lady eats austin

salon's new food columnist, francis lam, is SO FUCKING ANNOYING. at the risk of being sexist/ageist, he writes like a 16-year-old-girl's livejournal. so tedious, mediocre and insulting.

BUT

the rib marinade he wrote about a couple days ago is totally simple and perfect, like the garlic/soy sauce/black pepper marinade for steak that always wows the shit out of everyone and they think you're lying when you tell them what's in it. mr. lam's consists of a bunch of garlic, soy sauce and honey and that's it. he says we should use more honey than soy sauce, but i think equal parts is about right.

i ignored the terrible writing and did pretty much what he told me to, which was: 3/4 c each soy sauce and honey and half a head of garlic for the marinade, reserve half a cup and soak 3lb baby back ribs in the rest for 2 hours, tent ribs in foil and cook at 325 for 1 3/4 hr, remove ribs and set aside, crank oven to 450 while boiling reserved and leftover marinade and whatever juice accumulated in the foil until it is no longer toxic and becomes a syrup, pour some syrup over ribs and reserve the rest for rice, put ribs on a baking sheet and blast the hell out of them for 10 minutes or until they become slightly charred.

next time i think i might go for longer at a lower temp to combat gristle, but these were still really, really good. had them with the rice and an asian-style slaw with apples and a lot of scallions and cilantro in it. unfortunately we ate this at 10 PM the night before krav class and i almost ralphed on my partner today. worth it though.

two emails to mom

My mom is the best cook I know. We talk about food a lot. Here are two emails I wrote her recently.

Last time I saw her she told me how to make quick pickles. This is an incredibly simple procedure which makes very, very delicious pickles in no time at all. You boil 2 parts vinegar to 1 part sugar with a lot of salt and whatever seasonings you like -- traditional ones are garlic, mustard seed and dill. Then you chop up some vegetables -- celery and carrots are especially delicious, along with the traditional cukes -- and pour the hot brine over them, cover and let them sit until the vegetables are duly pickles, 10 minutes - 1 hour depending. You won't be sorry you did this.

we're having asian-ish ginger salmon and wasabi mashed potatoes for dinner, and needed something acidic and vegetal as a side so i made pickles by your method.

pickling brine was made with 1 part rice wine vinegar 1 part apple cider vinegar 1 part sugar and lots of soy sauce, and a mixture of green, white and szechuan peppercorns. i would have put in some wasabi as well but it's already going in the potatoes. pickled some celery and carrots a la beast, and they turned out so good i moved on to cabbage for fake kimchi and onions, all separate. very, very tasty. and i think i can save the brine for next time too, don't see why not.

Mom and I also talked some about America's Test Kitchen and how we resent their often persnickety and specific but infallible directions, the last time I saw her.

we had our roast beef/yorkshire pudding extravaganza to go with dad's christmas present of a nice 1999 burgundy. i followed ATK's rule for the beef. it struck me as extremely weird. here is how it went.

they recommend that you dry-age your roast on a rack in the fridge for 5 days before cooking. i put mine in the day before we left for pdx. when we came back it was a shriveled, dessicated, jerkylike shadow of its former self. i thought i'd ruined $30 worth of meat BUT NO. trimmed off a surprisingly thin layer of jerky and there was the roast, looking very red and happy and smelling great. WEIRD.

then they say that you should brown the meat on all sides in olive oil in a dutch oven, as for pot roast, and then put the whole thing -- dutch oven incl., no lid of course -- in oven at 250 (!!!) for 45 minutes or until internal temp reaches 110. then you're supposed to crank the heat to 500 (!!) until internal temp reaches 130. i could not have accomplished this without my other dad gift, an instant-read thermometer which is really an incredibly useful gizmo. but i did what i was told, allowed the roast to rest for a full half-hour and everything.

the result looked like a picture in an in-flight magazine, an ad for one of those beef-of-the-month clubs. it looked styled. the outside was perfectly brown and crunchy and the inside was solidly, flawlessly rare, with absolutely no grayish ring. it was unnervingly perfect -- too perfect, i found. i kind of like the grayish part. WEIRD AGAIN.

so there's that.

the yorkshire pudding was delicious thank you very much.

kitchen disaster: chile verde

I had my first kitchen disaster in quite some time today. It wasn't a disaster because it tasted bad, but it's taking years off our lives and this was entirely My Fault.

