Food Cart Project Part II: Let's Rip the Roof Off This Place!

And for that matter, the walls...

...and the window! And the framing!

I'll be able to reuse much of this lumber, if not the the plywood, and I'm actually getting a handful of pretty nice decking screws out of it as well. The rest of this shouldn't take all that much longer. Might even have it down to the frame by the end of the day!

Food Cart Project Part I: The Cow's Last Stand

This is the Cow:

I don't know why it's called the Cow. Maybe because it's large and unwieldy, maybe just because it's ugly? Either way, that's what it's called. The Cow. Here's what it looks like from the side:

And here's what it looks like inside:

Or looked like, that is, until I cleaned it out this afternoon. The Cow belonged to my landlords until just recently, and dutifully served as a makeshift camping trailer for many years. The accommodations were spartan, to be sure, but it was weathertight and provided cheap and reliable shelter on many a trip into the mountains and the backwoods.

But that's all over. The Cow is mine now, and it's soon to be stripped down to its frame and transformed into something entirely different. The Cow is about to embark on a path to a new life; an urban life; a culinary life...

Roasted Chicken and Toast á la Limoges

I've been thinking about roasting a chicken lately, after stumbling across Thomas Keller's roasted chicken recipe on the interwebs about a week back. As providence would have it, I ran "afowl" (heh, heh) of an interesting idea this weekend at my neighbors' holiday gift exchange party, which kicked this project into gear.

Said neighbors are a couple who live just down the hall in my apartment building, and one half of the couple, Nicolas, is from Limoges, in the Limousin region of France (the other half is Jessica, who hails from Tacoma). Nic mentioned that in Limoges, when they roast a chicken, they put a slice of bread underneath it in the roasting pan to soak up the juices. Which sounded pretty damn good to me...

The recipe for the chicken itself, as noted above, is Keller's, and it's a remarkably simple recipe, with only three ingredients. I will, of course, be sharing it below, but you can find my source material here. 

First, you'll start with a chicken. I went with a free range fryer (if you go with a roaster, which is a larger, older and tougher bird, you'll probably want to cook it a bit longer than I cooked my fryer) from New Seasons:

For the toast, I went with a baguette, also from New Seasons, and sliced it on the bias. I also dried the slices out in my toaster oven. I should note here that I did not *toast* them, I only dried them out. The reason for this, and also the reason for the dearth of ingredients in Keller's recipe (i.e. no onions, garlic, apple, lemon, etc. stuffed inside the chicken cavity) is to minimize any steam in the oven once the roasting process is underway.

Lay your sliced bread in the roasting pan, underneath the rack:

Now you'll want to get to work on the chicken. Take it out of the fridge well ahead of time to bring it to room temperature, and make sure it's completely dry, both inside and out. Coat the cavity liberally with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. Then do the same to both sides of the outside:

Now you'll truss the chicken with some kitchen twine, which is actually pretty easy (refer to link above for instructions):

Preheat your oven to 450 F, place the chicken on the rack in the roasting pan, and once the oven's up to temperature, place the whole thing in and leave it be. After 50 minutes, take it out and check the temperature, in the space between the breast and thigh. If it's 165F, it's done. If not, put it back in until it is. Once it's done, let it sit for at least fifteen minutes before carving. This is what it'll look like:

And here's what the toast itself will look like:

The middle slices were pretty much perfect, and just as Nic described them: At once crispy and moist, and imbued with essence of chicken. The outer slices, however, were a bit dry and didn't soak up much of the chicken drippings. Next time, I'll probably pack them a little closer so that they're all directly underneath the chicken. The bird itself was spot on. The skin was crispy, none of the meat was dry, and the salt and pepper infused into the meat and gave it just enough seasoning.

So, there you have it: Roasted Chicken and Toast á la Limoges. Give it a try! And enjoy...

Burmese Tea Leaf Salad

I headed to San Francisco last weekend, for the first time believe it or not, and had a remarkable culinary discovery at a place in the inner Richmond called Burma Superstar: Tea leaf salad, which you see above (I didn't get a shot of my own, so I pinched one from Grace Chen of cityfoodsters.com). We don't have a Burmese community in Portland, but we have some adventurous Southeast Asian restaurants, so once I got home, I figured I'd be able to find it somewhere around town. I was wrong. Nobody's doing this dish here, that I've yet found, anyway. So I set out to try and recreate what I'd had.

