Tag: Food

When it comes to culinary invention, I’m a fan of the “Let’s throw some stuff together, bake it, and see what happens!” approach. So here’s something I whipped up yesterday, and I rather like the results. Behold the NACHO-TOTS!

You’re probably thinking, “What is that, some blend of nachos and tater-tots?” And yes, you’re exactly right. I’ll almost certainly make this again, and I’ll tweak it some, but to start with, I baked enough tater-tots to line the bottom of a casserole dish (I got ’em fairly crispy, so they’d stand up), and then I topped them with prepared taco meat (in this case, ground beef with taco seasoning) and a “Mexican” cheese blend. I baked this in turn for fifteen minutes or so, just long enough to melt the cheese and make things pleasantly gooey, and then I served! Divvy the tots up in bowls, and provide salsa and sour cream and whatever other nacho toppers you might like.

Next time I think I might add a can of refried beans to the baked mixture…this is really one of those meals you can take in many directions.

And really, it’s just fun saying NACHO-TOTS!

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Have I ever mentioned my deep and abiding love of waffles? Maybe I have, but here I go again:

I really really really love waffles.

Fluffy, crunchy waffles dripping with real maple syrup. Belgian waffles with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and hot fudge. Traditional square waffles with a couple of pieces of fried chicken and some maple hot sauce to go with the maple syrup. And that’s not all! How about waffle sandwiches? Ham and swiss on two toasted pieces of waffle, dipped into syrup or jam? That’s like a Monte Cristo sandwich but with waffles instead of French toast! Oh, and blueberry waffles. Boy howdy!

Yup, waffles are awesome.

Now, growing up, waffles were a rarity. We never owned a waffle iron, probably because of space reasons and because I was really the only one in the family who really dug them. But since The Wife and I have been, well, The Wife and I, we’ve always had a waffle iron. In fact, we’ve always had more than one waffle iron.

Our first waffle iron was probably a wedding gift — I honestly don’t remember — and it was a decent enough machine. It likely still works, actually. It’s sitting in the garage right now, and I should probably clean it up and send it on its way to another waffle-loving but waffle-deprived household. This iron became superfluous when my mother-in-law gave us her old iron, presumably because she wasn’t using it much anymore.

Now, I’m generally of the view that with some things, older really is better. Waffle irons are a good example. Over time the metal grates should take on a rich patina of seasoning, giving you that wonderful crunch that you can really only get with an old waffle iron. This one definitely has the feel of an old appliance. Its cord is ungrounded, the knob that adjusts the temperature has a certain looseness to it — the looseness of old knobs, the “loose but not likely to fall off” kind of looseness — and the silver exterior is worn and scratched and looks like it’s been in various homes for years. Which, indeed, it has.

And it turns out amazing waffles.

I know, Alton Brown’s waffles episode of Good Eats weighs in pretty definitively in favor of circular waffle irons instead of square ones (it has to do with the circle being a better shape for efficient heat transfer to the batter), but I love this old beast, I love the product it turns out, and I love that it’s a connection to my mother-in-law.

One problem, though: we can’t use it anymore. At least, not for Family Waffle Night. I can use the old one for when The Daughter and I want waffles, but if we’re including The Wife, this one is off the table, because she is on a gluten-free diet. That being the case, she is too wary of not being able to clean the grates of the old iron sufficiently well to convert it to gluten-free batter. For this reason our waffle nights have decreased dramatically over the last couple of years. The few times we’ve had waffles, she’s made waffles for us and pancakes for herself, and that’s a fairly annoying amount of work.

Thus it came to pass that leading up to this past Mothers Day, I got in the market for a new waffle iron which she’d be able to employ in the baking of gluten-free waffles. After some shopping and comparing, I ended up at Williams-Sonoma and dropped over a hundred bucks on this bad boy:

I have no regrets, regarding the sticker price. None at all. For something like this, a device to make a food we love and like to have often (especially in the colder months), I’d rather spend a lot and get a good iron than some cheap $30 thing from Target where the construction is part-plastic and the lid doesn’t seem to settle down snugly over the bottom and so on.

How were the waffles from this iron? Quite good, actually! It’ll take years for the iron to develop that nice old patina, but it’ll get there. Meantime, we can all have waffles now.

Now I need to figure out how to make gluten-free fried chicken….

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I was in a brief conversation yesterday pertaining to coffee-brewing methods. It started when one friend indicated that he’d just witnessed a guy spend fifteen minutes making “pourover” coffee, which struck him as excessive. Well, I make pourover coffee here at home, and I can say…yes, fifteen minutes is excessive.

I’ve pretty much stopped using my drip maker for my own coffee, because after doing a lot of reading about coffee, I’ve learned that drip machines, with very few exceptions, simply don’t get the water quite hot enough to really extract the coffee. You need water that’s just off the boil, about 200 degrees, so I’ve adopted two main methods of brewing: the French press and the pourover.

