Sunday is Quickly Becoming Pizza Day

Pizza-making, it seems, has become a Sunday ritual of late.  I enjoy making them, and we enjoy eating them, which are good reasons to continue the ritual if you ask me, at least until we get tired of pizza.  Who gets tired of pizza?  


I'd been making thin-crust pizzas, with admirable-to-awesome results, but this past Sunday, I decided I wanted to try making a deep-dish.  I really like Star Pizza's deep-dish pizza.  I'm sure it's nothing like the one you can get at Vinnie's or wherever in Chicago, but taste good is taste good, and Star's tastes good.  I'd hoped to get close.


We bought some whole milk mozzarella at Phoenicia with the intent to make some sub sandwiches.  Man, I tell ya, if I had to pick one store to shop at, it would be a tough call between Phoenicia and Spec's.  Spec's has liquor and Phoenicia doesn't, so I guess Spec's (not like I drink that much liquor anymore or anything), but Phoenicia runs a mere speck behind.  If I had to choose two stores to shop at, there's no contest; in fact, if I could choose one store to buy food at and one store to buy liquor at, Phoenicia for the former, and Spec's for the latter.  I should note here that Spec's also has a fine selection of coffees.  


We didn't make the sub sandwiches, so we had cheese begging to be used.  There's no finer way to use a pound of whole milk mozzarella than for pizza.  I will submit that eating an entire block while watching baseball in your underwear is a close second, though.  Furthermore, the lovely Mercedes wanted meatballs.  A meatball pizza is tough to beat.  This pizza was virtually in the stars.


I used this recipe for the dough.  It was written by Jeff Smith, aka "The Frugal Gourmet," whose show I watched every single Saturday as a kid.  I learned a lot from the show, even if TFG turned out to be a less-than-savory character.  


The instructions' first paragraph reads thus:

In the bowl of a stand mixer (e.g. KitchenAid), dissolve the yeast in the water. Add the vegetable oil, olive oil, cornmeal, and half of the flour. Beat for 10 minutes. Attach the dough hook and mix in the remaining flour. Knead for several minutes with the mixer. (Note: because the dough is very rich and moist, it would be difficult to do this by hand.)

Baloney.  After I'd mixed all the ingredients, I, against the advisement of the author of this recipe (don't know whether it was TFG or someone else) kneaded the dough by hand, and it was no more taxing than a game of tic-tac-toe.


In some ways, I could be a more resourceful cook.  I could use what we have on hand more often, and I could use time more wisely.  I am, however, very resourceful in terms of using the space I have alloted and the tools I have to work with.  I've rolled out pie crusts on a surface that barely accommodates a pack of playing cards.  My kitchen gadgets range from the serviceable (a knife I bought at a department store that needs constant sharpening, a potato masher I bought at Fiesta) to the really nice (Kitchenaid food processor.  It was a Christmas gift.), but none of it's very fancy.  No Le Creuset pots and pans, for example.  Nor a Kitchenaid Mixmaster.  Boy do I want one of those.  I'll bet you can mix a nice batch of cement in one of those.  Delicious cement.  And I would, too!


What I'm trying to get at here is that I don't like the dialogue surrounding food these days.  Neologisms like "foodie" - what a stupid term.  Worse than that, the notion foisted upon us that ordinary folks can't eat good food.  This dish requires truffles, everything tastes nutty (a lazy, tired food descriptor), you don't have the training, you can't make this pizza dough without some Fancy Pants appliance, that sort of shit.  And celebrity chefs.  Man they make my skin crawl.  This butthole is the most egregious example:

Guy Fieri is not fit to scrub Jacque Pepin's bidet.  

The dough was a breeze to make.  Pizza dough isn't difficult at all, really.  It's not like Pizza Hut harbors some secret to making pizza.  You may never eat another Pizza Hut pizza or anyone else's after you've made a few of your own.  There's something distinctly gratifying about making your own pizza from scratch.  You feel accomplished, and not in a "hey, I could put Pizza Hut out of business!" way, although your pizza undoubtedly will taste better than Pizza Hut's.

I ended up making two deep-dish pizzas.  We ate them for two days, and were quite satisfied.  We also saved a wad of cash.  We probably spent $10-$12 on these two pizzas, and that's using quality ingredients (kiss my ass, Papa John's).  We would have spent upwards of $30 at Star, no sweat.  Hell, we would have spent at least $20 at one of the more lowbrow joints.  You don't want to know what you're getting from one of those places.  I've worked at almost every one of them.  Males have a propensity for making genitalia out of pizza dough, if that gives you any idea of some of the unhinged personalities at work.  I've never seen anyone spit on a pizza, put a booger on a pizza, or clip his toenails over a pizza, but I believe that happens, and it probably doesn't take much provocation.  

You're better off making pizza at home.