This disaster had its genesis when I was pretending to work the other day. I was pretending to work while talking to my colleague Brian C, who is a serious-but-carefree home cook and also one of my favorite people to pretend to work with. We were talking about the issues that come with serving the multitudes at The Holidays, and he mentioned that he tries to keep a pot of pork-and-tomatillo stew on the stove at all times because it's easy to make, improves upon sitting and everyone loves it. Brian told me about his technique, which is novel; instead of cubing the pork shoulder he leaves it whole, browns it off, cooks it in a vat of onions and garlic and poblanos and tomatillos and things, and simmers it forever and when the meat is done he shreds it, removing the nasty fatty gristly bits, and returns it to the primordial soup from whence it came. This rang my bell because pork is cheap and delicious, but I can't hang with the unknown quantity, the gristly chunky globules, that often occur with pork stews. I had three pounds of pork shoulder left over from my Christmas pate project (which I really should blog), and I decided to make it into Brian's chile verde for me and Ceej.

I heated my little Le Creuset Dutch oven and browned the pork (which set off the smoke detector). I sweated onions and garlic and cumin in the drippings, then I added about a pound and a half of of chopped tomatillos (I'd never cooked with them before; they're fun to get undressed) and four cleaned and chopped poblano peppers, and some canned jalapenos for heat, and a bay leaf, and some Swanson's chicken broth. I returned the pork to the pot and put it all in the oven at 350 to become delicious. This took about three and a half hours.

I had a clever idea in mind: when the pork was done I would remove it, hit the rest of the stew with the immersion blender, put the pork back in so it wouldn't get dry, and park it in the fridge overnight. I thought that the inch and a half of rendered pork fat that floated to the surface at the end of the cooking process would get a bit confused at the blending, but that chilling would allow it to reconvene so I could scrape it off in the morning, and we would get all the savor without abusing our serum cholesterol too badly.

Unfortunately this morning I found that the immersion blender did its job too well, and the fat refused to rise. It was entirely incorporated. I shredded the pork and picked it over, and reheated everything hoping the oil slick would reappear so I could at least try to spoon it off. This didn't happen. Eventually we got impatient, dumped the chile verde over tortilla chips and ate it with cilantro and queso fresco, and it was real, real good, but don't be surprised if my next post comes from the cardiac ward.

Note to self: next time chill BEFORE BLENDING. Dammit.

(This was really delicious though)

t-givez: the stuffing of the gods

I like making bread stuffing. It's so easy that I don't know why anyone resorts to boxed stuffing -- but boxed stuffing is pretty damn good, I admit. I also like eating bread stuffing and I am tolerant of its many quirks; I like it even if it is gluey, or burned, or greasy.

Most cooks assert that their stuffing is THE BEST EVAR!!!!1!!, and I believe all of them because bread stuffing is just good in general. Mine, however, really is the best. I've been making it every Thanksgiving for six years, refining all the way -- I went through a prosciutto-and-chestnuts phase, and that was pretty successful; I made a brief detour through cornbread-and-green-chilies country, and that was okay. For the last couple of years I've been fiddling with the toasted-nuts-and-dried-mushrooms nick, and have come ever closer to stuffing nirvana.

This year, I got it. I nailed that sucker, with one of those scary air-compressor nail guns even. You can make it too, and you should, and not only on Thanksgiving. Why don't I do this more often?

You need:

1 loaf whole-wheat sandwich bread, crusts removed and cut into 1/2"-1" cubes (use plain whole wheat, multigrain is too heavy for this)

Half a stick + 1 tbsp butter

Half of a gigantic onion or a whole small one, chopped

3 stalks celery

2 tsps fresh sage, chopped

1 tsp fresh rosemary, chopped

1 generous palmful dried shiitake mushrooms (I have big hands) (porcinis would also be good)

Half a wineglass Sauvignon Blanc or other fruity white wine

3/4 c toasted pecans, roughly chopped

Half a tin smoked oysters, finely chopped

Stock -- chicken, turkey or vegetable, and if this is coming out of a can or a cube do try to spruce it up a bit. Simmer it with thyme and bay or something.