The pourover method is actually the same thing your drip machine does, only it’s all done manually. You put a filter into a holder, measure your ground coffee (freshly-ground, mind you!) into the filter, and then pour the water through it. The water drips through into the receptacle below. When I make pourover coffee, here are the steps I use:

1. Fill kettle and put on stove to boil. (I’m told that if you use an electric kettle instead of the stove, the water boils a lot more quickly.)
2. While water heats, measure out and grind beans.
3. Transfer beans to filter in pourover brew basket.
4. When water boils, lift kettle from stove, hold aside for ten to fifteen seconds, and then slowly pour the water over the grounds, filling the brew basket.
5. When all the water has dripped through, repeat if necessary.

That’s it. The whole process, if I’m taking my time and not acting with any urgency, might take ten minutes. It certainly doesn’t take any longer to do the ritual needed to get the drip machine going, and I get better coffee for the bargain.

Here’s what the process looks like:

Now, that basket is a Melitta doohickey that I got for less than ten bucks, and the filters are standard #2 cone filters. It’s utilitarian and it works just fine. However, my friend on Twitter mentioned that the guy he watched used a Chemex pourover system, which is the Cadillac of pourover coffee. It looks like this:

Yes, that looks nifty. And if I had more money than I do, maybe I’d have one on the basis that they look pretty cool. But – and I say this never having actually tasted coffee brewed in the Chemex pot – I am perfectly satisfied with the flavor of the coffee that results from my cheap gizmo. I have a suspicion that my friend’s coworker isn’t just about having quality coffee, but about being seen executing the process using Chemex smallware.

The other brewing method I use a lot is my French press. This is more familiar-looking, even if most folks likely don’t use one of these, either. You put your measured grounds at the bottom of the carafe, pour in the proper amount of water, stir, and then wait a few minutes. After the few minutes (about four) you slowly push down the plunger, clearing the grounds out of the way and then you pour off the coffee. When I use the French press, I pour my resulting coffee into a thermal carafe for hotkeeping.

What’s the difference, taste-wise? Well, the French press method leaves a lot more of the oils and particulates in the coffee than does the pourover method, so for me, the result isn’t very different in taste but fairly different in terms of mouth feel. French press coffee has a thicker feel, more “body” to it. I was a bit gun-shy about the French press at first, because I wondered if the coffee would lose a lot of heat just sitting there in a glass carafe for four minutes as it steeped, but it turns out that it really stays hot for that period of time. I suppose four minutes isn’t long enough for four cups of water to lost that much heat once they’ve been brought up to a boil and I further suppose that the inch-thick layer of coffee grounds that forms up top provides some insulation against heat loss out the top of the pot.

(By the way, if you try a French press for the first time, when you press the plunger down — press slowly. Some interesting things happen with water pressure as you push that thing down, and it can get a bit explosive if you push too quickly!)

Now, I will admit that there is one area of the whole procedure where I obstinately refuse to do things in any more of a complicated way. That’s in the grinding of the beans. I still use a cheap, $20 blade-style grinder. I’ve been told my numerous folks whose food tastes I trust that blade grinders are awful and that you really really really have to use a burr-style grinder so as to get the uniform size of grounds that result in optimal coffee. And maybe that’s even so, but I just have no desire to spend over $100 on a single-task machine for grinding coffee beans. On this point my sense of economy will go no farther! (Plus, our tiny-arsed kitchen simply does not have counter space for such an item.)

I’ve also heard that tossing a pinch of kosher salt into the grounds before brewing removes some of the bitterness, but…I dunno. I’ve tried it, but I really couldn’t detect a significant enough difference to do that on a regular basis.

And there you have it: more than you wanted to know about how I make coffee!

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I have long maintained that I don’t believe in “guilty pleasures”: things that I like and yet I know they’re bad. But there are things that come really close to “guilty pleasure” status for me, and Bugles are one of them. They’re…well, they’re not “good”. For corn-flavored snacks, tortilla chips are so much better. More versatile. More authentic. And even Fritos are better.

But there’s something nifty about Bugles that defies description. Obviously it ain’t flavor, because they really don’t have much. They counteract the lack of flavor by amping up the salt. And they’re not uniquely crunchy, either. What I think they do, though, is have a specific way of crunching that’s all their own. That shape makes them crunch very easily, almost softly, at the wide end, the “bell”, as it were. But the inner end, the closed end? Ahhhh, there’s a totally different crunch there. Harder. More percussive as your teeth break through it and crush it.

So there it is: Bugles combine different textures into a single snack just by being shaped the way they are. And that’s why, once or twice a year, I’ll consume an entire bag. By myself. And not feel the slightest bit of guilt in doing so.

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Old commercials in which women make coffee for less-than-appreciative husbands. Ye Gods.

(via)

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