As he came into the window, there was the sound of a gazpacho

Not much news today, just taking a little time after work to write a quick blog entry. Tonight marks the opening ceremonies of the biennial EBI Retreat, where I go talk about my biofuels research with other people who get money from the same oil company. Not an olive oil company. I wish. Fortunately, we aren't retreating as far as central Illinois this bi-year; instead, we're retreating a little under a mile down the road to the Claremont Hotel. I am still about as excited as I was for the last retreat, though. Dinner tonight will be "a light dinner of heavy hors d'oeuvres." Isn't that the name of a Traffic album?

I'm going to keep making that reference until someone acknowledges it.

DID YOU KNOW? I first learned of the existence of ceviche during AP Biology, my junior year of high school, when Mr. Kemble explained to us the concept of denaturing proteins, and how you could "cook" a piece of meat either by applying heat or by increasing the acidity. Last night, inspired by Kenji again, I tried my hand at actually making ceviche for the first time, with a few corn kernels thrown in for good measure because Heidi just put up a recipe for raw corn salad. It was surprisingly easy and I probably worried more about slicing the onions and padron peppers than I worried about whether the fish was actually cooked or not. Well, no food poisoning so far today.

Less likely to induce gastrointestinal distress was this refreshing gazpacho I adapted from Ad Hoc At Home. Instead of using sun golds and Armenian cucumbers, I used a heap of tomatoes from Jeff's farm box, a couple of unidentified summer squash, and two red peppers. Thomas Keller has this strange, complicated way of making gazpacho where you puree all the vegetables, strain the resulting soup, and then blend a generous amount of olive oil back into the strained soup. The oil gives the gazpacho a tremendously smooth, velvety, luxurious texture. If I could offer one criticism of this otherwise fantastic recipe--it makes the soup just a little bit too smooth for my liking. Criminally smooth. Even with a fine dice of red peppers and padrons added for some crunch, I was sitting there last night, slurping my soup, thinking "This is just too easy. It feels too nice in my mouth. This is unsettling. Something is wrong here." Life isn't easy. Why should your gazpacho be?

Friday, fried egg

The other day I was reading this article in The New York Times about how there is a new trend in restaurants where chefs are forbidding you from customizing your food or making substitutions in any way. I'm not sure how this is puritanical, as the title of the article suggests, but maybe there's something in there that's analogous to the way the Puritans presented their religion. Of course, the Puritans didn't do so well in Europe, did they? Anyway, if you're keeping track, the trendiest meal you could get right now according to the New York Times is heirloom vegetables on artisan toast, wine on tap, and quinoa-crust pie, with no substitutions allowed.

But I digress. Accompanying the article is a picture of some restaurant in New York where you can only order steak with fries and a salad and the only choice you can make is how you want your steak cooked, and you're not allowed to say "medium rare" because that is how you probably want it, and so having that as an option wouldn't be hostile to the customer. The restaurant sounded really stupid but it made steak frites sound really good, so I decided to stop by my local butcher on my way home on Friday and grab some hanger steak.

Oh man. First of all, I'm not going to spring for fancy strip steak anymore because I think I get the same amount of pleasure from a nice, fatty hanger steak, seared, roasted until it's rosy, sliced thin, and dripping sweet bloody juice all over a pile of crispy fries. The fries were Kenji's modestly named "perfect french fries", which are blanched in acidified water and then fried twice. It sounds like a lot but with a little work setting up an assembly line it's not quite as hard as you'd think, and you can easily make them from start to finish in an hour or two.

To gild the lily--or rather, enrobe it in golden yolk--I topped everything with a sunny-side up egg. So the eating process became sort of like: cut off some steak, drag some fries through the juices, add the steak, swipe everything through the egg yolk. Oh, perfect. There's a salad there too, mostly for color.

Because Jeff was coming over, and everybody knows Jeffrey loves scallops, I decided to make a first course of a huge caramelized scallop set on a bed of chickpea porridge and charred brussels sprout leaves. It was pretty good, but the sundried tomato sauce I made was a little too sweet. Next time I think I'd go for an earthier sauce made from some reduced stock or something. This has inspired me to make veal stock and freeze it in an ice cube tray, so that I can have little stock cubes ready to make rich meaty sauce at a moment's notice.

I have become a crazy person.

Well I want to be

Now that I think about it, my favorite part of Sunday was not anything that happened at the dinner party itself or even how the food tasted--it was probably sitting at home alone, listening to the cold rain outside and chopping up octopus.


My roommate John showed me this video on Saturday, which features one of his friends telling you how you can become an urban homesteader and take your goats for walks around Berkeley even if you have only two thumbs. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to ask "Jim, how did you get your life? How can I get your life?" It's a great video but depending on your disposition it's a little hard not to get a little squicked out five minutes in when Jim takes one of his rabbits, puts a pellet in its brain, and skins it.

I think that our culture is generally moving towards the idea of knowing more where our food comes from and recognizing that lamb chops don't fall off the lamb chop tree into shrink-wrapped packages--from all these trendy San Francisco restaurants that are serving live spot prawns and pork trotters to Campbell's soup commercials that name the farms on which their chickens are raised. I still think that for most people there remains a disconnect between the fact that we eat meat and the fact that meat comes from living, often adorable animals. I know people who run the gamut from "all I care about is that animals are tasty" to "I am a vegetarian except for eating sustainably-raised meat", and I would bet that just about all of them would still be pretty uncomfortable being present at the moment of an animal's death.

What Jim does in the video represents probably the closest interaction you can have with something you're going to eat for someone who lives in an urban environment. Although I'm still a long way from calming a rabbit as I cradle it in its last moments of life, I think that this weekend I took an infinitesimal step toward this ideal. Preparing an octopus, which looked identifiably like the octopuses that I have seen in aquariums, in such a way that involved the step "remove eyes", and then watching its little tentacles curl up in the pan as I seared it in hot oil, made me think a lot about how octopuses work. I also had some trepidation going to work with the bone marrow because I usually don't even like to eat it in restaurants, but somehow scraping the fresh marrow out of the bones--real bones, that felt like the ones in my arm--was not quite as traumatic as I thought, and actually kind of fun after a few minutes.

So, anyway, my point is this is a thousand mile journey that I have taken a single step toward. I've actually wanted to cook lobster at my house for a while, but I don't really like the taste of lobster at all so that seems like a waste.