Cooking Debauchery

Hummus

There are two parts of my brain.  The passionate impulsive part and the scientific part.

The passionate part of my brain falls madly in love with recipes.  It courts them with great fervor, spending hours upon hours day dreaming about what the recipe would be like.  Writing its name plus mine in cute little hearts upon the back of my cook book covers.

In the mean time the scientific part of my brain wants to dissect a recipe.  It wants to turn the recipe around, unscrew the cover poke around the insides and rearrange the inner workings.  My scientific mind wants to know why a recipe works.  Why choose this combination of ingredients or that?  What does this flavor do with that?  What makes the recipe tick.

Either way, between these two halves of my brain, I can’t ever seem to make any recipe that I see until I have thoroughly dissected it.

Mushroom Pate

When I was little I was the kind of kid that was happiest taking things apart.

I wasn’t destructive per se, though that was the end result of what I did, I was simply curious to see how things worked.

So it surprises no one that my first memory of mushrooms involved me tearing them into little pieces in a vain effort to understand what it was that made them so good.

I must have been about 5 or 6 at the time.  And as per our usual pass time, my parents had taken the boat up the river to our favorite camp site.

Being experienced mushroom hunters, they had found a small amount of edible wild mushrooms and had placed them on a shelf to be made into dinner.

Unfortunately they did not account for my determined ingenuity in getting into trouble.

Caramel Roasted Pineapple

It is said that our taste buds are completely replaced every 10 years. 

While there is no official evidence that our tastes change in that period, there is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that perhaps as our taste buds change so do our tastes.

And because I never know when that change will happen, every few years I re-try things that I have not liked in the past.

Sometimes, it even works.

Much to my delight that was exactly what happened with this roasted pineapple.

Sharp Cheddar Pennies

At 3 years old, a cheddar has an almost acidic bite. 

Tangy and assertive, it is difficult to imagine a more intense cheese experience.  Arguably, a good member of the blue cheese family packs a powerful wallop and there are certainly cheeses that are more pungent; but few cheeses have the mouth puckering quality of a good aged cheddar.

Which is why it is incredibly difficult for me to imagine a recipe that can not only take advantage of this acerbic bite but enhance it.

But that is exactly the promise on which this recipe from Gourmet Magazine delivers.

Artichoke & Basil Pesto

There are some combinations that should be natural.  Garlic and lemon.   Sweet and tart.  Cool and creamy.

Others are subtle.  Not the first things you think of, but once hit upon become instant perfect pairings.

This was the case with this pesto.  I have to start with stating that I absolutely ADORE artichoke.  I love it almost any way except for canned or pickled.  I love the flavor of it.  I love the fact that you have to work for each delightful morsel, scraping and pulling with your teeth (this is hearty due to my love of food that puts up a fight).  But most of all I love the way that artichoke changes the flavor of other foods.

And while not every food agrees with this change, in this pesto it is sheer magic.

Fresh Cranberry Sauce

Ban the Can!  Ban the Can!

Hi I am a representative of the Fresh Cranberry Sauce Council and I approved this message!

My opponent, canned cranberry sauce, is a disappointing gelatinous mess!

It lurks on the Thanksgivings table amid all of the homey dishes prepared with care like a prehistoric gelatinous monster.  A hideous concoction suited better to horror movies than to a traditional sacred supper.

What could this lurking horror possibly offer over fresh cranberry sauce?

Spicy-Sweet Pumpkin Seeds

One of my earliest and most profound sense memories was the smell of roasting sunflower seeds.

On crisp autumn days you could smell them for miles.

Through the chill bite of wind the scent of roasting nut meats brought with it a sort of warmth, an eddying respite.  Bemittened and freezing it was difficult, especially as a small child to not follow those perfumed eddies back to the source.

In my memory the sunflower seed vendor was always hidden right around the next corner.  Just where the smell became so overwhelming that you thought you might die of hunger right on the spot if you could not taste one of those precious pods with their crunchy nutmeats.

They were almost always women.  Older women; bundled up in scarves with their faces careworn and sad.

Favorite Ingredients: Honey

I don’t remember a whole lot of my childhood.  It swirls away like smoke as I reach back into my memory.

Most of what I remember are people.  My grandfather’s face with the divot dug deep into his skull just above his right temple, the result of a glancing blow from a bullet in WWII.  My grandmother’s hands… little details.   The kinds of thing a child is endlessly fascinated by.

I was a little over 7 when I last saw my grandparents.  And time spent with them seems like a collage.  Composed of bright threads, stolen moments.  Amongst these bright scraps are precious few whole memories.  Ones that include talking and motion.

But what I remember so very very clearly, was the honey my grandfather use to dole out as a treat.  He would only allow me but a single teaspoon, placing it into my eager, open mouth as if I was a nestling.  He ever only allowed me one at a time, claiming that more would cause me to get sick, something that I never dared to doubt.

Chicken Liver Pate with Mushrooms & Apples

I often and readily admit to being a picky eater.  Not in the sense that I won’t try anything new.  Far from it.  I seek out new food experiences.  I am however picky about everything else.

One of the most problematic areas for me in food is texture.  There are certain textures that are very off-putting.  Though often times, it is not the texture of the article itself that is problematic but rather the difference between the perceived texture based upon appearance versus the actual texture of the item.

Liver is the head of that list.  It is meat.  It appears solid.  And yet when you bite into it, liver is oddly spongy.  Almost moussey… and yet dry.  YUCK!  The blatant disparity of this is enough to turn me right off of liver completely.

But what I actually don’t mind about liver is its taste.  I am perfectly happy with the flavor of liver.  So how do you reconcile the two?  How do you make peace with liking the flavor but nothing else about something?

Gingered Mango-Habanero Sauce

Written for the Spice is Right IV: It’s too darn hot event at Tigers & Strawberries 

Habanero (Capsicum Chinense Jacquin) the hottest pepper in the world – it is the dread of every spice wimp from pole to pole. Rated between 100,000 and 350,000 Scoville units, the pepper is often described as having a fruity heat that many chileheads fine irresistible. A native of Cubathe habanero has spread all over the world. Never smoked or dried like many of its cousins it none the less finds its way into a surprising number of dishes; from sauces to Japanese snack food. 

It is the kind of thing that also brings dread to the home cook. Even the more experienced among us who play with South American flavors and devour the milder chipotle, ancho, and pasilla chiles shy away from. We prefer, out of the desperate desire to avoid chemically burning off all of our taste buds, to leave habaneros to the professionals. 

Until this challenge, I was one of those home cooks.