Kick Start My Heart - Part 1

I’m going to attempt something bold and daring, something figured out by our ancient ancestors. With the gallery of players above can you figure it out? It is a process which is still used today by bakers and brewmasters. Yes, I am attempting to cultivate a wild culture of yeast. Where does one get wild yeast? From the air my dear fellow, yeast happens to be floating around us all the time along with a multitude of over spores and what have you. This must be complex, right? Wrong!

First, the recipe [taken from “I’m Just Here For More Food” by Alton Brown]:

1 Cup Bread Flour	2 Cups warm water	1 teaspoon (tsp) sugar

There must be some complicated procedure right? Nope!

First we pour everything into a bowl like so.

Then apply some agitation to bring it all together.
whisk whisk whisk whisk

Done!

Yup, that's all the prep it takes and now we play the waiting game. The AB says it'll take about three days for things to really get going in there so until then I need a bug-free spot to leave it uncovered at about 70 - 80 degrees. Hm, I'm not sure how hot the sweat box is these days, feels like it's bouncing from cold to comfortable but I'll set it near a window cracked ever so slightly to be safe. Now, bug free, hmmmmm. I don't like the idea of leaving this completely vulnerable to the air, I mean, I don't have a pest problem but I did just hunt down a pesky fly this evening. I need something that will still let the air at it but won't let anything too big in. Aha! Cheesecloth, I knew I kept this around for more than just making yogurt cheese.

There, cheesecloth + tape = protected starter. I hope this pans out for the pay off will be sweet, I can't wait to taste that Vancouver sourdough (look out San Fran, you're not the only place with wild yeast).

And just in case you don't get the reference (Universal disabled embedded video, dunno why). If you're impatient scroll to just before a minute in.
- Alex

Dude, I feel like pizza! Guess I'll improvise with some brie, focaccia and salami

Dinner again? I guess it’s always lurking at the end of the day but it doesn’t help when you get home after 8pm from work & a piano lesson with a craving for pizza. I really, really feel like that gooey, delicious, cheesy, pepperoni delight but I knew that I should not as I ate out for lunch today (mmm, katsu curry ga daisuki desu!). Worse yet, I didn’t take any meat out of the icebox for a main so I’m stuck with whatever is in the fridge & pantry. There's always eggs and there's that buttermilk I bought so pancakes? There's even bacon I cooked yesterday. No, I really want pizza damn it. Hmmm, well, there IS some old marinara from last week but the question is, is it still good? Sight test: pass! Smell test: pass! Taste test: pass! Marinara is a go. Good thing the focaccia I baked last weekend is still kicking around the fridge too and some salami from Oyama. Things are looking up but wait, there’s a snag. The only cheese I have is Brie.
Will it work, who knows but it’ll have to do. What else is there in here? Mushrooms, peppers, spinach, an onion, eggs and the aforementioned bacon. These would all join the focaccia pizza party quite nicely but you know, I think I’ll go for another spinach salad tonight but this time I’ll remember the bacon and make the dressing separately.

First off, an egg goes into a pan of warm water so it can come closer to room temp before being hard-boiled. What's the deal with room temp? Things cook more evenly because the inside doesn't have as far to go on the temperature dial and will make a nicer hard-boiled egg. On to assembling a simple open-faced Brie pizza sandwich.

Focaccia gets sliced in half and then I'll slice a little of the center out to make a bit of a reservoir and liberally apply my sauce.
I love hollowing the bread a little because it holds stuff in and makes for a tidier pans at the end of cooking, plus it gives you a nice little bready snack to hold off your hunger pangs. Something I am very glad for at this point. Slap on the meat and some Brie slices and we’re ready to hit the oven, toaster oven that is. Set to the magic temp of 350 and close the door. When you aren’t sure what you should cook at, I find 350 is your best bet which is why I call it the magic temp. While that’s toasting away, we can move to the salad. Oh, right, the egg, we gotta get that start that up to a boil. After it reaches the boil I'll just turn it off and let it sit there till I'm ready for it. I find this an easy way to hard boil eggs without getting that nasty grey around the yolk, using timers or getting gross sulphur smells (Yes, I am aware that the spelling of sulphur was officially accepted as sulfur, but I say PHI! It’ll always be a ph in my heart).

The dressing today is a little different, well do it a little more complex. First take a clove of garlic and finely grate your allium on a rasp grater. My girlfriend doesn’t care for my use of raw garlic in salad dressings but I love it.Don’t think grater like a cheese grater, use a rasp grater (aka microplane). They’re fantastic and only cost about $12. Makes quick work of lemon zest, nutmeg, hard cheeses in addition to garlic and ginger. If you don't have one, just mince or crush the garlic, it's not a big deal. Anyways, the garlic's in there, add some salt, pepper and then olive oil??
For some reason I added the olive oil before the vinegar, I really should know better but well, I wasn't thinking and it happened. Not the end of the world though. Why does it matter? We all know oil and water don’t like each other right. They’re like Dr. Evil and Austin Powers, they won’t work together until a uniting bond (Michael Caine) brings them together under some kind of force. The most common bond in any salad dressing is our good friend, mustard.

The salad trio

In goes vinegar, about a third of the amount of olive oil and then a dollop of my favourite mustard (hellooooooooo Dijon). Time to give it a beating it won't soon forget, since it's basically just everything mixed together it might take a bit of cajoling. Normally, it’s much easier to do one of two things, either make in a sealable jar so you can shake it like a mixed drink (easiest) or slowly whisk the oil into the mustard & vinegar (better). What makes it better? Slowly whisking in the oil breaks it into small bubbles of oil forming a proper emulsion, the mustard then acts like a bodyguard between the oil droplets helping to hold the emulsion. In other words, it stops the two from gathering back up into seperate phases. I might have my oil and vinegar switched in the analogy but it still works. Anyways, bottom line: The slow addition + whisking produces a smoother and more stable dressing. There, now I've got a bowl of dressing made from garlic, salt, pepper, vinegar and oil. Lovely isn't it? Time to give it it a taste. Phew! A little overpoweringly on the vinegar/mustard side of things for me, time to invite a balancing act. Reach out and grab some honey, just drizzle in a little bit and it'll take off the sharp mustard and vinegar edge. A dressing should be strong since it’ll be diluted by a bunch of leaves but still be a balance of flavours, not too sour, not too sweet and not too salty. Finally, back to the toaster!
Excellent, the cheese on the focaccia pizza is melted and the egg’s been sitting long enough in it's water to hard boil. Time to take our veggies to the gallows.

Onion chop!Mushroom chop!Pepper chop!
Bacon chop!Egg chop!

Ki-ya! We’ve got ourselves a spinach salad with a honey mustard dressing.

I don’t feel like being fancy, I’m eating it out of the salad bowl. Now we can take our focaccia pizza sandwich out of the oven and plate it up.
The looks amazing! Okay, it doesn’t look that great, it looks, well... boring! Time to fix that with two quick slices with a knife. *slice slice*
There, doesn’t that look better? Yeah, I know you wish you could have some too but sorry, it's all for me. You'll have to make your own dinner.

The verdict? Well, it stopped me from eating out which is good and the salad was great but the sandwich, while pretty tasty, didn’t really live up to my pizza dreams. If only I had some mozzarella on hand, it would have been perfect. I guess I just need to learn that some substitutions work wonderfully while others are better replaced with a quick trip to the corner grocery store. Still, there’s a lot you can do with random the things stashed in the chill chest and pantry, even those back shelf forlorn and forgotten items of yester-week may still bear fruit.

I hope you enjoyed another dinner time adventure through my gastronomic thought process. It's been tasty!
- Alex

Lamb with Mushroom Wine Reduction, Roasted Parsnips and a Spinach Salad

Doesn’t that look tasty? Well, I hope so cause it sure did taste good. What is it? A seared lamb rack with a mushroom wine reduction, roasted parsnips and a spinach salad. Was it hard you ask? Heck no, simple as pie- wait, pie’s not THAT easy but anyways, you get my drift right? Right. Here’s what I did to make this tidy little meal.
It all started with our friendly neighbourhood taproot the parsnip. I’ve recently been watching a lot of Good Eats again (I’m an avid fan of the AB, I mean Alton Brown) and came across the episode Undercover Veggies. Little did I know I was in store for a lesson on how to hide the ever so healthy parsnip in dishes like muffins, chips and pear/parsnip sauce. Good eats indeed but it did more to remind me of how delicious this root vegetable can be and how often I make the mistake of passing over it for my standby favourites of kale and spinach. Still, the unique taste and texture of parsnips I think really shine under some good old fashioned high temp roasting so I just cut them into pieces of roughly the same mass and rubbed with a little olive oil, salt & pepper in the toaster pan. I turned my toaster oven to about 450 and let them sit in there till they started to get some colour. My attention then turned to making a sauce for my lamb.