Very Difficult to Eat Soup With Delightful Garnishes

I have to say that I've made some dishes for the ages within the past several days, real epics.  I know I run risk of sounding like an insufferable braggart, but I'm really proud of them, and I could've written about each of them, but I've chosen to write about the soup, not least of all because I'm really amused with the name.  Very Difficult to Eat Soup With Delightful Garnishes, née Very Difficult to Eat Soup.


We were supposed to go to an event on Monday night, with promise of "light bites,"  but we were too wrecked, even for free food, prompting Plan B.  "Always have a Plan B" was advice given to me, but rarely heeded, as a teacher.  When it comes to food, though, there's always a Plan B, even if it's McDonald's.


Actually, McDonald's is more like a Plan ZZ, and I say that with all deference to the immortal ZZ Top.  Happily for me and ZZ Top, Plan ZZ has not been enacted in years.  It has less to do with the food (I used to crave those $1 cheeseburgers, but that's largely subsided) than it does because of practices like this.  The Jack in the Box on Montrose and Westheimer, I'll eat my own eyes before I eat there.  I'd love nothing more than to watch a wrecking ball go through one side of that dump and right out the other, with Jack the Mascot in attendance, crapping little antenna baubles.  Suffice it to say, "B" did not, nor will it ever again, stand for "Bisquick." That crap is clogging up a landfill by now, I'm proud to say.  


Plan B was soup.  For whatever reason, and this doesn't happen often, I wanted soup, the desire that won't be placated.  It was to be chicken soup, and it had to meet two salient criteria:  

1. It had to be quick.  We were hungry and tired and in no mood to eat past midnight.  
2. The chicken had to be prepared in a manner other than boiling.     

We went to the store, and I literally created the recipe walking down the aisles.  The soup began to take shape when I grabbed a nubbin of ginger and said, "This soup will be a faux pho."  We'd toyed with the idea of buying a a rotisserie bird, but the deli was almost closed when we got there.  After dick knows how long they roasted under greasy jaundiced light, all the chickens looked like catchers' mitts or George Hamilton.  They asked a song for breast quarters, so that's what we got..  

Once home, I hacked the quarters into smaller pieces with aid of a cleaver.  I'd like to say I did it with one graceful whack like Martin Yan of "Yan Can Cook" fame, but his cleaver is much bigger, with a laser-honed edge.  He chops onions and it looks like a shell game, but he's so humble about it.  I like what he says when he's finished:  "Loot at dat!"  

The chicken went into a flailing hot wok and after I'd moved it around some, I added, first, a nice viscous stream of soy sauce and an innuendo of sesame oil, and then finely-minced garlic and ginger.  I drained the chicken and skitterings on a couple of pieces of paper sack, and deglazed the wok with a blub of sake and chicken stock.  All this went into a stock pot, along with enough water to cover it.  With some shake still in the wok, I stir-fried shredded bok choy, added that to the soup, and then stir-fried a julienned zucchini.  Udon noodles were added last.  I saw them at the store during a trip previous and wanted to use them, so we bought two packages, which proved to be perfect.

One thing I like about Asian cuisine is that Asians don't blanch about adding condiments to their food.  In that spirit, we chopped green onion and shredded carrot with a potato peeler to place atop the soup with the sort of care reserved to a head of state in the grip of delirious fever.  I yanked out soy sauce, Sriracha, and hoisin sauce from the fridge to be added at the discretion of each diner.  

I'd read about Japanese soups that are garnished with tempura, and if you can think of a more irresistible way to top a soup, I'll prince about in a fish skin skirt some day.  Tempura was a last-minute idea, and I nearly didn't make it for fear of violating Criterion 1, but I couldn't help myself.  Sake, rice flour, soy sauce, salt, and water were mixed until it all achieved the consistency of slightly runny pancake batter that I could pour into the oil.  When the mixture hit the oil, it formed into some really cool shapes, like these:

This one reminds me of an H. R. Geiger construction, a cracker that H. R. Geiger designed to put on top of soup.

The tempura was a nice addition, but it tasted like a snack cracker I can't identify, good, but off somehow.  Undoubtedly, this had something to do with the properties of the rice flour, but since I don't really know the properties of rice flour, I won't enumerate them here.  

I did a dumb thing my mom had warned me about repeatedly and I'm not doing it anymore.  My mom would make fried chicken, and I'd scoop out the crispies and shovel them into my mouth straight from the pan.  They were hot enough to deform flesh on contact, but a tablespoon full of those crunchy, chicken-flavored morsels poised for my mouth made me take leave of my senses quicker than anything this side of angel dust.  

I was removing the last of the tempura from the wok with a spatula.  There was a piece at the end of the spatula that proved too tempting to pass up.  Without considering that the oil could boil a Ford Pinto, I wrapped my lips around the spatula, and they stuck instantly.  I ripped the implement off before I lost my entire upper lip, but not before a nasty blister formed on it.  Applications of ice and antibiotic ointment might ensure that I won't have a permanent bubble on the middle of my lip.  

