Hunger, boredom, wanting to be the world's fattest man

A few weeks ago, right around the last time I wrote a blog entry here, I twisted the dickens out of my right ankle. No, I didn't do it jumping off a skee-ball lane in 3-inch heels like the inimitable Linda from Salty Seattle. Rather, I was out for a quick run on a Saturday morning to work off a few of those 42,000 calories from Thanksgiving and I hit a patch of uneven sidewalk coming down from Diamond Heights. "OH JESUS F-F-F-F-F!", I shrieked among the rows of single-family homes, hitting the ground like a Dutch soccer player in the World Cup finals. Don't worry, this story has a happier ending: within a few minutes, I was able to flag down a very friendly passing driver for a ride back to my apartment, and when I got there Jeff had just finished making a batch of eggs in purgatory, one of my favorite things in the world. Yum-ouch!

Jeff spent the rest of the afternoon replenishing the ice in my plastic baggie and openly laughing at my attempts at walking. By the next morning, he had gotten so tired of hearing me complain about my twisted ankle that he decided to go drink bottomless mimosas for four hours with our friend Greg, leaving me at home alone with an ACE bandage and a pound of leftover mashed potatoes in the fridge. I was pretty mad, so, to spite him, I decided to make fried mashed potato balls and eat them all before he got home.

I'd been wanting to try my hand at pommes dauphine for a while now, and revenge seemed as good a reason as any. To make them, all you have to do is whip up a quick pâte à choux--the same pastry dough you use to make cream puffs--then beat it into some leftover mashed potatoes before dropping the whole gemisch spoonful-by-spoonful into hot oil. Hey, if I can do it with a twisted ankle on a Sunday morning before making coffee, anyone can do it. At this point, I think I'm contractually obligated to tell you that if you just drop the dough into the oil sans potatoes, the resulting little fried bits are called pets de nonne, OR, nun's farts.

So perhaps pommes dauphine should actually be called pets de dauphin or pets de pomme. Whatever you call them, cooking them is really one of the most fascinating bits of kitchen alchemy you'll ever try. I'm still amazed by how you can start with a single, shaggy ball of dough and, following a quick dip in some oil, end up with both a crisp, lacy crust and a barely-set custard enclosed therein. The raw dough is so unattractive on its own that it's truly miraculous to transmute it so easily into not just one, but two culinary treasures. Maybe we should start telling kids this story instead of The Ugly Duckling.

All that said, I couldn't eat magical fried potato balls alone for breakfast; I needed a side dish. Looking at the first batch of pommes that I fried up, I decided that they were more or less just fancy pierogies--a crisp, fried shell with mashed potatoes inside. And, still hobbling around the kitchen with my swollen ankle, desperately in need of comfort, I decided to adapt an old standby dinner from my childhood: franks 'n' beans with pierogies.

I'm pretty sure Sam's Mom invented franks 'n' beans 'n' pierogies as a dinner concept, so you probably can't relate to just how comfortably a deep-fried pierogi nestles alongside a broiled hotdog in a bed of baked beans. Fried, creamy, sweet, tangy, smoky, porky, onions--it covers just about every flavor and texture you could want in a meal. I was in no condition to crawl out and buy hot dogs that morning, but I did have a bowl full of leftover bacon-laden beans in the fridge, which made an acceptable substitute. This is the point in the blog entry where I usually say something kind of hyperbolic, like: this brunch was so good it could have brought eyesight to the blind. In this case it didn't even bring feeling back to my toe. But it was a good brunch.

And this story too has a happy ending: I filled up so much on my first serving of franks 'n' beans 'n' pommes dauphine that I was able to keep a second batch of fried mashed potato balls warm in the oven for Jeff to try when he got home. Hey, after four hours of mimosas, he probably needed them more than I did. I didn't end up enacting my revenge after all. Well, like they say, it's a dish best served cold.

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Recipe roundup...

Mashed potatoes from my thesis-length recipe

Pâte à choux adapted from Ratio by Michael Ruhlman, then mixed 2:1 with the mashed potatoes and fried. I tried the suggested 1:1 ratio but the dumplings sort of dissolved into flakes as I was frying them. I think I needed the extra dough because my mashed potatoes were prodigiously creamy.

Don't be distracted

This was a particularly busy weekend for Jeff--he had two handbell concerts and a handbell dinner celebration, and he also had to work overtime on Sunday to help relocate his office. Each time he left the apartment I put forth some sort of vague proposition toward imagined productivity--"Okay, cool, I'll clean up around here while you're gone" or "Oh, yeah, maybe I'll do a little laundry this morning."

But, well, you know me.

So my original cooking project for the weekend was to prepare this chicken liver mousse from Frances. A duck liver mousse had been a highlight on a previous visit (and is the current teaser picture on their website, served with APPLE BUTTER), so I was overjoyed when the recipe showed up in the Chronicle a few weeks later. On Saturday afternoon I went out to buy some supplies for that. And, well, you know how things can just snowball? Oh, look, Mission Meat Market sells chicken backs--maybe I should buy some for stock. Hey, we still have some eggplant leftover from the farm box--how about some baba ghanouj? Four hours later Jeff was home from handbells, down on his hands and knees in the bathroom, scrubbing off all the dirt that I had spattered everywhere while unpacking my camping tarp, and I was in the kitchen pushing chicken livers through a sieve. I am awesome.