Half a cup chopped parsley

You do:

Preheat oven to 350.

Put the mushrooms in a bowl with boiling water to cover and let them sit until reconstituted, about 20 minutes. The soaking liquid is good for broth-sprucing. Coarsely chop mushrooms.

Spread bread cubes on a baking sheet and bake them in the oven until they are dried out and beginning to get toasty.

Melt butter in a large, deep skillet over medium heat. Sweat celery and onion in butter until translucent. Add sage, rosemary, mushrooms and oysters and saute, stirring, for a couple more minutes. Pour in wine and cook, stirring, until liquid has evaporated.

Add toast to pan and stir all around. Once bread has absorbed all the butter (and you can add more...) and everything is nicely mixed, start ladling in the broth half a cup at a time. Stir thoroughly after each addition. Only you know how wet you want this. I like it about half wet and shredded and half remaining in coherent cubes. Stir gently or it'll get too dense.

Stir in pecans and parsley. Salt and pepper.

Spread in casserole and bake until browned on top.

Done! Four adults and two small children demolished this; it doubles and triples easily.

You could also stuff a turkey with this, I suppose, but I kind of hate stuffing that has actually been inside poultry. It's always too wet and I worry about salmonella. If you like, you can take the pan drippings from the turkey and use them to baste the stuffing while it is baking. 

Next year I think I might try to introduce a dried-fruit angle, like Craisins or something. When it comes to stuffing of the gods, the good is the enemy of the perfect.

back to mine: moules not-quite-marinieres

I got my first real day off in a LONG time today thanks to the patience and generosity of my business partner, and had a glorious big blowing blue autumn Saturday full of hanging out with Ceej, catching up on "Dexter", writing the most difficult part of a grueling piece of pornographic short fiction that's been frightening me of late, and some other ordinary things including doing the dishes and bathing the cat. After all this normal perfection (the cat didn't even object to her bath too badly) I knew I had to produce a meal that would make me and Ceej happy, in the making and also the eating, and on days like this there is only one thing to be done: go for broke and make a giant seething odiferous cauldron of mussels.

You know how to do this. Garlic shallots olive oil white wine maybe tomatoes, maybe saffron and cream if you want to get fancy which I rarely do. A vast quantity of delicious, sustainable, expensive in a mild way, beautiful glossy black-purple sea creatures which come so spanking-clean these days that they only need the barest rinse.  All this goes together in a large, heavy hot pot until the mussels open up, then you dump those suckers in a bowl with some parsley and pepper flakes and pick and slurp to your heart's content, and have a lot of bread on hand for the sublime broth which appears with no effort from you, and ice cream afterward.

This is always good. Tonight's version was especially so because my mom sent me a little package of fennel pollen, which is the kind of "Top Chef" glamour ingredient against which I am biased by default. It turns out that fennel pollen is wonderful: it doesn't taste much like fennel but does taste sweet, antique, mysterious and slightly sinful, like if you took a bindle of it through airport security the sniffer dogs would point at you. It loves mussels and mussels love it, and mussels love me and I love them and also Ceej, and "Dexter", and white wine, and the newly-spotless cat, and the great blue fall.

This is what food and cooking and life are supposed to be like. I am thankful today.

not hungry

That's my official excuse for why I haven't been updating. I've been thinking about food so much, but in a very narrow, limited way, and after a day in the restaurant kitchen I just can't bear it. I haven't been cooking anything but microwave burritos and Marie Callender's chicken pot pies for weeks; I've mostly been grazing at the perennially disappointing Whole Foods buffet, shoving things in my head mindlessly, reaping vast fields of biliousness and indigestion. I am tired.

But I am hungry, really. My inside cupboards are empty and full of roiling, bitter acid. What I want in there isn't food. It's more vaporous. Not even organic; mineral maybe? Tourmaline but less tangible. I had a beautiful tourmaline bracelet once, I wonder what happened to it.

When I start cooking again, you'll know that I'm okay. It probably won't be for awhile.

strange loop

            There is a word for people like me, people with rough hair and sharp white teeth and moons in our eyes, silvery crescent moons, and the growl in the talk and the stalk in the walk and I’ll ask you not to use it, please. It hurts me and will probably hurt you, if you have the time to hurt. (Mustn’t think this way.)

