Pippa’s hot tonight

Chef Pippa Calland of Newville will be cooking tonight on the Food Network.

It’s a new show called “Chopped,” in which contestants compete in three 30-minute rounds to prepare appetizers, entrees and desserts with surprise ingredients.

Calland trained in New York City, Northern Italy and Beringer vineyards in the Napa Valley, where she worked under legendary culinary educator Madeleine Kamman. She moved to the Harrisburg area a few years ago, and has been a Second Street restaurant consultant.

Fry, baby

There are few things that improve on Troy Polamalu. Deep-frying is one. We made sweet potato chips for the Steelers-Cardinals game, dipped them in garlic hummus and eased their path with Anchor Steam porter while Polamalu disassembled the Baltimore Ravens. Sweet.

The Cool Daddy fryer was a Christmas present. I didn’t exactly ask Santa for it, but I’ve talked enough about frying off chips and fritters at the Hilton and the extraordinary taste that the need (?) was obvious. Okay, the want(!).

Meanwhile, inside my brain, my inner Nutrition Nun had a hissy fit.

So imagine my surprise when I started googling deep-frying and nutrition and all I got back was bloviation about How Awful and No Nay Never, with not much data. Then when I was finished frying the chips, there was as much oil in the pot as I put there in the beginning. So the sweet potatoes did not absorb vast quantities. Huh.

Making chips is about as simple as it gets with frying, but even so we checked some recipe sites … and found weirdness about breading the vegetables. Breading is exactly my objection to deep-frying, because I want to taste the food, not the bread crumbs.

La Tartine Gourmande cleared it up with a quick discussion of Root Vegetable Chips.

Now, you might find the whole deep frying project messy, and hard, but it really isn’t. Not only making chips is easy, but it requires next to nothing – and this is coming from someone who does not do it often. You need a pot deep enough to fry (of course, a deep fryer is always good to have, but not necessary), frying oil, and a good Chef’s knife (or a mandoline, or a turning vegetable slicer). The rest is just fun, especially the eating part as you go along. Impossible to resist nibbling on chips while you are making them.

Exactly.

The Cool Daddy fryer is not at all like the open basket fryers you see in a commercial kitchen. It’s a closed system. That’s good because you don’t get splashed with hot oil, bad because you can’t see or sense the cooking as well or turn the food as easily. What made me like it for home use is that a typical commercial open fryer is built in at hip height — in your house, it would sit on top of a counter and you’d have to stand on a chair to get the right angle.

I fryed off four batches of chips at different cooking times because I couldn’t see the color well enough through the window on the machine. The 8-minute batch was pretty well  burned, the 7-minute batch was a bit lighter, and the best came at 5-6  minutes. Once they’re out of the oil, dusted with salt and resting on a paper towel, they crisp up nicely.

Hard to resist? Yeah.

Beets?

Whatever growing up means — getting a job, getting married, saving money, watching your kid graduate from college  — I think that some where at the bottom is a large NOT: not knowing. Even more, being comfortable with not knowing.  Not needing to be the smartest guy in the room.

So it is with me and beets.

I started from a childhood of encountering beets at other people’s houses, not expecting it, and really not wanting to walk into a wall of seriously troubling aroma. So it took me decades to even consider beets as edible. And then it was more about philosophy than taste: as in, you really should eat more root vegetables. They are so good for you.

That was back in the Whole Foods phase, which succumbed to Natural Foods, followed by Slow Food and Locavoring. All that helped bring me to a post-modern Don’t Knowing, because as much as I vote with my thoughts and dollars for local, sustainable food, local food is not appealing in the winter in the Northeast and I’ve lost my appetite for faith-based Shoulds and Shouldn’ts.

And no winery in Pennsylvania makes a decent Cab and I’m not buying a plane ticket to Hawaii when I want to eat a pineapple.

So with all my food catechisms in shreds around me, I looked again at beets. I began by shredding raw beets into salads, which was not bad. Good sweetness (like good quickness in a running back), a nice textural element, and not smelly.

Next, I threw in beets when I roasted vegetables in the winter. Sitting happily among the  squash and yams and asparagus, mushrooms and carrots, the beets were homey.

Now comes a terrific idea in the NYT about dicing and caramelizing that just looks scrumptious.

It’s a roasted beet salad with bitter greens to balance the sweetness, and goat cheese, because everything’s better with goat cheese. I’m happy to say I will make this salad without knowing if I’ll like it.

“When we are able to be here without saying, ‘I certainly agree with this’ or ‘I definitely don’t agree with that,’ but just be here very directly, then we find fundamental richness everywhere,” as Pema Chodron says.

Desperation, part deux

As registered contrarians, we consistently use things in ways they were not meant to be used. By we I mean people in our family and our extended family. By not meant I don’t just not mean the excellent cold cure involving Nyquil and Single-Malt Scotch.

