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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Sunday, December 01, 2002

A little farofa puts a right pleasant smite of heat on slowly sauteed shittakes and a medium rare strip steak. Takes confession, blesses without penance, and sends them off to sin no more. It puts ordinary delicious food on the express elevator right to the 5th-dimensional summit of Everest  There's no reason for this stuff to be even slightly obscure. It is good. It is everything I dreamed it might be and indescribably more. 6:20:33 PM    comment []

A local supermarket is packaging cremini mushrooms as "baby portobellos". The fabric of our universe was rent on Feb. 18, 2001 when Dale Earnhardt crashed into the wall at Daytona, allowing unspeakable demons to pass through unnoticed into our dimension. Nothing has made any sense since then. 3:20:12 PM    comment []

This farofa recipe, from Recipe Cottage, looks pretty good. Another variation uses fried eggs instead of hard-boiled and chopped. Using only a friend's description and trying to guess ingredients, it never occured to me to add eggs. I'm boiling a couple right now... Farofa 1/4 cup vegetable oil (or oil + butter) 1 large onion, chopped 2 hard-cooked eggs, chopped 1 tsp red pepper flakes 2 cups manioc flour Heat oil in a frying pan and fry the onions until golden brown. Add hard-boiled eggs and saute the mixture for 1 minute. Next add the pepper and manioc flour, stirring constantly until the mixture turns golden. Serves 4. (I sauteed it real slow, a half-batch starting with a 50-50 olive oil/ butter oil. It got a little dry after adding the manioc, so I threw in a couple more patties of butter. At the end, after it was off the burner, I stirred in a couple tablespoons of freshly-chopped parsley.) 2:05:31 PM    comment []

The okra in manioc is resting after a a brief stint in the T-Fal deep fryer. I am not happy with this thing. The power cord attaches magnetically, which might have been intended as some sorta voodoo safety mechanism but what it is an annoyance. The lights goes on, the lights go off, maybe affected by sunspot activity causing sinusoidal deviations in the earth's magnetic field. We must have hit a peak because the light indicating the heating element is on just went off while the power light is still on. Maybe now the okra can finish frying. I used the buttermilk soak approach after the okra had soaked in icy water several hours. The grossness of okra had an opportunity to manifest itself in the water, which had the consistency of glycerine when it was strained. I picked up the strainer and long goopey okra boogers crept out the bottom. A quick rinse got rid of those. There weren't any after the buttermilk soak, which lasted about an hour. The fry completed. There was no oil on the paper towels that were supposed to drain the okra. The little brown nuggets, not quite golden brown, resemble almonds in shape. They're crunchy and definitely could have used a little more seasoning, but the okra flavor, not the manioc, dominates. The manioc gives the same grainy texture as cornmeal would, but without contributing a strong flavor. The pieces held their shape as the okra contracted within, kinda like little cocoons they are. The manioc is not as delicate as panko, but there's a niche for it - adding texture while preserving the natural flavor of the food it coats. 1:51:08 PM    comment []

Look! The economy in Bangladesh is improving too! 7:07:24 AM    comment []

Twice in the past 24 hours, Google has taken me to everything2. Once looking for the technique of making pancetta and this time looking for a picture of bias slicing. There are no pictures there, but entries are hyperlinked, apparently automatically by SQL and Perl, nearly to to the point of distraction - but still an interesting project, another approach to an "online community". From the FAQ:  E2 can be a very, very confusing place at first. This website has grown from being a very simple user-written encyclopedia (see E1) to a very complex online community with a focus to write, publish and edit a quality database of information, insight and humor. When you make an account here you join not only a team of dedicated writers but an entire micro-society and community with its own pop culture, politics, beauty and blunders. It's not perfect. In fact, it can be pretty messy. It's cool as hell, though... and it is. "Saige" provided a pancetta recipe there. The reason for the inquiry on "bias slicing" was the second okra recipe I linked yesterday, the french-fried one. It never occurs to me, with a basically German mind, to slice on the bias unless the recipe specifies it. Then, of course, there is no alternative. It still leaves strange endpieces and with hard vegetables, like carrots, leaves the fingers more vulnerable - as Xarnot at E2 gleefully notes, you can't pick your nose if you cut your fingers! I wonder if E2 is unintentionally building GoogleMass and might become a gravitational black hole for searches. While I had some difficulty visualizing bias slices of okra without help, my mental picture did include the slices soaking in a bowl of water with ice cubes. They're doing that right now. 4:25:02 AM    comment []