The definitive ingredient in this salad is fermented tea leaves, which due to a general lack of trade between Burma and the U.S., as well as a couple of really sketchy chemicals used in most commercial Burmese preparations, is basically impossible to get here (apparently, the Burma Superstar folks make regular excursions to Burma and mule a bunch of it back). There used to be an importer in London that you could order it from, but that source seems to have since dried up (and who wants to pay $40 in shipping for $2 worth of fermented tea leaves?). Making them myself wasn't really an option, as the process takes months and, presumably, a tropical climate, so the next best alternative was to use pickled tea leaves instead. I found this recipe online, for both the pickled tea leaves and the salad itself, and altered it a bit for my own purposes.

This salad is a two-step process, the first being the pickling and pureeing of the tea leaves. Here's the mise on that:

Ingredients:

1 C water

1 C rice wine vinegar

1 Tbsp fish sauce

1 Tbsp Maggi seasoning

1 Tbsp Sriracha

1/4 C toasted sesame oil

1/4 C extra virgin olive oil

1/4 C green tea leaves (loose, not bagged; I used gunpowder)

1 Tbsp chopped lemongrass

Process:

Simmer the tea leaves and lemongrass in the vinegar and water for 30 minutes, then strain them and remove as much of the liquid as possible. I used, appropriately, a tea towel for this purpose:

Next, combine with the rest of the ingredients in a food processor or blender and puree. What you'll end up with is a dark and funky paste that looks like this:

The second step of the process is pretty simple, and involves combining your tea leaf paste with the rest of the ingredients. Here's the mise for that:

Ingredients:

I head of cabbage, shredded

Tea leaf paste

1 green pepper, minced

1 tomato, chopped

1/4 C sesame seeds

1/2 C sunflower seeds

1/2 C fried garlic

3/4 C roasted peanuts

1 lemon, cut into wedges

Combine all of the ingredients except the lemon into a bowl, squeeze the lemon wedges over them, and mix together (it's messy, but it's best to use your hands):

That's pretty much it. This came damn close to what I had in San Francisco, and was delicious. Like, seriously delicious. I'm very happy with the outcome, and I'm looking forward to introducing this dish to friends and relatives at potlucks and barbecues this summer. Serve topped with a few bean sprouts and a healthy dose of finely chopped dried shrimp. And enjoy...

Adventures in Juicing, Part One

So I've been doing some snooping around on the subject of juicing lately, and finally decided to give it a try. After a bit of research into juicers, I landed on the Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Juice Extractor (model 67650). I headed over to New Seasons today to pick out some produce, pretty much at random, and came home with kale, parsley, celery, carrots and apples. You can see in the photo above how much the indicated amounts yielded in juice, using standard pint glasses for scale. The juicer handled these quite nicely, and as this site isn't about endorsing any specific products, I'll leave it that.

There are a number of considerations in all of this, of course, first and foremost flavor. How did all of this juice taste? The kale juice tasted a bit like grass clippings; I probably wouldn't drink it on its own. The parsley and celery juice tasted like, well, parsley and celery (one interesting observation here: the parsley juice came out weirdly gelatinous). The carrot juice tasted like carrots, but a little sweeter than in their whole form. The apple juice fell somewhere between cider and filtered juice. Next, I combined them, in the proportions above. Here's what that looked like:



This tasted pretty good. Celery was the dominant flavor (which in my case is a good thing, as I really like the flavor of celery; it's the texture that's always kept me away), the sweetness from the carrots and apples came through pretty nicely, and the vegetal flavors of the kale and parsley rounded it out and were particularly strong on the nose, to put it into nerdy beer/wine tasting terms. The next thing I did was to combine about a third of the pulp back into it, via blender (the rest of the pulp became a snack for the chickens). I had to really liquefy it on the highest setting for about 60 seconds to get a smooth texture. Even with that, it was still a little on the chunky side, but not too bad. The flavor wasn't quite as sweet as the juice alone, and in fact was slightly salty. Still pretty damn good, though. It did separate, quite considerably actually, as I made my way through it. Definitely best drunk from a bottle which you can shake between sips.

