New video game drinks, part two.

I finally assembled the ingredients for the plasma grenade drink mentioned earlier.  Everything worked more or less as expected, except for the fact that just drinking blue curacao by itself tastes more or less like medicine.  Unfortunately, that means we'll need some other alcohol or drink to mix this with.  Perhaps some fruit juice might make it more palatable?

The other option, of course, is to get our blueness from something else entirely.  Mountain Dew Blue Shock, maybe?  In that case, we would need some other alcohol completely, and I'm not sure what kind of booze tastes good with Mountain Dew.

Back to the drawing board, I suppose!  At least the Pop Rocks worked nicely.

The glorious sandvich.

Through the wonders of Facebook, I stumbled upon an article that had appeared in the Guardian last year about possibly the most glorious sandwich creation I have seen.  Like the British, it is over the top, complicated, and basks in its own magnificence.  Yes, I am referring to the sandwich (a "shooter's sandwich," as it were, is more or less beef Wellington in bread) - but I am also referring to the article, which, while fundamentally about this particular sandwich, also takes the time to elaborate on the very idea of the sandwich as it is expressed the world over.  Leave it to the Brits, I guess.

On the topic of sandwiches, one of my favorites so far has been the Mediterranean veggie sandwich from Panera.  As someone who just doesn't really get that excited about vegetables, this is a vegetable delivery method that I can stand behind.

Ostensibly, the sandwich consists of cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, feta cheese, lettuce, and feta cheese on a soft, spongy bread (the actual ingredients include a bit more, and can be found on Panera's website).  One might consider this as a salad on bread, but I find that the cucumbers play a much more important role in this sandwich than the lettuce - so much so, that when I make a facsimile at home, I omit the lettuce completely.

As a meat eater, I have trouble thinking of non-dessert foods that can't be made better with meat.  (Dessert foods, on the other hand, I usually try to keep meat out of.)  Caesar salad?  Toss some grilled chicken in there.  Garden salad?  Some seared shrimp will do nicely.  When you get down to it, meat is the meat of the matter.

But here is a sandwich that simply has no room for meat.  It stands proudly in its simplicity, its lightness.  Adding meat to that would be like adding child seats to a Lamborghini - one would be rather missing the point.

The perfect Guinness pour.

My friend Mike keeps telling me that I should go to this bar down by where he lives, where the bartender has mastered the art of the perfect Guinness pour.  According to him, the pour should take 120 seconds in order to get the proper amount of head.

Well, as someone who would never pass up good head, the exact time requirement nevertheless seemed rather stringent to me.  I mean... how much can really go wrong with an extra 1 second?  I've had plenty of Guinness(es?) at bars with various different pour times, and never have I been able to tell the difference.

Well, as it turns out, apparently the official recommendation from Guinness is a pour of 119.53 seconds, according to Wikipedia, which cited a page on the Guinness website that I cannot seem to access, since it insists I'm not old enough... or something.  If I thought 120 seconds was being a bit excessive, 119.53 just sounds utterly ridiculous (and utterly like a marketing campaign).

Well, since it was St. Patrick's day today (or rather, last night), my roommates and I just had to go out for drinks.  (It's only proper!)  Unfortunately, it appears that the popularity of this particular activity on this particular day has resulted in the bars serving beer in these dinky little plastic cups, and charging just as much for it!  In retrospect, getting a pitcher was probably a better idea (though of the four of us, only two drank... so maybe it wouldn't have been).

And you know what?  Despite the fact that the price for the Guinness somewhat soured my taste for it... I STILL could not taste anything different.  On the other hand, I would much rather have gotten a "proper" Guinness pour than the sad, sad, little cup I got instead.

So... let the legend of the perfect Guinness pour stand.  At least we'll be able to get a proper beer out of it.

Did you just eat Cthulhu?

I bought a chunk of octopus tentacle the other day, intent on putting it in my noodle soup.  A little soy sauce, some miso paste, some fish cakes, and my dinner is more or less ready to go.