For instance? We frequently use our ipods for non-music purposes, like scavenged/ borrowed Teaching Company lectures.  Dee got blown away by a 382-talk series about ancient Egypt. I was utterly seduced by Elizabeth Vandiver’s commentary on the Iliad. None of this was easily accomplished, because iTunes wants only to rub up against Christina Aguilera’s shiny lyrics.

iTunes firmly resists importing unregistered uncommercial audio unless you copy it onto your hard drive and slide it into a pre-existing file, drag that into iTunes and hold your nose and turn around three times stamping your feet in Birkenstocks.  By now we’re almost used to it.

Other examples? We have our Turkey Day on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, so our daughter and son-in-law and their kids don’t have to choose among various relative dinners on Thursday. Plus many of us had to work on the day, in the past — me as a journalist, Megan as a chemo nurse, Nate as a paramilitary nuclear defense guy. Turkey Saturday has become so traditional with us I felt I had to give it a name. I call it Givethanksing.

So there was an attractive contrariness to vacation on the Outer Banks in the winter. Neither of us care for crowds or sunbathing on the beach or shopping for pricey crap to fill up knick-knack shelves we don’t have at home. We like walking on the sand beside the sea, sitting on the couch reading, writing and Twittering — and grilling fresh fish for dinner. December seemed as good a time as July for that. So we rented this house:

If you look at the center of the photo and notice the staircase line, there’s a standing grill right behind it, which became The Problem.

Fish, definitely not the problem. Even though the main market in Duck is closed until April or so, there’s plenty of fish. I steered past the tiny, creepy plywood FISH 4 SALE shack awkwardly nailed onto the gas station in Southern Shores, went to Food Lion on the main drag for staples and then hit the small fish market on the south side of Rt. 158. Bought some salmon and a bunch of oysters and headed back to the beach house.

It was windy. I planned ahead. The sun would be way down by dinner time, I realized (for me, that was a real Duh Moment.)  The charcoal I bought at Food Lion was pre-lighter-fluided, because I didn’t want to be fooling with explosive liquids in what I was realizing would soon be total dark.  I put some newspaper on the bottom of the grill pan, covered it with a pile of charcoal and went inside.

Hours later, I returned with a pair of tongs, the salmon, a pile of oysters, a book of matches and a Yeungling Black and Tan. I am addicted to grilled oysters. They have a strange buttery succulence that goes way beyond anything else in shellfish land. I planned to eat as many of them as I could while the fish was cooking and serve the rest as an appetizer at table. (See, I can share.)

I put down everything but the beer and the matches and prepared to light the fire. The first match blew out before I could get it near the charcoal. So did the second one. I put the beer down. I huddled over the grill and lit the third match, managing to touch it to the charcoal pile before it blew out.

The wind was from the west, coming off the Sound straight at the open section of the grill. I smothered the charcoal pile with my body and somehow managed to wedge my arm, with the matches, inside the small open area between the front of my jacket and the pile of charcoal.  If the fire suddenly exploded into being I would be toastified. Didn’t care. Must light fire with remaining matches. Knew just how Neanderthals would have felt if they had matches.

Arrrgggh.

I climbed the stairs to the cottage realizing any sensible person would call for pizza now.  Got more matches.

This time, I slouched my body over the grill, wedged the matches into the opening and lit the whole pack at once. They flared and whooshed as I tucked them under a corner of the charcoal pile and waited happily as the fire sought out the lighter fluid, tempting it toward fiery magnificence.

But while I was waiting, I wondered when the bag of charcoal got put on the shelf at the Food Lion. End of season? Maybe August. Or maybe the store manager was really aggressive and laid in a couple skids during July, figuring they’d sell. Before, you know, December. Would the light fluid have evaporated in the intervening six months?  (I’m not a chem major.)

Possibly, because the next three packs of matches had no effect either. I climbed the stairs being very grateful that I’d bought a package of chicken at Food Lion.

After I told Dee about the non-fire, we had a moderately good if slighlty tension-filled laugh. It was getting late. I opened the cabinet to grab the the olive oil.  No olive oil. Opened the fridge. No chicken. Sensing some spousal stress arising from my stomach, I asked Dee where she’d put the chicken and the olive oil.  “What chicken?” she said.

What chicken, FFS?!? I looked in the cupboard and there was also no salt and pepper, no red pepper flakes, no trash bags — all things I remember we put in the cart. I called Food Lion but they didn’t have an extra bag of groceries sitting around. We looked at the receipt. None of the stuff we were missing was on it.

Hmmm. There had been a weird moment at the grocery when our cart went missing. I am seriously not making this up. After we both looked in several other aisles a woman came along with a chuckle in her voice asking, “Did someone lose a grocery cart?” and pointed to one back near the produce section. It was ours.

That seemed so odd. If she had taken our cart by mistake, wouldn’t she have said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I took your cart by mistake. There it is.” But we were in the South. Southern humor? Southern hospitality? We got the cart and finished shopping. We thought.