            I am mostly just very, very hungry.

            We’re both hungry, of course. I can smell it on you. There is an ache in your belly that is so like my very own wanting but also critically different. Yours is sweet, it spreads warmly down between your hipbones. It makes you squirm in your chair. Your gaze speaks of nice things, nice damp deep dreams. You have been so deliciously provoked by this sad moon-marionette, you say? Actually you don’t say, you haven’t said. You don’t need to.

            You have a hunch. You’re so close to the truth but really you may be the dumbest intelligent person I know. You keep putting food in front of me. Everyone knows you shouldn’t feed the dog people food! A little joke there, ha ha.

            Really, you shouldn’t have. You checked out a book by Laurie Colwin and read her wonderful essay about the “marvelously killing dinner”, the one about mashed potatoes made with pounds of butter and gallons of hot whole milk, and black and white sausages, the white ones with veal and cream, the black ones with blood and grain, and the big bowl of braised and roasted garlic (garlic, that’s also kind of hilarious given some cousins of mine), and this arrangement is sitting between us in a heap like the goddamn Matterhorn and you are looking at me so anxiously and you hope I don’t notice that your pupils are dilated, and your hands are twitching like they want something to caress or strangle.

            I know how it is, believe me.

            The blood sausages are almost right. I might pick one up on my fork and worry at it a little. If I ate “food”, I would like this. That ferrous tang is quite delightful. The rest of the menu is just a corruption of animals. Veal in a sausage, are you kidding? Slap that calf on the ass and give it a running start, and then we might be able to talk.

            You don't know when to quit. I like that about you. There was one time you were going to try me on lamb chops, your own little joke because you call me “lamb” – I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried, folks – and you went to cook them and wondered where they’d gone. You were sure you’d brought them home, wrapped up in their sticky pink paper from the fancy market, but their fresh young reek spread through the apartment in the dead of night and I couldn’t sleep, I was running away from the moonlight like I do and I ran straight to the different, colder, functional light summoned by the opening of the refrigerator door, and there they were. I couldn’t help myself, not like it mattered in the long run. Then I went outside and saw the moon, the bright silvery moon, and I ran with my paddy-paws in my true self. I was back before the sun came up. Didn’t blow my cover once. The hunting was adequate, I guess.

            The next night I created a diversion, to distract from the missing lamb and the bones in the garbage; we went out for drinks, and you got really lit because you hadn’t eaten, and we danced until we were dizzy, and I neglected to mention that I had eaten and eaten well and there was some whiskey, hmmm, okay a lot of whiskey, and I threw up behind a Dumpster (the police will have a field day with that, if they find it), and then we crawled back to the lair and tumbled into bed. You passed out right away. I lay watching the moon-shadows creeping across the wall, and listened to your heartbeat.

            My restraint is something quite extraordinary.

            I’m sorry about the lamby-lambkin chops. They barely made a dent.

            So now you’re watching as I toy with your mashed potatoes, which are full of wasted fuel for tender young animals, and the sausages that are made of dead things. Your blood is high, heated, vibrant; your whole self says welcome and it’s so good and look what I made for you, love me. I know I can get out of this mess if I go to you and pick you up maybe, and take you someplace comfortable and horizontal, because you actually want my body on you, you crazy person, you want my mouth all over your thighs and lips and belly and you think you want my sharp-sharp ear against your throat so I can hear the blood pumping straight to your heart. You think you want me to feel your pulse reverberating against my teeth.

            I have been so good.

            You don’t know me at all.

            But who knows anybody really?

            I think instead I will push myself away from the table and stand up, and continue to weave this sticky web of I’m not hungry and no thank you, I already ate and I’m sorry, I don’t feel well, but it looks delicious that we’ve been clambering around in for an age, and I will walk away from your sad, hurt eyes, knowing that the next amazing recipe, some divine concoction out of your brain and your desire, your hot quick blood and my own curiosity, will reel me back. I will be sorry for you, and maybe a little bit sorry for myself. I wish…

            No, enough of wishing. The moon is a mere harmless sliver, and I can smell the prey in the woods, and I hope they will see me like you see me, just for a moment. They will come to me like lambs. It will be so easy…. and I am so very hungry…

   

    (My friend F once told me that it’s no wonder I am fond of werewolves, because I’m a girl and girls are always into that shit. I protested feebly, but then there came a short but interesting conversation with JT in which we discussed the Freudian aspect of the feminine affinity for lycanthropy, the phases of the moon, the blood, the transformation, the repressed violence.

            So maybe I like werewolves because I’m a girl. I think mostly I like them because they are ravenous.)

in which kate is completely insane

I'm about to do two insane things. One, I'm going to yammer on about the menu for my Christmas party, and it is barely October. Two, I'm going to post a recipe that I made up and have not cooked yet.

But it's going to be fucking amazing. Hear me out.

The theme for this year's Christmas menu is Creole/Cajun. This is because we are really poor (running a restaurant has a way of nickel-and-diming one to the grave) and Southern food is festive and terrible for you while necessarily being light on the pocketbook. So we are having crawfish remoulade in toast cups (toast cups are a wonderful trick: cut the crusts off packaged white bread, squish the slices flat with a rolling pin, cram into mini-muffin tins, brush with butter, bake until toasty), celeriac remoulade also in toast cups, Coca-Cola wings, pimento cheese, shrimp paste, faux dirty rice stuffing with cranberries and apples in endive "bowls" for the vegans, black-eyed pea fritters with hot-pepper sauce also for the goddamn vegans, blah blah.

And we are having oysters. Quality Seafood will sell one a hundred oysters for $35, which sounds like a fabulous deal until you consider that the oysters are uncleaned, unshucked, covered with seaweed and barnacles, and come in a gritty, stinky burlap sack that must be toted out of Quality Seafood on a hand cart. I adore raw oysters to such an extent that I am more than happy to contend with this, or, more accurately, blackmail the men in my life into contending with this. We did the raw-oyster thing for my birthday this year, and once every six months sounds about right.

I really wanted to do oysters Rockefeller for my Christmas party. However, even given my unfortunate tendency to do amazingly stupid things in the name of cuisine, I knew that producing oysters Rockefeller for 30+ guests is a terrible, terrible idea. BUT THEY ARE SO DELICIOUS. So I pondered: how to accomplish the Rockefeller effect without actually having to fuck around with rock salt and touch-and-go timing and the like? It took me some days of pondering before I had the germ of an idea: how about having the oysters part and the Rockefeller part be separate?

I was also in need of another vegetarian nibble. I was planning on making classic gougeres, because they are easy and fun as hell to produce. But then my little noggin started a-tickin' and I had this giant, wonderful inspiration.

Gougeres "Rockefeller"

For the gougeres:

* 1 cup water
* 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, diced
* 3/4 teaspoon salt
* 1 cup unbleached all purpose flour
* 4 large eggs, chilled
* 1 cup (packed) coarsely grated smoked Gouda cheese (this stands in for the bacon of the classic Rockefeller treatment)
* 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

This technique is classic and universally useful. Globs of unprepossessing grainy dough magically become beautiful cream puffs with hollow places in their middles, all ready for stuffing. Learn you some gougeres.

Position 1 rack in top third and 1 rack in bottom third of oven; preheat to 400°F. Line 2 rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper.

Bring 1 cup water, butter, and salt to simmer in heavy medium saucepan over medium heat, whisking until butter melts. Add flour; stir rapidly with wooden spoon until flour absorbs liquid and forms ball, pulling away from sides of pan. Stir vigorously until film forms on bottom of pan and dough is no longer sticky, 1 to 2 minutes longer. Remove pan from heat; cool dough 2 to 3 minutes. Using electric mixer, beat in eggs 1 at a time. Stir in cheese and pepper.

Drop rounded tablespoonfuls of dough onto baking sheets, spacing about 3 inches apart. Using damp fingertip, press down any peaks of dough.

Bake gougères until golden brown, about 30 minutes, reversing position of pans halfway through baking. Using small sharp knife, pry open 1 gougère to check for doneness (center should be slightly eggy and moist). Serve hot or warm.

For the filling:

* 1 garlic clove
* 2 cups loosely packed fresh spinach
* 1 bunch watercress, stems trimmed
* 1/2 cup chopped green onions
* 3/4 cup (11/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
* 1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs
* 2 tablespoons Pernod or other anise-flavored liqueur
* 1 teaspoon fennel seeds, ground
* 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce

Saute greens and garlic until wilted, deglaze pan with Pernod and cook off alcohol, add other ingredients,remove from heat and allow to cool. Chop very fine. Mix with

* 1 cup Mornay sauce, made with Parmigiano-Reggiano

Bisect cooled gougeres with a serrated knife and pipe in a couple tablespoons of Rockefeller filling. Reassemble gougeres. Warm in 300-degree oven before serving.

I believe that this will be so incredible that nobody will notice I didn't make pig candy.

black bean soup for F

I was out at the bar with a couple of handsome young men last night, and the discussion was serious -- knife fighting, the relative merits of Kanye West, how everyone at the gym is doing their deadlifts wrong, the imminent zombie invasion, and, finally, how F is really seriously worried about money these days and doesn't know how he's going to make it through the next couple of months without ending up in hock.

Me being me, I immediately asked him whether he eats out all the time.

"Well, yeah," he said.

B and I tut-tutted. "Gotta cut it out, man. Gotta cook. Seriously. Fastest way to save money."

F looked indignant. "I USED to cook all the time when I had cash. I can fry up a mean steak, and I used to do this salmon with almonds and panko crumbs..."

B, who eats peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch every day so he can afford beer, said "PANKO CRUMBS? Oh what's up, Moneybags?"

"Sorry pal, steak is not happening if you're poor," I said. "Neither is the salmon, realistically. It is rice and beans and tuna for you."

"Yeah," B said. "Get some rice and beans. Mix 'em up with taco sauce you swiped from Taco Cabana and it's not bad. Frozen corn is good in there too, and cheese if you can swing it--"

"B, stop it, you're making me really fucking depressed," I said.

"Don't you go all Julia Child on us, this is bachelor food," B said.

"Being a bachelor is no excuse to eat dismal slop," I said. "Look guys, the solution to your problems of both palate and budget is soup."

They blinked at me.

"Soup encompasses many things," I continued. "It can be soup, or it can be stew, or chili, or curry, or any number of things because the technique is identical. The only things that vary are the ingredients, the seasonings, and the amount of liquid. If you know how to make soup you can make anything."

"Do edify us," F said.

"Well, you start with a mirepoix--"

"Mire-whatnow?" said B.

"Carrots, celery and onion, and sometimes garlic depending. All soup will start with at least one and sometimes all of these. You chop them up, then you heat some oil in the bottom of a pot, put in your mirepoix, and cook it partially covered until it's wilted down. Then you put in your liquid, which can be plain water although I swear by Better than Bouillon vegetable base to jazz things up, and any other stuff that needs cooking in liquid -- beans, other vegetables, you name it. Also your herbs and spices and stuff. Then you simmer it all together until it tastes good. Voila."

The conversation turned to Soups We Have Known. I mentioned my trick of putting canned pumpkin in with lentils, for color and fiber, and the boys were skeptical. B said that he was on a camping trip with our friend M one time, and she made soup for dinner and everyone was nervous because there was a lot of drinking going on and soup seemed insufficiently hefty to soak up the whiskey, but the soup turned out to be delicious and ribsticking and hearty and did the trick. (Of course B couldn't remember what was in it.) And I told F that for the price of two slices of Whole Foods pizza, he could easily produce enough black bean soup to feed himself lunch for a week. F said, meditatively, that black bean soup actually sounded really good.

Black bean soup IS really good. It's really good and it's super-cheap, because the ingredients are cheap to begin with and because, unlike most soups, the less stuff you put in it the better it is. It keeps very well, improves as it sits and gets along well with all manner of starches, from tortillas to rice, though I like it with polenta (recipe follows.) It's also good for you.

So here you go, F.

Take a big onion and as much garlic as you like (I recommend abusing your garlic privileges), chop the onion and mince the garlic, and sweat both over medium heat in a couple tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a partially-covered soup pot for about 5 minutes or as long as it takes the onion to go limp and translucent. To this you add one 12-or-14-ounce can of crushed tomatoes with juice, 6 cups of water or broth (made with Better than Bouillon or plain old bouillon cubes), and 3 cans of black beans with their liquid. (You can also use a pound of dry beans for this, and it will be cheaper and probably tastier, but will have to cook for much longer -- like two hours.) Set the heat on low and simmer, stirring when it occurs to you, for about half an hour or until everything is starting to look the same in there. Then taste it, add salt if necessary (it probably will be) and pepper, and allow to cool. You'll want to puree this, and the best tool for the job is an immersion blender, though you can use the regular old blender (just be careful). Add more liquid if it gets too stiff, and you're done.

Nice things to add with the water or broth are a couple tablespoons of tomato paste, a big canned chipotle chile minced up, a bay leaf, some thyme, and/or (my personal favorite) a teaspoon of anise seeds. But they are not necessary.

Now for the polenta: forget everything you've heard about polenta. It is time-consuming but not difficult or labor-intensive, and if you want to nest tasks you can get it started before the soup. Put 8 cups of heavily-salted water on to boil in a large saucepan, and once the water is good and boiling slowly sprinkle in 2 cups of regular cornmeal, stirring all the while. The sprinkling must be done carefully and the stirring must be constant, or the polenta will be lumpy, but who really gives a shit about a lump here and there, right? Once all the cornmeal is in the pot, drop the heat to the lowest possible setting and let the polenta simmer for 45 minutes. By "simmer" I mean "allow to blurp ominously about once every thirty seconds"; any hotter and it'll burn. Stir once in awhile but don't disturb the crust on the bottom. The polenta will be an edible consistency long before 45 minutes are up, but the long simmer is necessary to make it taste like anything. Add pepper before you eat it.

So you have your soup and your polenta and that's all you need, but you can also put yogurt or sour cream on there, and chopped cilantro. This will cost you about seven dollars for six or eight servings, and when you're sick of black bean soup there is lentil soup, with or without pumpkin, and minestrone, and and and...

Christmas: pig candy

Bacon was the zeitgeist this year, and recipes for pig candy were all over the place, and I kept hearing people talking about it as if it were the Second Coming, and this made sense because hello, it's candied bacon. But for some reason I was not totally convinced that pig candy was all that. A small part of me suspected that it was some kind of fairground-style gimmick, like deep-fried Snickers, tasty but notable mostly for its novelty.

How very, very wrong I was.

Guys. Pig candy.

Pig. Candy.

Pig candy is sex. It is sex with love. It is the kind of sex that takes hours and hours and sets off the smoke alarm. It is sweet and meaty and spicy and smoky and funky. It does strange things to one's perception of reality, and when it's fresh it drips.

Making pig candy is a lot of work, and it's really a job for two cooks working in shifts. It is easy to screw up, and is impossible to ignore or walk away from. (Is the above metaphor continuing of its own volition? Hm.) Basically, what you do is this: buy some good-quality thin-sliced bacon -- a party of 30 made short work of two full pounds of pig candy, and we were doling it out very sparingly, so plan on making way too much. You take this bacon, and you take some dark brown sugar and some cayenne pepper mixed together, and you pack the sugar on the bacon really good. Do not dredge: pack. Then you lay the slices of bacon out on a cookie rack which fits inside a rimmed baking sheet, put this in a cold oven, and turn it on to 350. After the oven gets up to temperature, you will need to turn the bacon every four minutes. You REALLY don't want it to burn, so take it out before it looks quite done; the melted sugar is like unto napalm and will finish the cooking off the heat. Then you let the oven cool down. Then you do it all again. One batch takes about half an hour. Your house will smell like the most ritzy, expensive private club in hell, and it will smell that way for days. You might as well just throw out the baking sheet; that shit is never getting clean again.

So what do you do with pig candy when it's done?

I'll tell you what you do: throw a party to which you invite your very most sexy friends, and as they arrive you hustle them into the kitchen, make them close their eyes, and feed them a slice of pig candy. Then you get to listen to them whimper and watch their faces become suffused with ecstatic wonder, and you can feel very smug indeed because you delivered the goods.