The second consideration is nutrition. This is something I've been taking fairly seriously in recent years, as I've passed 40 and my lifestyle remains, shall we say, guided by vices. I've become a big fan of George Mateljan's website, The World's Healthiest Foods, which contains an enormous wealth of information on the nutritional benefits of any number of different foods, and it's been a great help in tailoring my diet (I haven't necessarily slimmed down any, but on balance the food I eat now is way healthier than it was even five years ago). A considerable amount of the vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, antioxidants, etc. come out in the juice, and I retained some of the fiber by adding the pulp back in, so I'm pretty happy with the results.

The third consideration is price. I've been drinking a fair amount of juice lately, specifically a combination of Columbia Gorge Organics' VitaSea (their version of Odwalla's green Superfood) their Pomegranite/Blueberry/Cherry, and Knudsen's organic version of V8. My end result today came to roughly 40 ounces, for about $11 worth of produce. The equivalent amount of the juice combination I've been drinking, near as I can estimate, would run about $9. So the price is a bit higher, but I figure it'll come down somewhat once Farmers' Market season rolls around and I don't have to pay retail for all of the ingredients. Plus, I can tailor it to my own preferences, use fresher produce and get an end result that contains proportionately less filler juices. So I'm considering this a success. Stay tuned as I tweak my juicing techniques...

Gluten Free Vegan Biscuits

I took on another vegan project this past weekend... Biscuits! These biscuits were gluten free in addition to vegan, and they worked out pretty well. This was all spurred on by a gal I've been dating for about a month who has some pretty particular dietary restrictions. We'd made our way to a gluten free bakery on MLK called Tula for breakfast a couple of weeks back, and after having one of their parmesan biscuits, I was inspired to try my hand at it myself. In the interest of giving credit where it's due, I based my recipe on a post I found on Vegansaurus, with a few alterations. To wit...

Ingredients:

2 C gluten free flour*
3/4 tsp xanthan gum
1 1/2 tsp salt
5 tsp baking powder
5 Tbsp chilled vegetable shortening**
1 C unsweetened hazelnut milk

* I used Bob's Red Mill brand, you could also experiment with your own combination of corn, rice, garbanzo and bean flours, and potato starch.
** I used Earth Balance shortening; Crisco or vegan margarine would probably work in a pinch.

Process:

Preheat oven to 400F.

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and whisk together well. Add the shortening, cut into 1/4 inch pieces, and cut in with a hand mixer until the shortening has reduced to smaller pieces, and the mixture takes on a sandy, pebbly appearance. Then stop, you don't want to overwork it. It helps, by the way, to have placed the shortening in the freezer for a while, as well as the blades of the mixer (or, if you're using a Kitchenaid mixer, as I did, the paddle attachment and the bowl).

Add the hazelnut milk and knead by hand until just combined, ten or fifteen times at most. Again, you don't want to overwork it, or the flakiness of the biscuits will suffer.

Spoon biscuit sized portions of the batter onto a greased baking sheet. You should get about eight biscuits per batch. Place into oven, and check them after eight minutes. The bottoms should be golden, but not quite brown. Place back in the oven for another four minutes. Keep an eye on them during this period, as you don't want the tops to brown, only the bottoms.

And enjoy! For the gravy, I used an altered version of the sauce from Epicurean Vegan's Mac and Cheese recipe with some sauteed and crumbled seitan thrown in (seitan is, however, by definition not gluten free), although I might try Vegansaurus' recipe in the future...

Adventures in "Sorta-Veganism"

Okay, so there's no such thing as "Sorta-Veganism." I'm a poseur, and I'm more than willing to cop to that... But I did just turn 40 last year, and while I have no pressing health issues as of yet, no diabetes, no angina, no tingling in my left arm or any such like, I do have my vices, and milestones have a way of making a fella think. So, inspired by the work of George Mateljan, T. Colin Campbell's The China Study, and this dude, whose blog I kinda stole the title for this post from, I've decided to see how close I can get to an animal product free culinary lifestyle.

This all started about a year back, by the way, with an impulse purchase at New Seasons:


I picked these things up on a whim while shopping for jambalaya ingredients. I used them in place of traditional andouille, and the results were astounding... They were fantastic! The texture was great, and the flavor profile and spice level were dead-on. I decided right then and there that there was no reason to ever again use a pork product in my jambalaya. Then I did nothing, for about a year...