So maybe I didn't do so well with my chores on Saturday night. But that mousse I made? Sure was excellent. Probably one of the best things I've ever thrown together in the kitchen. I served it with some extra-crunchy baguette slices, tarragon balsamic cherries that I pickled last month, and a little arugula salad in a mustard vinaigrette. Having my hand in every element of the dish was pretty instructive as far as why this is such a classic pairing--eating the liver mousse alone (off of a spoon, off of the food processor blades, off of your fingers), you really do feel that for all its astoundingly smooth richness, it's missing something crunchy. Then you get that crunch and--oh, how about something sweet? How about for something sour? I learned something today.

As it became clear that my weekend would be consumed by some sort of weird obsessive-compulsive cooking ritual de lo habitual, I put out an APB for an impromptu dinner party Sunday night. I have to say that I felt a little awkward when our friend Nghi showed up in gorgeous Chanel flats--not because I was underdressed at my own dinner party, just because "sweep the kitchen floor" was another household task that never quite rose to the top of my to-do list, and I wasn't sure if it would be less gross for Nghi to get those flats dirty or to stomp around barefoot. Hopefully I made up for the mess by serving a bean soup based on a recipe from Ubuntu, a tremendously fancy "community-focused restaurant and yoga studio" in Napa. In fact, I think it is the only Michelin-starred combination restaurant and yoga studio in the world. Or, at least, it's the only one where a salad costs $16.

Speaking of pricing, I'm not quite sure which would cost more--replacing Nghi's Chanel shoes or dinner for three people at both Frances and Ubuntu--but I do know that the soup turned out really well. The bracing aroma of rosemary, chili, and two heads of garlic was so enticing that when I dove into a tupperware full of the soup for lunch this afternoon, my coworker Colin headed over to the fridge, deadpan: "Okay, I have to eat something now because that smells so good." Maybe slip an expletive in there too.

Another totally essential thing that I did this weekend: I took a tour of six grocery stores to see which of them the best place to buy produce near my apartment. No, really, this is how I spend my life. Conclusion: while I don't think that I'll be giving up the occasional evening-commute visit to Berkeley Bowl anytime soon, I really dig a lot of things about Rainbow Grocery on Folsom, particularly these adorable baby fava beans that I found this weekend. I did a little fritto misto with them, or perhaps a fritto solo, and tossed them with some most excellent sun gold tomatoes (my single favorite food in the entire world), also part of my haul from Rainbow. The baby favas weren't quite exploding with concentrated fava flavor as I had hoped, but dipped into a little fennel-spiked creme fraiche, well... how bad can that be?

This entry was brought to you by the colon.

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Recipe roundup...

Chicken liver mousse as served at Frances, recipe reported by the esteemed San Francisco Chronicle
Fritto misto batter and potted bing cherries with balsamic vinegar from Ad Hoc At Home
Rustic Rancho Gordo "Yellow Eye" bean soup as served at Ubuntu, the recipe reported by the New York Times

And don't eat too much fried food

I have embarked upon two major cooking projects in the past two nights.

Tonight I made falafel. Everything in this falafel sandwich is homemade--the pita bread, the falafel balls, the pickled red onions, the cucumber yogurt, and the tahini dressing. Okay, for the tahini dressing I just mixed together some store-bought tahini with some lemon juice and hot water. But who makes their own tahini from scratch, grinding sesame seeds with oil until they form a smooth paste? That's crazy.

As I was writing the caption for the picture above and rhetorically asking myself that question, I remembered that my friend Gustavo the Fulbright Scholar wrote a blog entry about making his own tahini from scratch three years ago. In Paraguay. Before food blogging was even cool. Probably before I even knew what tahini was. God, I'm so two thousand and late.

Last night I was sitting at my desk getting ready to go to choir and I was somehow struck by the urge to make bacon beignets à la Frances as a practice round for a Mardi Gras party that Jeff is having next week. Honestly, it wasn't too difficult. I just made this beignet dough, rolled it thin, and cut it in half. Half of the dough I topped with bacon at regular intervals, and the other half I cut into circles using a jar lid. I placed the circles on top of the evenly-spaced bacon, and then I used the same jar lid to cut out little doughnuts. I was worried they would be more biscuit-like than doughnutty, but it turned out that they puffed up perfectly as soon as they got in the oil. Using a thicker-cut bacon and a dot of brown sugar or maple syrup in the filling would have made them even better. Next time, Gadget, next time.

So, all in all, the past two nights have been tremendously satisfying for me from a cooking perspective. I've made some really tasty food, and I've really gotten better at deep frying, which used to be one of those cooking techniques where I would look at a recipe, see that it involved deep frying, and say, "Nope, not that one, George." There are only two things that are not satisfying--first, it's hard to take pictures of fried food, because, well, fried food is not fun to eat if you don't eat it right away, and what's the point of cooking something just to take pictures of it instead of eat it? Don't answer that. Second, well, it's hard to eat six doughnuts and eight balls of falafel in the space of 24 hours, no matter how many carrots and bowls of oatmeal you choke down in between.

Here's a picture of roasted pencil asparagus and spaghetti squash with marinara sauce (get it? it's a pun. and a visual pun) that I made on Monday, just so this is not quite the Minnesota State Fair of blog entries.