As I sit there waiting for my soup to cool, I can see it, lurking in the depths.  It occurs to me that maybe I should have sliced it up before putting it in, since my imagination was now conjuring up all sorts of scenarios in which the octopus tentacle tries to fight its way out of my mouth, using its suckers to cling on for dear life to my throat, or something.  It also occurs to me that I was perhaps being a bit hypocritical, since I would feel absolutely no qualms about fighting my way out of the mouth of something that was trying to eat me (luckily, that hasn't happened too often).

I definitely regretted not cutting it up as I took a bite.  Since it came already steamed, the meat was rather tough and chewy.  The suckers, though, were a bit crunchy, and did not try to kill me as I ate it.

To be honest, if the package hadn't been labeled octopus, I would honestly have had no idea what kind of tentacled monster I was sticking into my mouth.  For all I knew, I could have been eating chunks of Cthulhu - which, I suppose, would not be very good for your health.  Then again, who knows until you actually try some?  I don't think Cthulhu would approve, though.

More video game drinks.

Here's an idea in progress:  The Plasma Grenade.

Blue Curacao
Top with whipped cream and Pop Rocks.  Make sure the Pop Rocks stay on the whipped cream until consumption.

I have yet to find a place that carries Blue Curacao in not so ridiculously huge bottles, but as a form of triple sec, it is rather cheap.  Maybe the drink is lacking some kick, so maybe something else needs to be added to it.

A very berry delight.

It's that time of year again, and as the days get warmer, you'll see a lot more street vendors out and about here in New York City.  These purveyors of cheap cuisine have been my go-to guys for fine, frugal fare in finicky financial times.  My curb-side heroes have been the halal food carts and fruit vendors, ever since my first summer down here.  While chicken and rice is a great deal for a meal (we'll probably talk about them another time), I love the fruit vendors because they're just so much cheaper than the local supermarket.

Today, on my way back from picking out a wine for my steak, I stopped by and picked up two 16 oz. cartons of strawberries for two dollars.  Compared to what you'll find in the Food Emporium supermarket one block away (one 16 oz. carton for somewhere between four and five dollars), this was phenomenally cheap.  Unfortunately, it is a law of nature that any berries you buy at a fruit vendor will inevitably go bad the day after you buy them.  To take full advantage of these street vendor deals, then, you'll have to do something special besides just eat them.

After eating as many as I could today, I decided to make the rest of my strawberries into a syrup.  This particular one would be more of a strawberry in syrup mix, which could be used for various things like ice cream, strawberry shortcake, or blended into yogurt.  In principle, syrups are sugar dissolved in water.  To make my concoction then, I sliced up a bunch of strawberries and boiled them in a little water and a decent dose of sugar until the liquid achieved a thick enough consistency.  Tomorrow, I'll probably have some of that with the carton of Greek yogurt I've had sitting around in my fridge for a week now.

As for the steak, well... here's a picture:

As it turns out, the cut was a little thinner than I had imagined when I told the butcher (At a local butcher shop, Ottomanelli's), so I overcooked it somewhat - a shame, since the Argentinian Malbec I had was rather good - spicy, with a moderate level of tannins.

As a side note... is it just me, or does everyone automatically say a red wine has notes of blackcurrant?  I've never even SEEN one, much less tasted one.

All you can eat philosophy.

I went out Friday night to a sushi buffet with my friend Longlong.  The place was packed, and as I subsequently learned, rightly so.  Sushi Palace, as it's called, sits in the middle of a nondescript strip mall a few minutes east of Princeton.  Instead of going up to a bar to take what you want to eat, you ordered what you wanted to eat like ordering dim sum (that is, marking off what you on a paper menu for the waitress).  If you ordered too much and didn't finish most of it, you would pay an additional surcharge.  You can, of course, order as many times as you like, so long as you finished what you ordered.  This, in my opinion, was the best idea yet to minimize food waste, the bane of any good buffet.

The fish in this place was fresh and the rolls were fairly interesting.  Best of all, you could try everything to your heart's (or stomach's) content, something which would cost you a fortune at a more typical Japanese place.

Longlong recommended the spicy seaweed salad, which consisted of your typical seaweed salad tossed with tempura flakes, imitation crab meat, and various spices.  Upon seeing the dish, the man sitting next to us told me that it looked delicious - then proceeded to comment that he "wouldn't waste his time on vegetables" while he was there.