The soup was probably done in an hour and a half, after much sweat and injury.  Though I improvised quite a bit, I considered each component really carefully so it wasn't like Kenny G in the kitchen.  There must be something about frying on hand-hammered steel because that element featured prominently.  It makes sense, really - almost everything but the water was fried.

Needless to say, the soup was delicious.  I can't imagine eating anything else at that particular time.  I can't praise a dish more highly than that.  

Not So Quick...

After last night's dinner debacle, we decided that we were going to flush the Bisquick down the toilet.  There are so many additives in Bisquick, though, that it might turn into concrete.  So Bisquick might be good for something.  Like spackling.  Bisquick might make fine spackle.


I scrambled somewhat tonight.  I knew what I was going to make, but I wasn't sure how I was going to execute it.  In a previous post, i alluded to a pasta disaster.  Tonight I made gnocchi, and the possibility for a repeat disaster loomed somewhat large.  


I had a half cup of semolina flour and about the same amount of farina, and that would have to do for a basic dough.  That went into the food processor, along with two eggs, a bit of water, and several king-sized dollops of leftover mashed potatoes.


I made one mistake immediately:  I poured the flour in before the eggs.  I realized my error as I watched the flour whirl around and around in the food processor while I added the eggs.  Oh yeah, I'd added the potatoes, too.  I'd reserved a bit of the flour in case the ingredients didn't come together as they should have.  After I'd added everything, the dough was the consistency of an unattended Icee.


There was no getting around it.  Break out the Bisquick.


I added the Bisquick very gingerly in an effort to use the least amount possible.  No telling how much I'd used until the dough began to assume any semblance of cohesion, and I didn't want to use anymore because I didn't want dinner to taste like fabric softener.  


I tried to mill some polenta (okay, grits.  Okay, gree-yits) in the Ninja, one of my most useful appliances.  I got it for Christmas a couple of years ago, and immediately I was skeptical.  Just by looking at it, I knew there was an infomercial for it, yet I'd never even seen the infomercial.  After I'd used it, however, you could've knocked me over with a flapjack.  It makes routine prep work pretty effortless; however, it makes pretty awful guacamole, and I stripped it out some making snow-cone grade ice.  So the verdict on the Ninja is:  almost indispensable for small tasks and tasks for which you don't to drag out the blender or food processor, just don't use it to make guacamole or margaritas.


Nor is it good for milling polenta.  I'd pulsed it for quite awhile, to virtually no effect.  But screw it.  I'd probably ruined the gnocchi after the Bisquick addition (and at this point, I'm beginning to enjoy using the word Bisquick the same way I enjoy using the word flapjack.  Maybe we should keep the Bisquick so that one morning I can say, "How about some Bisquick flapjacks!"  Well, I can say Bisquick flapjack Bisquick flapjack whether we have Bisquick or we don't have Bisquick, so we're dumping the Bisquick down the annoying neighbor's toilet.  Besides, I don't eat breakfast), so why the heck not?  I'd added enough polenta to form a nice firm ball, and then divided it into four portions, and refrigerated them.


I'd never made gnocchi, but I think it's safe to say that the process of making mine was inordinately tortuous.  However, they also turned out pretty alright.  They floated to the surface of the boiling obediently, and they were very toothsome to the bite.  They also paired quite nicely with my piecemeal sauce of bacon, chorizo, and avjar.  


Oddly, Bisquick actually helped save this meal.  Don't get me wrong, I'll never use that shit again, but this time I'll begrudgingly cut it some slack.


Thanks Bisquick.


That was fun to say.  "Thanks Bisquick!  Ha ha!"

  Gnocchi with Bacon, Chorizo, and Avjar Sauce.

Don't Gimme No Flap, Jack

No pictures were taken of last night's meal.  Frankly, the inerja were an embarrassment, easily one of the worst things I've ever made and not very picturesque.  I say blame it on the Bisquick.


I think I'm going to call inerja "Ethiopian flapjacks" from now on.  They are a lot like pancakes, and I just like the word flapjacks.  


I used to work at Central Market.  That store is crawling with loony-tunes.  One time, some guy carried on about how he makes the best pancakes.  I somehow got a word in edgewise.  That word was, of course, flapjacks.  The King of All Short-Order Fry Cooks asked me whether I'm from around here because the term flapjack doesn't have much currency in these parts.  Flapjack is more of a Northern term, said Mel Sharples.  


Despite all this, I still like the term flapjacks.  


Edit:  In lieu of photo from last night, enjoy this photo of our breathtakingly clean microwave:

Careful With That Bisquick, Eugene

Last night, I embarked upon my first foray into making Ethiopian food.  I'd been craving it awhile (the anticipation of making and then eating inerja, which I will discuss shortly, kept me awake a couple of nights ago), but since we haven't been able to get over to The Blue Nile, I decided I'd give it a go myself.