Now, I love a good sauce. They can really take a simple dish and elevate to a new plateau of palate pleasing goodness but at the same time, shouldn’t be so strong that they mask your main player. Usually for a pan sauce I sear the meat first then use a deglazing liquid to scrap off and dissolve all the flavourful bits left behind. Sometimes it turns out great, sometimes not so much. I haven’t honestly been having a lot of luck with my pan sauces lately so I wanted to give this one more time, more effort. Luckily for me, I had a pan just begging to be deglazed from this morning’s breakfast of scrambled eggs, popovers and bacon. Sadly, I don’t have a picture to show you what my bacon pan looked like beforehand but trust me, it had a plethora of stuck on bacon-ey goodness just dying to get free. Set my burner up to medium, diced a shallot and added a little oil to lube things up (I had drained all the bacon fat of earlier for bacon-infused vodka). After the shallots got a little translucent and picked up some colour from the stuck on bits I tossed in a liberal amount of hooch (aka my dad’s homemade red wine) and just let it sit on medium-low. Lamb rack off the port bow!
I know what you’re probably thinking, “Lamb rack? This doesn’t sound like a special occasion, what gives Rockefeller?” Well, to be honest, my mom works in a grocery store meat department and even though I live a few hundred kilometers from her she still manages to bring me a treasure trove of frozen meats thus keeping me with a stock pile of lamb racks, bacon, steaks, chicken. Oh, all that glorious glorious meat! Ahem, yes, so you'll have to excuse me if I’m a little spoiled when it comes to meats. I still tried to save the lamb for special occasions but then it just ended up sitting in the freezer so long it turned into something better suited to cobble shoes out of than to cook so I started eating them whenever I feel like it.

Now, I see a lot of fancy applications of lamb out there and trust me, I’ve made a few. The most common appears to be the application of mustard to the tenderloin part of the rack, then a breadcrumb mixture and into the oven it goes. This is all right but is a lot of work to cover up something as marvelous as the taste of good lamb so when I approach my rack, I chose the simple salt & pepper & oil (canola is what I use for high temps like searing) route. After massaging that into the lamb I took a look at my sauce to keep an eye out for reducing to the point of burning, adding more wine if things looked like they were drying out.Back to the lamb searing, I set my trusty cast iron skillet hits the burner set to medium to medium-high heat for a couple minutes to get up to a good temp.

I used to sear at as high of a temperature as possible thinking it would give the best Maillard reaction without bringing my meat too far past rare (or blue rare for cow steaks) but I’ve found that my initial fervor for heat was misguided. At a lower temp for a little less time I produced a far superior crust on the meat which all us steak lovers know is a very good thing. The lamb rack hit the pan with the meatiest side down (or boney side up) for a good 5 to 10 minutes. I didn’t really pay attention to the time, just let it sit for while, almost to wear you start to get anxious because you haven’t poked or prodded or lifted to check on it. Trust your nose, if you can’t smell burning, it’s not burning. At these temps, burning would probably take at least 15 – 20 minutes. I just trust my instincts and flipped when they said, “okaaaaaaaaay, NOW!” and ta-da.A beautiful sear was the reward for my patience. Now, I know the squeamish out there might see that red juice and be thinking blood. It’s not really blood more than just some marrow dissolved into fat. At least, I think that’s basically it, don’t quote me.

After letting the other side cook for about the same time I took the lamb out of the pan and set it in a 350-degree oven. The pan used to sear the meat now had some nice bits stuck to the bottom and a bit of rendered lamb fat which I could have poured out but why waste a good thing? I was thinking that I really wish I had some beef broth, then I could deglaze my pan, mix in the wine reduction and then polish with some butter. Sadly, my pantry was bare and my frozen turkey stock or plain water just wouldn’t cut it. But I did have some mushrooms sitting in the fridge, so I cut a few into eighths and tossed in the pan with a little kosher salt. What’s with the stock to mushrooms mental process? I wanted something meaty to mix in with my sauce’s wine base, sure there’s the lamb but trust me, for a pan sauce nothing adds depth like a little stock. What’s the meatiest thing that’s not meat at all? Well, mushrooms of course. What else can be put in a bun and act like a burger? I use mushrooms as replacement for that umami sensation you get from meat, it’s very similar I think. Still, this may not be a liquid but I think it’s just what I’ll need to balance the sauce out. In went my mushrooms plus a nice heavy pinch of kosher salt. I left these brown in the pan but tried to make sure the bits didn’t burn so I used medium heat and had oil ready to make sure things didn’t get too dry. Looking at my reduction, I had turned it to the lowest setting earlier, I realized I needed a binder of some type, something to take my sauce from watery to rich and velvety. What better thing than the most classic base of any sauce, the roux.

