Pork-Shiitake Niku Dango

Niku dango are Japanese meatballs, and are the perfect accompaniment to beer and noodles (two of my favorite things). Meatballs, in general are huge right now - Bon Appetit magazine recently had a whole issue devoted to them. Shit, 20% of all my (granted, now craptastic) blog traffic consistently comes from people Googling Swedish meatball recipes. I love meatballs, and since I've been fiddling with Asian flavors again these days - mostly Japanese and Korean - I thought I'd make some pork meatballs with a Japanese twist.

Flipping through my cookbooks, I saw a recipe for such "meatballs with a twist" in the Japanese Country Cookbook, and this is very loosely based on that (I prefer fresh shiitake to dried, soaked ones). Mix a pound of ground pork with a beaten egg, a small handful of panko, 2 minced shiitake mushrooms, a clove of minced garlic, a couple tablespoons minced shallot and grated ginger, a small splash each of soy sauce, mirin and sake, a tablespoon or so of sugar and a pinch of salt. I also added a pinch of chile flake for posterity. Some minced scallion would've been a nice touch, had I had any around, and I guess some finely chopped hijiki or nori flakes would've been kinda special. Oh well.

I know people will say there are better ways, and I know that grilling would yield the best flavor, but I just portioned these puppies out using a small ice cream scoop and baked them at like 375 or 400 for about 20 minutes. This is just always the easiest way for me to make meatballs, even if frying in butter or duck fat does taste better. The mushroom and all the seasoning liquids (plus the lovely pork fat) keep the interior of the niku dango so nice and moist that you can get away with a higher temp to get a crispier exterior, but I brushed mine with store-bought tonkatsu sauce (pineapple flavor, though you could use a mix of soy sauce, honey and rice vinegar) and returned them to the oven to get all sticky and glaze-y.

Since I cooked these to sate a trashy izakaya jones, I originally served them with udon soup and gyoza, but I had so many leftover that I enjoyed the rest for a fast lunch the next day (reheated in the toaster oven) with shoyu ramen, soft-boiled egg and sprinkled with shichimi togarashi (Japanese chile powder) and nori goma furikake (seaweed-sesame rice seasoning).

Enjoy with a tallboy of Kirin (Marc suggests Asahi for proper Japa-redneckness) and Keyhole TV.

Living off the fat of the land

I guess it's fairly obvious that I've got a lot on my plate these days, so to speak, and my writing has taken a back seat to more important ventures. I do still cook, once in awhile (last week produced a kabocha and eggplant mulligatawny of sorts, spicy with curry and cardamom, with coconut milk for body), and this time of year I still think about treks to spongy woods, even in my compromised mobility and subsequent preference for the sloth of a warm couch and chenille throw.

Thank goodness, then, for store-bought chanterelles and Langdon Cook. Some of you might know his blog, Fat of the Land (I've had him linked on my sidebar for some time now). His new book of the same name has recently been published and is now available for sale on Amazon.

Cook is a modern, urban male indigenous to an opposite coast where clams are fried, not dug. Relocated to the Pacific Northwest for graduate school, he met a fascinating young poet with an ear to the wind and an eye to the ground, and by her beauty, found himself rapt. In a comically-told recollection of her contempt at his efforts at a woo with a reconstructed fast food breakfast sandwich (""I don't do McDonald's", she said dryly"), his now wife and twice-babymama opened the door to a world that would clearly become a new passion for Cook.

Langdon Cook is no latter-day Euell Gibbons, and Fat of the Land - Adventures of a 21st Century Forager is no Stalking the Wild Asparagus. More than simply a field guide to modern locavory, FotL is a series of witty vignettes that are really about the people and places that have informed his passion - they all just happen to involve the hunt for "foods that don't run away." These are forthright tales of character-building trial and error (smashed shells of many razor clams before hitting limit), of humility at the smallness of men in an unforgiving landscape (and fast tides that fill slow boots with icy water), and thankfully, of hard-won triumphs (even if those triumphs are later rudely stolen in the middle of the night by greedy raccoons and must be re-won the following day). And more than a gatherer of popular and less-loved wild foods alike, Cook is clearly a writer.

Each story is about one ingredient and ends with a recipe for that ingredient. This afternoon, as I finished reading Fat of the Land, I was stricken with the coincidence that tonight's dinner, for which I had shopped only an hour earlier, was only one or two ingredients away from the last recipe of the book: creamy chanterelle pasta. Instead of peas to add color, though, I added pea shoots, my pasta was a gnocchi and I added toasted pumpkin seeds for added protein and seasonal crunch (Lang uses bacon and bowtie pasta in his rendition, and while this year I happily coughed up $8/lb for my chanterelles, I doubt he ever pays for a mushroom).