But back at the house facing a chickenless fridge, I wondered if this odd woman had raided our cart for things she was too shy to acquire by the normal public process. Didn’t really matter. I wasn’t driving back to Food Lion now to buy more chicken.

Plan C: call for pizza.

No answer.

WTF? The pizza place A. wasn’t answering the phone, or B. had closed. It was 8:15. I got in the car and drove to the pizza place in Duck, which had taken Option B. I kept driving until I found my self past Southern Shores at Cosmo’s, next to the Food Lion. Ordered. Waited 2o minutes. Drove back to the house.

We ate. We drank beer. I wondered at the wondrous complexity of a contrary life, and decided we usually have more fun than other people, if not more pizza.

Desperation, part one

That our first meal in southern France was at McDonald’s always gets a laugh. Like a great New Yorker cartoon, it immediately balances the warmth and beauty of life by the Mediterranean.

I’ll make this short, so I can get to why we’re eating pizza tonight in the seafood capital of the Outer Banks, N.C.

We got off the train from Paris on a Sunday afternoon, had to take a taxi to the airport to pick up our rental car, managed to lose ourselves on the way out of Nimes and finally found our cottage in St. Mamert du Gard after some confusing encounters with people who speak the language a hell of a lot faster and better than anybody in our car.

Saint Mamert du Gard

This photo shows the square. Our gite was on a street nearby, under olive trees. The landlady was away, but we found the key to the front door above the lintel.

Note the closed shutters in the square. Since we’d driven through town, we already knew the grocery was closed. So was the tiny bistro we saw, and the boulangerie. Small town, sleepy Sunday. Sun going down. Hunger coming full on.

Back to the car, but to go where? We headed for the highway and went north. (South to Montpellier would have been a better choice, but who knew?) Tried a few exits and found nothing but houses. Hunger had become a third voice in the car, an unpleasant finger-pointing WTF-Were-You-Thinking snarky voice that didn’t sound like calming down soon.

About an hour into our search, with only headlights and moonlight around us, a soft reddish-yellow glow appeared on the right side of the roadway, miles ahead. It looked M-ish.

HFS — it was an M. It was a McDoubleCheeseBurger M, a McFries With That M, a Where’s The Damn Exit M that pulled us clean off the highway and into a long line of Peugeots and Renaults.

It’s called McDo en francais, and done with full French efficiency and courtesy. Uniformed servers walked the lines of cars, taking orders and taking money, so that when we got to the takeout window all we had to do was grab our hot bag of holy junk food and find a place to park.

And give thanks.

FWIW

Okay, I had a chicken breast defrosting and some roasted veg leftovers. Dinner? Hmm. Seemed like it needed a platform, a vessel.  Pasta. I filleted the chicken and marinated in olive oil, salt and pepper and white wine. Seared it and then roasted it.

Cooked bowtie pasta, heated some marinara, nuked the roasted veg.

Pasta, veg, sauce, chicken. Out-standing.

Great grilled cheese

This is an outstanding grilled cheese, except I’d go for an apple slaw instead of the cole slaw

Texas BBQ

Word envy is not a big problem for me, except when Calvin Trillin bothers to write. Here is his latest on Texas BBQ.

Keeping it moist

The science guy Harold McGee on the Brining or Not Brining thing.

Queso Fundido

While I am not a fan of the folks at Cook’s Illustrated, they certainly test the shit out of everything they cook to find the best possible recipe. The thing is, i don’t really like the best possible recipe. I like some ingredients, a sense of the proportions and then don’t be in my way.

But as it happened, I got a review copy of “The Best International Recipe” by Cook’s Ill and began to read it. The recipes looked like fair representations of the cuisines (Mexico, Latin America, Central Europe, France, Spain, Italy etc.).  So, WTF. I sort of decided to cook my way through it.

Mexico was the first cuisine and Queso Fundido was the first dish. Although my friend Beth called it fancy-sounding stuff, it’s just a totally overwheming flavoricious fondue with cheese, hot sausage and chiles. Call it apps for 8 or dinner for 2. At our house, it was dinner.

4 ounces chorizo, skin off, medium chop

1 poblano chile, julienned (or other moderately hot chile)

1/2 onion, sliced thin

8 ounces Queso Asadero (at a Spanish market) or Monterey Jack (NOT grated), medium dice

Tostitos Restaurant Style White Corn Tortilla Chips (the best)

Saute the chorizo in a little bit of olive oil until the fat starts to render, a minute or two, then add the chiles. Cook for a couple minutes, then add the sliced onion and cook until softened, five minutes or so.

Spread the cheese evenly over a pie plate or shallow casserole, and spread chorizo mix over the cheese. Bake in a 350 oven until the cheese is melted a little, about 10 minutes. Serve with tortilla chips and beer.