My sauce making is amateurish at best, I really haven’t got them locked up into my repertoire of culinary tools but that’s something I’m looking to change. I’ve got a couple books to help but that’s not important now. To make my roux I just mixed equal parts of room temperature butter and flour then placed them in the pan till they got a little colour. Then, I poured on the wine reduction and all the bits I could manage out of that pan and it came together nicely, well, it looked nice but it tasted flat. All that reduced wine and scraped off bits and it still tasted more like just some meaty water with a little salt. Still, this is the perfect time to meddle with the flavours so first I tried a little sweet vermouth. Why? I dunno, it just felt right at the time and it helped but still, it was missing that meaty punch I was looking for. At least I was starting to taste the mushrooms as it bubbled longer on the stove. I then reached from the HP sauce, something I honestly only own to stir into my caesars (it’s what my favourite brunch spot does). I’m just trying to say, I’m not one of those HP nuts who put it on everything from steaks to ice cream it just felt right. I wanted something pungent in tomato-ey steak-ey Worchester sauce way. So, I guess I could have used ketchup and Worchester but HP was right there. Mmm, getting closer to what I’m looking for but it needs some acidity, far to sweet and savoury right now. Lemon juice? No, too powerful in flavour. Red wine vinegar! No, no, it doesn’t have enough kick, it’ll just water down the sauce. Of course, balsamic vinegar, it’d give a good sour vinegar kick but play mediator between the wine reduction’s flavours and sugars we’ve already brought out. Okay, it’s ready and can just sit on low as I toss together a quick spinach salad.
I managed to get myself to quickly hard boil an egg in the midst of everything else as well as wash a bunch of spinach. I gave it a rough chop just to make it easier to eat and plate, as the leaves seemed really big. The thought had crossed my mind to make my mom’s traditional spinach salad as I did have bacon cooked, clean mushrooms, managed that egg and had an onion already sliced open now just her dressing. Hm, I remember it’s not hard but is a more involved vinaigrette. Do I really want to go look it up? Not really, time it ticking away and I already had to turn the oven off to let my lamb rest before cutting. So, I opted for the Caesar Cardini school of salad dressings aka dress in the bowl. Put in your clean, dry leaves, thinly sliced mushrooms and onions. Pour in enough olive oil to coat, dash of kosher salt and a grind or three of pepper then toss with the best utensil’s you have, clean human hands (your hands, not severed hands). Once as everything is nice and evenly mixed splash on a little red wine vinegar. Easy does it on the vinegar, a little goes a long way. Remember that salad dressings are usually something like 3 or 4 to 1 of vinegar to oil. It’s a shame but I forgot to crumb some bacon on there, damn, I so love bacon.
Now that everything was in order I could finally chop up the rack and plate. When I cut a lamb rack I just hold the bones up and then slide my knife down in between each rib. At the bottom the ribs are usually almost connected so try to pull them apart before you cut into the tenderloin part. This way, you get nice straight cuts down the tenderloin and each rib has little round of loin attached.
Arrange these however you like on the plate, I did little spiral kind of thing using the first chops as a platform for the rest to lay against. Dollop the piping hot sauce on with spoon, use just enough to give it a good coat but make sure it’s not swimming in it. The point is to enhance the lamb, not cover it up. Then add the sides and we’ve got a complete meal. Yum!
I found that this is one of the best sauces I’ve managed in a while, it took a little more tweaking but I think sooner or later I’ll be able to bang off scrumptious sauces with less effort and more precision.

So, that’s what I had for dinner and the thought process of the meal while I threw it together. Hopefully there will be more of these as I try to up my skill in the kitchen. I want to see my improvement so I’m planning to keep track of things here. Maybe you’ll learn along with me, maybe this was as boring as hell. Anyways, here’s to culinary advancement and adventure.

Now laugh and grow fat!
- Alex