Gnocchi with Chanterelle-Pea Shoot Cream

Saute a minced shallot and a clove of garlic in a bit of butter and olive oil. Add a handful of clean chanterelles, torn into bite-sized pieces. When mushrooms have released their liquor and start softening, add cream, a few tbsp of fresh thyme, a few good scratches of nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for a minute, then add a handful of pea shoots and an 10oz package of gnocchi (cooked), and toss together until pea shoots are wilted. Top with toasted pumpkin seeds and copious amounts of Parmigiano Reggiano.

Buy Fat of the Land.

Elk sirloin chili with Beans

Any more, whenever I cook or even eat beans, I think of my buddy Ken Albala over at Ken Albala's Food Rant. He doesn't get as much traffic as all the Foodbuzz and Foodie Blogroll folks, which is a fucking shame, because he's actually a real writer. Of actual books.

One of such books is Beans: A History.

You ever find yourself reading some Pollan and thinking to yourself, "sure, this is entertaining, but I really wish he didn't dumb everything down for the lay audience"? Yeah, me too.

If Michael Pollan is coffee, Ken Albala is espresso. Ken is an award-winning food historian and author of such effervescent reading as Eating Right in the Renaissance; Food in Early Modern Europe; and Cooking in Europe 1250-1650. More recently though, he dabbles in what he deems to be "pop" food writing, but is, in my opinion, a meticulous examination of individual foodstuffs.

Beans is one such exploration, in which Ken chronicles the cultural and culinary significance of one of our most basic forms of sustenance, the humble legume. From the crippling classism faced by Medieval bean-eaters, to the role of toxic vetch seeds in combating famine in the 12th-century, to the bacterium that distinguishes natto from hamanatto, Beans delves into depths rivaling a thesis for its attention to detail, and for leaving no stone unturned. Beans is, in a word, thorough.

It's also pretty fucking entertaining, although I'll admit that the thing I like most about this book is its unflinching nerdiness. This is an entire book about the seeds of a single plant family. It's not just for scholars and botanists, though - Ken's enthusiasm is contagious.

Some of you are still doing your holiday shopping, and I scold you for your procrastination. However, you can satisfy the academic foodie on your list (or yourself) by picking up a copy of Beans or Ken's latest tome, Pancake: A Global History.

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Oh, hey, and speaking of beans, I made it to the store yesterday. It really wasn't that terrible - without that nasty sumbitch Old Man East Wind, it was actually kind of pleasant, bordering on magical.

Since I knew I had to carry everything I purchased, I made very edited choices. Milk, eggs and flour are already heavy, so everything else really had to count. A couple containers of frozen juice concentrate to drink with our vodka. A bag of pink beans.

We had everything else at home, so this wouldn't be too difficult. Catherine sent me a huge elk sirloin roast a few weeks ago (have I mentioned that I love that woman?), from which we'd eaten a couple of steaks and then refroze. I'd normally never refreeze a meat, but I was going out of town and figured it'd be better to risk freezer burn than for the whole thing to rot in my absence. Rubbed and double-bagged with the air smooshed out, it was absolutely fine rethawed, without a single indication of freezer burn.


I finely diced the elk and browned it with an onion and a few spoonfuls of homemade ancho chile powder, half spoonfuls of pimentón and garlic powder, and a good few pinches of homemade Berbere spice. I dumped in a can of tomatoes and the leftover tomato-roasted pepper soup from last week. Then I added a dribble of soy, a spoonful of gochujang and a few good pinches of MSG. Oh, don't look at me like that - it is pure, crystalline umami. It makes everything taste really good and I'm not sensitive to it.

I let everything simmer and stew while the (presoaked) pink beans cooked in unsalted water. Never cook beans with the tomatoes or in salted water, or they'll go tough. When the beans were tender, I drained them and added them to the pot, then added more salt and pepper to taste. While the beans were soaking up some of the good chili flave, I whipped up some cornbread.

Top with cheese, sour cream and minced shallot for best effect. I'm heading to the kitchen for some leftovers right now. Not too shabby, this "working from home" business.

The 2008 Tillamook Mac & Chee Cook-off

...or, wherein I find out that Ilan Hall is actually super nice, and pretty funny in real life. He totally forgave me for making fun of him and everything (for the record, he is NOT afraid of starfucking fangirls, and isn't into the dick. He was just trying to sleep when I tried to prank him). When he opens Gorbles (his coming-soon restaurant in LA - Scottish and Jewish!), go give him lots of your money and eat his bacon-wrapped matzo balls.

So, last Thursday was the 2008 Tillamook Macaroni & Cheese Cook-Off. It's the 100-year anniversary of Tillamook Dairy, so I think their PR firm really busted out all the stops. Next year I'll enter a recipe, but this year I attended to cheer on fellow blogger and hottie Catherine Wilkinson of The Dish. She hasn't been blogging much these days, but she doesn't have any kids left to get sick or married, so she thinks she might be getting her groove back soon.

Catherine didn't win the cash money prize, but she did win the Widmer Brothers (local beer-makers) Brewmasters Choice award. One of you is saying "boo-urns", but the rest of you are saying "boo." And rightly so. Fuck sake, even the god-fearing dairy farmers and cheese-makers themselves voted for hers!

