but disappears when baked.

I thought maybe last time the wasabi was undetectable in the crackers because it was added to the surface of the crackers without being moistened first. So this time I doubled the amount and mixed it in with the dough. Two full even tablespoons full for four cups of flour and it is still barely detectable. I did catch faint glimpses of it, and I'm sort of glad it wasn't much stronger because it doesn't add much that is pleasant to the finished cracker. It tends to dominate the profile of anything it flavors or otherwise warp it unpleasantly. I'm glad the bulk of the flour held it in check by deadening it. I don't think I'll use it again. (Except maybe if I fell like it.)

I over baked the first tray. Threw out about 1/3 the tray. Took me by surprise there how fast they cooked. Boy, you gotta watch those things because they go: Not cooked. Not cooked. Not cooked. Cookedburnt. Just like that.

The first cracker was disappointing. But then the flavor developed in my mouth after it was gone and I was soon craving another one. Then another, and another. They don't hit you as super duper right off but they sure do grow on you. This became my dinner -- mung bean crackers and mango salsa. I abandoned my original idea for dinner and settled for this. I couldn't be more satisfied.