Many people, when they approach a buffet, see it as a sort of challenge:  How much money's worth of food can I eat for the flat price I paid?  Others have told me that when they go to a sushi buffet, they take the fish off of the nigiri sushi, throwing away the rice, in order to eat the "maximum amount of fish."  And why not?  Fish is expensive, rice is cheap, and the system is there for you to exploit.  It becomes almost like a sort of game, trying to see just how much you could take advantage of the restaurant.

I used to think this way as well.  The end result, of course, was me being absolutely stuffed with food, with the satisfaction of getting more than my money's worth rather spoiled by the urge to throw up.  Instead of being pleased with the meal, I wished I hadn't eaten it at all.

The problem, you see, was one of utility - in the economics sense.  Most economists will happily assign a monetary value to utility, embodied by the question, "How much is this worth to you?"  Unfortunately, I made the mistake of confusing that question with "How much does this cost?"  For you see, while the absurd amount of food was worth quite a bit in terms of production costs for the restaurant, the end experience of that meal wasn't worth nearly as much for me since I wanted to puke my guts out afterward.  The utility I got from the buffet meal in no way corresponded to the costs of producing it.  Taking a buffet as a challenge was a lose-lose situation for both me and the restaurant:  The restaurant lost money because of the huge waste, and I didn't maximize my utility because I could have had a better experience.  I couldn't even justify it as gaining utility from the joy of beating the system - after all, are you really beating the system if you're worse off as well?  This behavior, in the economics sense, was simply irrational.

So I shrugged politely at my fellow diner, and happily devoured my seaweed salad, and my sweet potato tempura, and my miso soup.  And my mind was at ease, because I knew it was far easier to optimize my enjoyment of my meal than to optimize the cost of it.

More than meets the ice cream.

I hate it when my store-bought ice cream gets all icy in the freezer.  Unfortunately, the closest I've come to making my own ice cream was some fun with liquid nitrogen back in high school.  For those who are interested, it's actually quite easy, provided you have access to liquid nitrogen.  (Inappropriate use of lab resources, anyone?)

Remember those science experiments in high school where you made ice cream by churning cream over salted ice?  The goal was to demonstrate the phenomenon of freezing point depression when a solute is added to a liquid.  By adding salt to the water/ice mix, you lowered the freezing point of the ice to below the temperature it was currently at, causing it to start melting (the heat of solution of salt is negligible in this case).  In order to melt, though, the ice needs thermal energy, which it takes from the plastic baggie of cream and sugar you've got churning on top of it.  This causes your mixture to cool and become ice cream.  See (http://www.foodscience.uoguelph.ca/dairyedu/findsci.html) for an in-depth explanation.

Well, all that is fun and scientifically enlightening, but it takes an awful lot of work.  A faster method of cooling your ice cream solution would be to, well, use something really, really cold.  Just pour it in as you're stirring your mixture, and you'll have ice cream in minutes.  Since liquid nitrogen is so cold, the parts of your ice cream mixture that make contact will freeze very fast, which means the water doesn't have time to form into large ice crystals, which makes your ice cream exceptionally smooth.  Best of all, liquid nitrogen evaporates into, well, nitrogen, which can help aerate your ice cream as it boils off, and is completely harmless.  If only it was easier to get...

In the meantime, I am considering adding liquor to preserve the creaminess of ice cream.  Ethanol freezes at -114 degrees Celsius, which is quite a bit colder than your typical freezer.  Unfortunately, it makes sense to add the liquor while you're making the ice cream.  Still, there must be some decent way of adding it afterward.  Just pouring it in won't do, as the ice cream is too solid for the liquor to absorb.  Maybe if the ice cream was warmed to be on the verge of melting, then the liquor was poured in, mixed, and the entire mixture flash-frozen?  The difficult part would be flash-freezing the new mixture.  Nevertheless, it will have to be something to try out.

Sticky and sweet, oh my!

Most Chinese folks here are probably aware of the delectable delights known as tang yuan.  These little balls of sticky rice dough filled with sweet, rich sesame seed paste are boiled and served in its cooking liquid as a soup.  These are typically served to the whole family as part of Yuanxiao, a festival that celebrates the first full moon of the Chinese New Year.