I reconnoitered the fridge and cupboards for stuff to make Ethiopian food out of.  The freezer contained a package of chicken thighs and legs (bought a couple of weeks ago expressly for making doro wat), and there were red lentils in the cupboard.  Here, I'll level with you:  the lentils weren't in the cupboard.  The cupboard's crammed full of spices, lots of shit you can't make a meal out of without a lot of effort like baking chocolate, what-must-be thirteen varieties of vinegar, and cans of, hell, I don't know.  Veg-All?  We try not to eat the Veg-All or anything else from a can if we can help it.


Ethiopian food requires not only a staggering number and amount of spices, but also roasting and pulverizing those spices.  The aroma permeates the house in a kinda poetic way, but all that roasting smokes up several city blocks and causes violent fits of coughing and painful, watery eyes.  The recipes also call for lots of butter; specifically, the recipes call for nitter kibbeh, or spiced butter, which requires its own preparation, including the addition of more spices.  Lots of onions, too, more onions than we had in the whole house, like six pounds of onions or some crazy amount that not even the most nutty onion-stinking guy would ever use in a lifetime.  Two small onions would have to do, including their cute little tippy-tops.  


Once all the prep work was finished, cooking the meal was a breeze.  Fry your weight in onions, and then add to it garlic, water or broth, berbere, which we have plenty of now fr Chrissakes, the butter I can't pronounce, and the chicken. Let the whole schmeer simmer for thirty to forty minutes.  Fry ginger, garlic, and an armload more onion in the nutty butter, add the bunga-bunga spice mixture plus some tumeric, add water or broth, and boil the lentils until you can maysh 'em like those maysed taters, takes about thirty minutes, maybe fewer.  


I'm thrilled to say that the meal was delicious.  Not quite Blue Nile delicious, but damned close enough and we didn't have to drive across town to get there.  Indeed, my doro wat and the lentil dish I can't remember the name of and I'm too lazy to look it up and link it right now were a big hit.  


The astute reader has noted that at this point, I've mentioned the inerja, really the attraction for me, but once.  And what about the Bisquick, Shiftless Chef?  Inerja is, effectively, Ethiopian silverware.  All the dishes are served on it, and the inerja is used to scoop up everything into your mouth.  I'm too lazy to look up a youtube video to demonstrate how this is done.  At any rate, an Ethiopian meal seems incomplete without it.  


Inerja calls for teff flour and three days of preparation time to allow the teff to ferment.  I didn't have teff flour and I didn't have three days to prepare a meal.  Happily, Ethiopian cuisine seems pretty casual in terms of ingredients.  Many of the recipes read, "These proportions aren't set in stone, so if you don't have something, you'll get it right next time."  Such is the case with the inerja.  Ordinary white flour and some sort of fermentation or bubbling agent will do in an emergency.  I had some sourdough starter that's been brewing in the fridge for a couple of months now, so no problem.


We'd run out of ordinary white flour because of my failed pasta attempt two nights prior.  How do you prevent pasta from drying out before you're ready to use it?  None of the pasta recipes, which vary pretty wildly, I consulted address this.  They think-it we all know-a how-it to make-it the pasta?  They're it the crazy types!  No flour, but we did (do) have a box of Bisquick somebody gave us.  I looked at the ingredients, which I'm wont to do.  Bisquick contains leavening, which is good.  It also contains dextrose, which I'm not sure about.


The inerja recipe seemed similarly casual to the other recipes.  "Mix all ingredients until not-quite pancake batter like consistency is achieved."  I mixed the sourdough starter, the Bisquick, and less than a cup of water with a couple of teaspoons of baking soda together until I achieved the runniness I was looking for.


As casual as Ethiopian cuisine is, I'm now sure that it makes absolutely no allowances for Bisquick under any circumstances.  I don't care if that's all you have, eat pancakes or waffles or biscuits tonight instead, or drive across town and eat Ethiopian food the way it's supposed to be made.  I'm pretty easy-going, but Bisquick, no-sir-ee.  


I dipped my finger in to taste the batter, and ascertained a distinct laundry detergent-like taste, and not the good stuff, like Tide.  I tried to thin out the dough using more sourdough starter, a bit more salt, some vinegar, and the scant amount of bread flour I discovered behind the stupid Bisquick.  None of those additions helped much, but I soldiered on anyway because I was determined that we were going to have inerja, befitting a proper Ethiopian meal, soldiered on in bad faith, believing that I could fry out the Sam's Choice detergent flavor.  


Bisquick is wretched, wretched stuff.  I have deemed Bisquick unfit for human consumption.  I'm convinced that it doesn't even make good roach feed.  


Bisquick Buyer Beware!