...Until Portland's favorite local bagel shop, Kettleman's, was purchased by the Noah's/Einstein's conglomerate, and I was forced to seek out another local bagel purveyor. I set out with whole grain bagels in mind, and after some legwork, found a few, including notable varieties from BagelLand and Spielman's, as well as Dave's Good Seed Halos. Kenny and Zuke's, unfortunately, still offers no whole grain variety, according to their website, anyway (Nick, I'm talkin' at you here). All of this bagel searching got me to thinking about also considering an alternative to cream cheese; which led me to this stuff:


Now, I'd be lying if I were to say it were a perfect match. The texture is good, but the flavor is just a bit off, a little reminiscent of cardboard, even after adding some chopped up smoked salmon (see, I told ya I wasn't going totally vegan...). But it's better than the Tofutti version, and I've found that mixing two parts of this to one part Philly brings the flavor profile into the range of acceptable. So that's what I put on my bagels now, and I'm quite happy with it.

My cream cheese epiphany inspired me to revisit my experience with vegan chorizo and jump headlong into the fake meat scene. A little bit of research revealed that "meat analogues" are made from one of two things: Soy, which yields tofu and tempeh, and vital wheat gluten, aka seitan. Here's what I've discovered so far:


I've been really impressed with Seattle-based Field Roast's line, which is built around wheat gluten and contains no soy. Their Italian sausages are fennel forward flavor-wise, which for some might be a problem, but for me, not so much, as that's how I like Italian sausage to taste. The texture, as with the Mexican Chipotle variety, is pretty damn close to the real thing. They're great in pasta & marinara, beans & rice and kushari.


Here we see two patty varieties, one sausage from Trader Joe's, the other chicken from Morningstar Farms (pretty sure Morningstar doesn't operate any actual farms, but anyway...). Both of these are soy based, which in theory isn't a bad thing, but in reality usually means that there's fair amount of textured vegetable (soy) protein involved. The problem with that is that the production of TVP typically involves temperatures high enough to denature the proteins in the soy, rendering them more or less inert as they pass through the digestive tract. In other words, about as useful, health-wise, as Cheetos (also, look out for soy protein concentrate and soy protein isolate; pretty sure neither of those comes straight off the tree, either). Another thing to think about when dealing with soy products is that you're likely to wind up with genetically modified products, unless you're really diligent about reading labels (look for Organic or Non-GMO). For the record, TJ's sausage patties were pretty tasty once I had a really good sear on 'em, though the interior remained a bit mushy. The Morningstar Chik patties were kinda chicken-like, but at the end of the day... meh.


This stuff's actually quite good, whether formed into a pattie and fried, crumbled up, sauteed and added to a scramble, or what have you. It's composed mostly of suspect soy products, and is manufactured by a subsidiary of ConAgra... Make of that what you will. I'm considering this the "guilty pleasure" of the meat analogue world.


We've all heard of Tofurky... Turtle Island Foods have been doing their thing for about thirty years now (in Hood River, OR, no less), but it's only in the last decade or so that they've emerged from the shadow of Gardenburger, Boca and Morningstar to make a name for themselves. Tofurky's deli slices are made from a combination of vital wheat gluten and tofu (soy), which is non-GMO and contains no TVP. Both approximate the texture of meat-based cold cuts pretty faithfully. The hickory smoked variety is the tastier of the two.


At the risk of sounding like I'm shilling for 'em, which I assure you I'm not, here we see Field Roast's entries in the deli slice category. Like the rest of Field Roast's products, these are made without soy. The Wild Mushroom variety, while tasty, is a bit crumbly and fragile, making it somewhat impractical for serious sandwich work... The Lentil Sage and Smoked Tomato versions hold up a bit better, and have great flavor, with a texture that's a ways off from real meat, but this becomes a moot point once piled into a sandwich. For me, flavor trumps texture, and these have become my go-to fake cold cuts.


By now you've probably guessed that I'm more or less in love with Field Roast. That said, I'm not in love with their meatloaf product. The flavor is pleasantly meatloafy, but the texture isn't exactly 100%. It's weirdly springy and chewy, and I'm pretty sure I lost a bit of enamel from one of my teeth while test-driving this stuff... Not a good thing. It would probably be better suited to a "meatloaf" sandwich than sharing a dinner plate with some mashed potatoes... Either way, be mindful of your choppers.


Also picked up one each of these. Both are good, both slightly gritty in texture, the hazelnut's definitely the better of the two. Really nice flavor. Drinking a second glass of it as I write this. I'd put it on my cereal, if I ate cereal. Might try it in my coffee.

Anyway, stay tuned, more to come in my "sorta vegan" adventure...