The Josis of Wilsonview Dairy

I also got to meet the Dairy Princess. For some reason, I was completely smitten with her (seriously, I have like 6 pictures of her), and wanted to see her get a little drunk. Such boorish behavior never befits a princess, though, and she was, in fact, a perfect lady all evening.

Look at Catherine's mac & chee. It's truly boner-making, isn't it? The fuck is up with some weird mac & chee sweet potato casserole winning? It was good, sure, but I really wonder if it wasn't just the Oregonian penchant for bong hits doing the voting here.

There were about a dozen or so judges, and the event on the whole was really well-attended. This was a good thing, as I passed out about a million of my Foodbuzz blog cards. I'm still waiting for that sweet spike in blog traffic. Yep, any day now....

Anyway, she was a really good sport about it. I don't know what I would've done. Prolly gotten drunk and pulled someone's hair. Or tried to make out with the Dairy Princess.

Kare udon

Okay, this is a total phone-in. I will give the concession that I used homemade chicken stock, and sure, I poached the chicken breast with lots of fresh ginger and garlic, some sake, mirin and sesame oil, then added sliced shiitakes, Sweet Nantes carrots and delicate pearl potatoes. I even threw in some heirloom Italian pepper such deep carmine that it resembles raw beef. But this is hardly cooking.

Okay, I added cubed silken tofu, slivered scallions and sliced snow peas, and at the end I folded in some thick, chewy udon noodles (boiled separately so the broth wouldn't go all soapy-starchy).

Come to think of it, what I did was truly cooking, but the act of breaking a couple cubes of Golden Curry into soup made it feel like I was faking it. Sure, I could've just added some curry powder, MSG (yes, I keep a fatty sack of it in my cupboard) and a little sugar and corn starch, and I would've achieved the same result. But I used the cubes. And I feel like a dirty cheater admitting it.

I keep cheapie Gekkeikan around for cooking, but a nice bottle of Momokawa Diamond Junmai Ginjo (I love the cloudy Pearl Junmai Genshu in the summer) for drinking. I know it's probably sacrilege, but I heat osake in the microwave. In exactly one minute it reaches perfect blood-temperature.



Oh, p.s. I'll be in and out a bit until Sunday. My good friend Catherine Wilkinson from The Dish is in town competing at the Tillamook Macaroni and Cheese Cook-off. In case you're wondering, yes, she really is that hot in real life. Today I brought her chanterelles for her recipe, then we sat in the bar of her hotel making fun of Ilan Hall from Top Chef Season 2, who is emceeing the event. Catherine had been mistakenly calling him "Ian" all day, and couldn't figure out why he was so standoffish. For laughs, I went to the concierge and asked her to page Ilan's room to tell him he had two ladies waiting for him in the bar. He never showed up; probably because he is gay, or afraid of starfucking fangirls.

Oh, p.p.s. I'm planning a very special dinner for twelve of my closest friends this weekend. Elk roast with alder-smoked chanterelles, coho loukaniko with Fraga Farm saganaki and Hood River pear galettes with Douglas-fir needle ice cream will feature prominently. Stay tuned, and happy autumn!

The Silver Spoon

The much-anticipated "Bible of Italian Cooking" has finally joined my cookbook library. The Silver Spoon feels like an Italian Joy of Cooking (and weighs as much), and having recently been translated into English, will likely soon have as much place in the American Everykitchen as Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

I'm very much looking forward to learning new tricks from the generations of Italian home-style cooking that went into this book, and will definitely share what I learn!

Alton Brown Has a Very Hairy Chest

Noticeably so.

Scott and I met him yesterday at Wild About Game, a food event that included a wild game cookoff of which Mr. Brown was a judge. I kept asking people working the event, "when do we get to meet Alton Brown?" And since no one knew, I just followed a waiter to the judges' room and peeked in. There he was! He had a shitload of food to taste, so Scott and I took off for awhile and got back just when the last dish was being presented. We waited outside the room and when he stood up I ran over to the door and pounced on him! He was visibly startled by my sudden presence.

I nervously asked, "would it be totally inappropriate if I asked you to sign this?" and presented my old copy of On Food and Cooking, an early food science tome by Harold McGee. He looked at the book, looked at me, and said, "You want me to sign this? Are you sure?" He sort of oohed and aahed over it for a minute, and I joked he could sign it "McGee" if he wanted. He sat down and started writing:

Then he glanced at my tattoo and said he'd never seen a girl with DNA on her arm before. I was really nervous and shaky, which is strange because he seems pretty normal. I felt that I'd already bugged him enough so I didn't bother asking for a picture with him. Then I thanked him, shook his hand and giddily ran back to my table. Yay!

I wanted to send him another thank you, but it seems that people have been sending him rude things on his site, so he's disabled the contact part of his page. Oh, well.

Now I just have a figure out a way to meet Tony Bourdain....