I prepared a store-bought batch today, tradition be damned.  I don't often get the chance to invoke tradition, so usually I settle for an excuse like "I feel like it."  While tang yuan can also be made without the filling (in which case making from scratch is ridiculously easy), those are usually used to add texture to other dessert soups rather than consumed by themselves.  Boiled dough balls are rather bland.  (At least matzo ball soup is made in chicken broth.)

Though sesame seed paste is my favorite, tang yuan can also be filled with various other mixes.  A friend of mine told me her favorite was a peanut filling, which I had honestly never heard of until then.  In my experience, peanut butter isn't all that different in taste to a sesame paste, and I've definitely substituted the former for the latter in things like cold mixed noodles before.

Frankly, I absolutely love things made from sticky rice (or glutinous rice, if that's what you want to call it).  I'm rather at a loss to describe the texture of things like nian gao or tang yuan - they're a bit like gnocchi, except chewier, and maybe softer.  Unfortunately, neither my parents nor I have run into many Americans who like the texture - an observation made after one too many pot luck parties where they're left uneaten.  (Bring them to an Asian gathering though, and they'll be gone in an instant.)

Perhaps one of these days I'll do a feature on things you can do with sticky rice.

On yakiudon.

I love the chewiness of udon noodles, but getting some have always been somewhat of a pain.  Short of going to a Japanese restaurant, I have to trek all the way to Chinatown (Chinatown!) in order to get some.  Compared to the Food Emporium a block away, well...  I guess New York City has spoiled me.

Nevertheless, on a previous trip to Chinatown in Flushing to meet with a friend, I seized the opportunity to stock up on Asian food at the supermarket.  This included, amongst other things, a giant package of frozen udon noodles.  I was unaware that udon was sold in frozen packages here (they're usually refrigerated), but this was great, since I could toss a bunch in the freezer and use them months later.

A month later...

According to Wikipedia, udon noodle is traditionally served hot during the winter, usually in a broth of some sort.  Unfortunately, I didn't have the ingredients for a broth, tradition or otherwise, so I had to settle for the next best thing: yakiudon.  This consists of udon noodles stir fried with various things, including vegetables and meats, similar to the Chinese chow mein.

And true to the spirit of cheap, simple fare, I didn't bother with a recipe, instead making my yakiudon with various things that have been sitting in the fridge:

Chicken thighs
Carrots
Onions

Add some soy sauce and garlic, and we've got the makings of a stir fried noodle dish.

Stir frying things involves two basic steps:

1.  Ingredient preparation.

Cut things into bite sized pieces, and marinade your meats if you've got them.  In this case, a bit of soy sauce, black pepper, and cayenne pepper did nicely.  It doesn't really matter if you don't marinade it for very long; the flavor is there to sear in.

2.  Stir-frying stuff.

The most important thing to not screwing up a stir fry is the order in which you put in the ingredients.

When you first start out, you have a fresh, hot pan with some hot oil.  As you add ingredients, your ability to apply high heat or hot oil (read: fry) your ingredients diminishes.  As you add vegetables, any moisture that comes out will further reduce your ability to brown or sear.

Thus, add first the ingredients that you want to get a nice sear on, or maybe things that requires the full application of heat to cook.  This generally translates to meat, but some people like to put in garlic or hot peppers for the seared flavor first.

In my case, I put in the chicken first, then the garlic, onions, and carrots all in a bunch after the chicken had been sufficiently browned.  Since none of these ingredients gave off much water when cooked, the chicken could continue to brown while everything else was cooking.  The udon noodles were added last (noodles generally are cooked in water first, then added to the rest of the ingredients more or less to mix).

Frozen udon, according to the package, should be cooked in boiling water until loose.  I'm pretty sure these came precooked, so as soon as they were more or less floating loosely in the boiling water, I drained them and tossed them into the pan with the meat and vegetables.  Season with a couple swigs of soy sauce, pepper, and a little bit of salt (since soy sauce provides most of the saltiness one needs), and the yakiudon was good to go.  The end result: