The Crow's Return North

The parliament was especially good to me this year. Nestor Statue Raven, one of the newer members of the northeastern quorum hailing from some town in Vermont, took me under his wing for the winter. I learned more this year than I ever have before. He taught me some of the High Raven caws so I could understand some of the more esoteric aspects of their meetings and he made me keep a journal for the purposes of personal reflection. It's a habit I intend to keep, so I guess this is my journal for the journey back north.

Notes on the effects of Spring air on carrion

I never used to like carrion from Springtime. I found it off-putting the way that all the blooming and blossoming and wet heat makes everything, even animal carcasses, taste fresh and vibrant. I always thought, "What's the point if it doesn't taste dead?" but I guess tastes can evolve. This year I find myself grabbing bits from the first post-hibernation kills and really enjoying them. Maybe it's because I'm not making a whole meal of them this time around. Nestor got me into balancing my dishes. Before this year I went about food like any crow, nabbing whatever came opportunistically and pecking around until I wasn't hungry anymore. Now I know the value of constructing a proper meal. I take a little Spring carrion, mix it with some tree berries and, if I'm near civilization, some bread crumbles. So satisfying, I don't even know how I lived before.

 

Ruminations on the caprice of female crows

Nestor talked a lot about cycles, how a lot of things have a way of coming back around and repeating themselves, for better or for worse. The seasons, for example. Winter always comes, winter always kills, but winter also always melts. He helped me see my own cycles, how they harm me and how some of them are inevitable while others can be broken. Nestor kept me up nights conversing about what he called my "heart cycle". See, every year I leave the city and go south regretting the things I didn't get done and hoping for the next year to be better. Every year I come back to the city looking for stability and companionship. And every year I get my little heart broken when the she-crow I'm certain is the love of my life just abandons nest and disappears forever. Nestor helped me come to the conclusion that I put too much pressure on them to stay, which only makes them run faster, and that if I hooked up with the right pair of wings, I'd probably run away with her instead of waiting for the city nest to go empty.

 

Nesting in new rafters

Before I left, Nestor made me promise that I'd break an old habit of mine of setting down sticks in old buildings. See, I've got this affinity for those old, broken-down churches and warehouses all around town. No one ever goes there and I can make a nest in some high place and never be bothered. Nestor says that's bad for my soul, that I should spend this year hanging out in new places, places under construction and such. I'll have to move more often and keep an eye out for the dangers of a high-traffic area, but maybe that's the point. I guess watching something get built and appreciated could do me some good after so much time hanging out in the abandoned and forgotten. This could be a really good year, I think. Those ravens, they know what they're talking about.

Cat Cora Joins the Muppets!

Move over, Cookie Monster—there’s a new foodie in Sesame Street! I love me some Cat Cora. Not only is this working mom a prime example of how one can be successful and still have a family, she’s also one of the best chefs in the country. Have you ever seen her on the “Best Thing I Ever Ate” show? She always suggests the simplest, yet most elegant dishes. Her recipes have even been featured in Parents magazine as both family-friendly and healthy dishes. As the only female Iron Chef, she’s also a shining example to young girls and women of what they can accomplish in the culinary world. In other words, she is made of awesome.

Cat has been cooking up some culinary delights alongside the Muppets lately. The Muppet Cooking Show, or The Muppets Kitchen with Cat Cora, is a pretty sweet web series starring none other than Ms. Cora and Jim Henson’s motley crew of Muppets. The show is smart, creative, informative, and funny—including some goofy episodes such as “Food That Gets Caught in a Mustache Night.” Mini shows featuring the Iron Chef and her Muppet cast mates, known as “Hasty Tasty Cooking Tips with Cat Cora and the Muppets,” can also be seen on the web. All kinds of nutty, fun things happen on the show—from Cat being locked in a food cupboard while the Muppets invade the kitchen to her being called in at 3:00 AM to make pancakes. The funny thing is, parents can probably see their kids substituting in as the Muppets in the series, doing funny (or not-so-funny, depending on what!) antics while Mom or Dad has to come in and save the day—or start the day—with pancakes.

The best part of the show, of course, is that it gets kids thinking about cooking. It seems like cooking is becoming somewhat of a lost art today, with so much fast food and takeout available. Not only do kids get fun, inspiring recipes from the videos, but they also get to see some of the funniest—not to mention kindest—characters in all of imagination bring the food to life before their eyes. Perhaps if Elmo can cook, for example, a little girl or boy might feel more able to do so, too. Of course, it helps if Mom and Dad get into the kitchen and help teach kids to cook, too!

You can get a listing of the webisodes with descriptions here. Full webisodes can be watched here.

Slow Cook at the Speed of Light!

Well, maybe not the speed of light, but with this new technology, people may be able to slow cook their food at the same speed they’d normally nuke a hot pocket in the microwave. If this gadget goes mainstream, people may not pay Paula Deen and Co. much attention anymore, since they can make a savory slow-roasted dinner just as quickly as they could make a frozen entrée.

The Nutri-Pulse is currently on the market, not available to kitchens across the world just yet but to researchers testing the quick, slow-cook technology. By electronically breaking apart cells of food, the Nutri-Pulse is said to be able to create the flavors of slow-cooking in only the seconds it takes to cook in a microwave.

The thing is, I’m not so sure this is a great idea. Sure, it’s right out of the future; think of anything from The Jetsons to The Hunger Games, where all one needs to do is press a button to get a meal. But if we can recall the mentality that this media brings to light, we remember how complacent it makes humans. Just look at what the cell phone industry has done to us; just 100 years ago we thought that phones were a miracle of science, something to be revered and respected; today, we complain that our signals are too slow, that our service providers suck, that we need our phones to watch TV, surf the Internet, download music, and pretty much live on instead of just making a quick call to let Mom know we’ll be home in time for Christmas.

And we’re already approaching this same mentality with food. We’ve lost many varieties of vegetables already—not because we’ve exhausted their supplies but because we don’t cook anymore, so we only buy the varieties that McDonalds and KFC use to feed us, thereby eliminating the need for other varieties. We demand that our food is ready within minutes so we can get through the line and take it home to watch American Idol while we eat, before we head out to work another ten hours the next day in our oh-so-healthy way of life.

So is the Nutri-Pulse going to be a boon for us all? I’m not saying it’s the food apocalypse (no, that would’ve been McDonald’s, I suppose), but it’s not something we should be working towards so much as maybe green, renewable energy (in that light, perhaps it is better, since it doesn’t require longer cooking time?) or cures for different types of cancers.

The Disgruntled Food Critic: Cheerios Intervention

Something disturbing has been happening at the grocery store as of late. Those morning meal whores at General Mills have gone over the edge in tarting up their flagship product, Cheerios. Speaking as a lifelong consumer of those boring yet satisfying circles of composite grain, this atrocity cannot continue. General Mills has launched a long line of flavored Cheerios varieties, especially over the past five years, and most of them are wrong in one way or another. I suppose it has been a profitable venture, but so were the freaking Transformer movies, so that's no excuse for messing with perfection.

When I talk about "perfection" I'm not referring to regular, plain Cheerios. I'm fairly certain that nobody except for three-year-olds like plain Cheerios. The only reason toddlers accept the plain ones as a snack food of all things is because at that age they've only eaten, what, like five things ever. They don't comprehend that they're choosing to consume bland circles of grain that are, at best, reminiscent of tiny, stale bagels. Oh, but everyone grows up and learns what's really going on with the Cheerios racket. Since 1979 the king of the Cheerios line has been the Honey Nut variety. They are, hands down, the most respectable breakfast cereal on the market and have been for 32 years. They're not too sweet, they stay crunchy for a decent amount of time and they taste more or less like what they're name suggests.

Honey Nut isn't the first attempt at flavored Cheerios, though. General Mills trotted out Cinnamon Nut Cheerios in 1976 but discontinued them a year later. Cinnamon would pop up again when General Mills decided to start screwing around with the recipe in 1988 in the form of the weak but passable Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. I'll admit, I enjoyed the novelty of the extra-crunchy, somewhat cobbler-flavored ACC when I was a kid, but I never thought of them as superior to Honey Nut. The most recent flavor also makes that spice the centerpiece. Cinnamon Burst Cheerios aren't bad, they're just kinda boring. The bar for cinnamon-flavored cereals is pretty high thanks to Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The only thing the cinnamon in CBC does is make the milk at the bottom of the bowl taste like cheap horchata, which is novel but isn't exactly something I'm looking for in a breakfast experience.

I'm also not too keen on these attempts to make Cheerios sound exciting. Cinnamon, Berry and Yogurt Burst sound ridiculous, not to mention that nobody buys Cheerios because they're stimulating. General Mills could make Crystal Methamphetamine Cheerios and they would still be a low-key way to approach the morning.

But the biggest offender has to be last year's newcomer, Chocolate Cheerios. This is just wrong. One of the major selling points of Cheerios is that they're reasonably healthy. Slathering them in the kind of cut-rate chocolate we Americans have tolerated in candy bars, drink mixes and, yes, breakfast cereals for decades undercuts that. And unless General Mills was trying to mimic the experience of eating soggy Cocoa Puffs, I'd say they failed. It's like Frosted Cheerios all over again.

When it comes to health, though, Cheerios stumbles when they try too hard. They failed to edge into the Wheaties market with the short-lived Team Cheerios on the eve of the 1996 Olympics and their current healthier-than-healthy variety Multigrain Cheerios is, by far, the most baffling cereal I've ever eaten. MC taste like absolutely nothing, so the experience of eating them is punctuated by the brain compensating for the blandness by randomly inserting flavors from its own memory archives. There's a corn-based Cheerio in the mix, so you may notice a fleeting Kix flavor that isn't really there, or maybe a nondescript sweetness that is also entirely imaginary. Somehow, General Mills has made a cereal less flavorful than plain Cheerios. That's some sort of Nobel-worthy accomplishment in chemistry.

The point is, General Mills needs to dial back its variety binge concerning Cheerios. Honey Nut remains perfectly delicious and popular. I really don't need dried fruit and oat clusters in the mix.

The Elusive Shamrock Shake

Oh the mighty seasonal shake! How you humble us! The Shamrock shake is the most famous in a line-up of McDonalds holiday shakes (which include a Pumpkin Pie shake at Thanksgiving and an utterly revolting Eggnog shake for Christmas). And like the McRib, the Shamrock shake's elusive nature has only stoked the flames of passion among its fans.

You don't see the Shamrock Shake advertised as heavily now as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. It used to be a big thing, with ads trumpeting its release up to a month ahead of time. Now, some 20 or 30 years later, a lot of people have apparently forgotten about it. But not a core group of fans, myself among them.

The Shamrock Shake is still available at select locations. The trick is to find these locations. And then, if you are a kind and decent person, to share them with others. Enter a series of websites devoted to locating Shamrock Shakes. The best of these is ShamrockShake.com, although I wish it was either integrated with Google Maps or sorted by town. Maybe one day I will get around to building my own Shamrock Shake Finder website. (Maybe!)

The Shamrock Shake is experiencing something of a resurgence, at least here in Washington. I remember going on the hunt around 2004, and finding only ONE McDonalds in the entirety of King County which carried the shakes. (The one just up the street from University Village.) Now, if reports are to be believed, you can't throw a rock without hitting a Shamrock Shake. Other states are not so lucky.

What accounts for the Shamrock Shake mystique? It surely can't be that horrible color, the palest shade of green which is just this side of "sickly." In fact, maybe it's best you don't look at the shake, frankly.

Many people find the flavor somewhat elusive. It definitely isn't a very strong flavor, for which we should probably be thankful. When told it's "mint," a lot of people react with "Ew!" But think of it this way: it's like mint chocolate chip ice cream, but without the chocolate chips.

I know that sounds weird. Just trust me on this one.

I grew up in Anchorage Alaska in the 1980s, when there were about two dozen McDonalds in the greater Anchorage area. I remember one year in high school, one of my friends set himself a lofty goal: to get a Shamrock Shake from every McDonalds in town. Considering he only had a month (the shakes are only available from March 1st to March 31st), this meant that he had to eat at McDonalds almost every day.

Dude REALLY liked Shamrock Shakes.

He came pretty close to hitting his goal, if memory serves. But I remember that by the third week of March, he had developed an alarmingly pasty complexion. Not too different from the color of a Shamrock Shake, actually. I don't think he quite made it, but he definitely gave it his all.

Think you can do better? Find a Shamrock Shake near you, and give it a try!

Photo credit: Flickr/gordasm

Irish Soda Bread

Irish food, quick breads, Irish cuisine, easy breads

Unlike a lot of the things we Americans associate with Ireland and Irish culture, Irish Soda Bread really is Irish, and when made fresh, it really is fantastic. It's as common on Irish tables, whether at home or at the local, as corn bread or biscuits (also traditionally made with baking soda as a leavening ingredient) is in the American South, and in many ways, Irish Soda Bread fills the same culinary comfort food niche. It's also dead easy to make, and super quick. It's a fun recipe to make with kids, too.

The basic ingredients of Irish Soda Bread are flour, baking soda, salt, and buttermilk. The buttermilk absolutely is crucial, both in terms of the leavening chemistry, and the flavor. If you don't have buttermilk, you can make an ok substitute by adding a little lemon juice or vinegar to regular milk. Traditional additions to Irish Soda Bread include raisins and caraway seeds, separately or together. It's a bread that's best consumed when it it's hot and fresh from the oven, or toasted for breakfast the next day. This is not a time to be frugal with butter; good fresh butter makes this amazing bread even better—but having said that, it's also startlingly good with high quality olive oil, or just a little fresh local honey drizzled on top.

I will confess to having gone beyond the traditional additives of caraway seeds and raisins, and added dried tomatoes (soak them for a few minutes in warm water, then drain and chop, or microwave them in a mostly covered dish with a few tablespoons of water to steam and soften them), dried cranberries (I highly recommend the orange-infused cranberries), and grated lemon or orange rind.

This is a quick bread; that means it rises quickly, and, even more importantly, you don't want to mix or handle it or knead past the point of being mixed. If you over-knead or over handle, it will be tough and rather unpleasant. You bake most Irish Soda Bread in a greased cast iron frying pan (much the best way!) or as a flat roundish loaf on a cookie sheet that you've greased and sprinkled with corn meal.

For the best, easiest to make, and most clear instructions for making Irish Soda Bread, see Elise's Irish Soda Bread Recipe. Elise offers an equally yummy Irish Soda Bread With Caraway Seeds recipe, and a slightly-sweeter variant suitable for an Irish tea, with Irish Soda Biscuits. And for the adventurous, here's a lovely slightly sweet Irish bread made with self-rising flour and Guinness; self-rising flour already has baking soda added— Guinness Bread with Molasses Recipe.

If you really want a traditional Irish meal, skip the corned beef and cabbage, and serve Irish Soda Bread with Colcannon.

Image Credit: Heather "Moria"

Hooray for Chopped All Stars!

Ever since my husband and I became addicted to the television cooking show Chopped last year, we’ve always thought that the judges should have to compete sometime. It would only be fair, right? Sometimes their judging is so caustic that you can’t help but feel sorry for the contestants. I know I wouldn’t be able to do what they do—especially in that amount of time!—and I’ve even cried over a contestant or two who was torn apart by judge comments (especially Geoffrey Zakarian, who seems to get especially mean sometimes—particularly when it seems like he doesn’t like someone).

So when we heard that Chopped was airing an All Stars series featuring five episodes of judges and Food Network stars competing as chefs, we were ecstatic! We both can’t wait to see these chefs battle it out, and to finally empathize with the contestants that they so regularly judge. We are really looking forward to seeing what kinds of amazing creations the chefs will come up with, too, which is always the most fun part of the show.

Sunday the first episode aired (spoilers ahead), and we were a bit disappointed to see not judges or Food Network stars, but former contestants from the Next Food Network Star program. Not only does this seem not fair—having these people compete in the final round against the much more seasoned judges and stars—but it was also just not what we expected. As much fun as it was to see Brad Sorenson again (we didn’t watch the other seasons of Next Food Network Star, where the other contestants were from), that wasn’t what we were looking forward to. We were looking forward to seeing Chopped judges understand the pressure their contestants usually go through—not these cooks get frazzled on the show. I walked away feeling sorry for them all again, even though they’re playing for charity. (And since these people aren’t stars or judges or anything, I think that the winner should have at least won the usual Chopped $10 grand, too!)

I’m hoping that next week will feature some more familiar faces—I can’t wait to see both Geoffrey and Scott Conant compete, if they do, since they always seem the hardest judges to please. And in the commercials I thought I saw Aaron Sanchez cry! I certainly hope he was just sweating, since he’s one of my favorite judges—along with Alex Guarnaschelli—and I’d love to see either of them win.

Of course, the charities are important to support, too. Sunday’s winner, Michael Proietti, is competing for a suicide help organization, which would be a completely worthy charity of the win.

Amazon: Norpro 7-Piece Home Canning Set - $29.99

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Amazon is offering this Norpro 7-Piece Home Canning Set (2478367600456) for only $29.99 with FREE shipping. If you are all about saving money - you should start being all about canning your own food  - it's a skill that will also be handy during the impending apocalypse (if you survive).

Features:

  • 7-piece canning set provides the essentials needed for canning at home
  • Steel canning rack holds 7 pint- or quart-size jars; sterilizing rack holds 12 lids
  • Also includes 2 stainless-steel funnels, magnetic lid wand, jar lifter, and cheese cloth
  • Dishwasher-safe funnels and canning rack; hand-wash all other pieces
  • Measures approximately 10 by 8 by 24 inches

Demystifying Eggplant

You pass by it every time you walk through the produce section of your local grocery store. You avert your gaze from its odd, purple curves at the farmer's market. You can't even wrap your mind around the implications of its seemingly nonsensical name: Eggplant. Perhaps you once attempted to incorporate it into a meal back in your more ambitious days as an amateur cook and things... things got ugly. It's true that eggplant is a bit of an esoteric fruit and there's a lot that goes into cooking it properly, but once you have the initiative and the know-how, it can be a stunning addition to anyone's at-home culinary repertoire.

The big secret of preparing eggplant properly is controlling moisture. Eggplant, on its own, is like a sponge encased in rubber. It likes to hold a lot of moisture in, doesn't like to push any of it out and relies on a fragile interior to retain its structural integrity. This means that there are a lot of ways to ruin eggplant if you don't know how to coax the flow of material in and out of it.

The first step to prepping your eggplant for whatever application of heat you've chosen is to peel it. Unlike a lot of vegetables, eggplant doesn't benefit from a full peel. It's important to keep strips of the tough skin intact to keep the pieces from falling apart in the cooking process. Think "tiger stripes" for your eggplant. Peel away the majority of the skin while leave one-inch strips going long-ways down the fruit. This will allow each of the pieces, whether sliced or cubed, to hold up as the movement of moisture and the breakdown of structural materials under heat gives the flesh of the eggplant that distinctly mushy texture.

The next step in moisture control is pulling some of the water out of the raw fruit. Do this by arranging a thin layer of slices or cubes in a colander suspended over a bowl, sprinkling it with salt, then leaving it to chill for at least two hours. The salt will gradually coax the eggplant's own moisture to the surface and into the bowl, allowing the pieces of fruit themselves to prime for the introduction of more flavorful moisture.

No matter how you cook your eggplant, it'll want to soak up new liquid quickly. Whatever it shares the pan with will influence the final flavor of the eggplant, so be considerate about the pan drippings and sauces you're considering for the dish. A nice mix of garlic, onion, fresh tomato, zucchini and wine make for an excellent eggplant saute, just be aware that your pan will be crowded in the early going before the various components reduce.

You'll have to keep your eye on the pan and test the eggplant frequently, giving it the occasionally stir to make sure it cooks evenly. Unlike a lot of vegetables, eggplant is best when mushy, so give it longer than you think you should. Firm eggplant can be unpleasantly springy and quite bitter, so a long stay in the pan is necessary to bring it to that unique state of yielding, flavorful creaminess.

Eggplant is a nice addition to any diet, as it can fill the role of meat in a lot of dishes without bringing nearly as much fat and char to the party. Like a lot of firm fruits it's a good source of antioxidants and it's fairly heart-healthy, meaning that it's good for those who keep an eye on their cholesterol. It's low in carbs and sugar, has negligible fat content and is a source of potassium. It may take a little extra work and some special techniques to shape eggplant into something edible, but it's such a unique and versatile plant that every budding cook should know how to handle it.

The Great Microwaved Bananas in the Tailpipe Experiment

Microwaved Bananas: Yay or Nay in Banana Bread?


My eyes are unfortunately never bigger than my stomach.

3:02 pm

 I am now preparing to indulge myself by eating an entire loaf of banana bread, maybe even with a little pat of butter. The banana bread is a bit of an experiment because I used microwaved my rotting bananas. I know, it sounds strange, but I got the idea from Cook’s Illustrated a couple months ago. (The banana bread is currently in the oven as it didn’t cook at mock speeds even though I tried several different Harry Potter spells to cook it faster. This may be because modern technology has yet to hit my kitchen.) I found a banana bread recipe in my Betty Crocker cookbook because I didn't want to bring my laptop into the kitchen and risk banana splatter on it. (I don't have a hard copy of the magazine.)

I felt a little weird microwaving the bananas, but nobody was looking. When I mixed the bananas into the banana bread batter, they were easier to moosh—I didn’t even need to use a special mooshing tool to stir them into the batter. I’m guessing that was because the bananas were nuked at semi-radio-active temperatures.

Ten billion years later.

The banana bread still isn’t quite ready; probably because I did what I always do: I stuck every last rotten banana into the batter. This results in an extremely moist, but not-quite-cooked banana bread almost every time. The advantage to a moist banana bread is that you can really taste the banana in the bread (because the bananas don’t quite cook all the way through).

The Results of the Microwave Banana Bread Test.

 I honestly can’t taste the difference. Maybe I should bake two banana breads next time: one with microwaved bananas and one without so I can really give an accurate description for those too scared to try microwaving bananas for fear of ridicule. So, unfortunately at this point, the study results are inconclusive. (Please note that I could falsify the results, but that would be unethical, wrong, and would tarnish my clean reputation for all time.)

I consulted El Chef on the matter—he doesn’t usually bake, but is always helpful when I need test-eaters for my baked goods—and he couldn’t taste a difference either. He did say that he missed the cinnamon, sugar, and butter that I usually put on the top of the banana bread, but I was trying to make a “low-fat” recipe. (As a side note, there aren’t any “low-fat” recipes in the Betty Crocker cookbook. Do not trust Betty when she says that a recipe is low-fat. She is a useless, wanton hussy who will do anything to sell her cookbooks.)

******It should also be noted that I did not drain my bananas after microwaving them, which would have also made the banana bread better********

Lovely banana bread pic courtesy of flickr user dichoheco.

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