lady eats austin

crevettes aux lait de coco et maguier, beans and rice

Poulet au Lait de Coco
West Indian Rice and Beans

I've had a craving for tropical food recently. Actually I always have a craving for tropical food; this climate seems to inform it, as does my general affinity for all things island. If it comes with palm fronds, steel drums and cocktails with plastic monkeys, I'm all over it like a rash.

My experimentation with Caribbean cooking has been hit-or-miss (hit -- last year's Easter dinner; miss -- Run Down, which has an excellent name but languished uneaten in the refrigerator until I had to throw it away with a heavy heart, thinking of the starving babies in Haiti.)

This dinner was both a resounding hit and a near-miss. It was a hit because both of these recipes are absolutely delicious, a miss because they don't go together at all. There's a lot of ingredient redundancy -- all those green onions, all that thyme -- and also textural redundancy; I had no idea that genuine Caribbean beans and rice are basically a soup, or a really loose risotto, not at all what you want with a curry. When you make these things, which you should, have the curry with plain white rice and a dish of beans on the side, and the beans and rice with some jerk chicken or even just a nice pork chop.

ANYWAY, I really wanted to post this because of this site, which I StumbledUpon and have become obsessed with. It is not for the novice cook; the recipes are terse and the techniques are sketchy. It's basically a shorthand archive of a great many recipes from a great many precious, out-of-print cookbooks that I can't afford, and I love it for that. Actually I would love it just for the recipe for Poulet au Lait de Coco, which hails from Martinique (palm fronds! plastic monkeys!), and is the kind of recipe, beloved by me, that is ridiculously easy to put together and still makes people want to have the cook's babies. I tinkered with it a little bit; I threw the onions and garlic in the blender to make a paste per my usual curry method, and stir-fried the paste with the thyme and curry powder. Don't waste your precious saffron here; it will be totally lost. I also did not have poulet, so I subbed shrimp, and when the liquid looked like it was overwhelming the protein I threw in a large chopped mango. This took about fifteen minutes and was extremely tasty and unusual.

The beans and rice were an exercise in Weird, for me. I grew up with the edict that you do not stir rice ever, ever, ever, so executing the recipe was a lesson in adaptability and trust. Also, have you ever noticed that the flavor elements in Caribbean cooking are really peculiar? Thyme and allspice in rice? Both scallions and parsley in the curry? What? But all doubts are banished when the aroma starts to rise; this is true fusion cuisine, and it smells like God. I added some minced fresh ginger to the rice, and sauteed onions instead of scallions, and it turned out just fine. Runny, but fine.

Now all I need is a mojito. Or at least a Red Stripe.

how it's gonna be: potato salad

This is the fifth summer that I have sought the perfect potato salad, and finally, after dozens of veryveryclose but not QUITE there moments in its pursuit, I have finally landed the beast. It has been pwned. Its head is now mounted on a plaque above my stove. I have eaten many pounds of potato salad in my day, it being one of my very favorite things to eat and all, and I can safely say that mine is now the best I have ever had.

I am speaking of potato salad with a mayonnaise dressing here. I have already developed an extremely good potato salad, largely aped from a recipe my high school boyfriend's aunt made up, which involves red potatoes, lightly steamed green beans, Kalamata olives, and red peppers in a garlicky balsamic vinaigrette, but it is less versatile than the American beauty mayo variety. It is not what people think of when they want potato salad. It is very good, though, and I thought about posting the recipe until I realized that I just did. That's basically it; you throw those things together and dress them. It should also have parsley and basil. People love it and it's easy to pretend it's healthy, too.

Mayo-based potato salad, of course, has no such pretensions. It's terrible for you and everybody knows it. It is also usually very tasty; Laurie Colwin and I are of a mind that there is no such thing as truly bad potato salad, provided nobody monkeys around and puts nasty shit like ketchup in it. The basic boiled potato-mayo-onion combination is always at least OK, and it's malleable; you can try putting hard-boiled eggs in there (meh, to my mind) or capers (but they always sink straight to the bottom), or celery (but it's kind of depressing), and so forth, and you will probably end up with something that the people at the barbecue will scarf down like pigs at the trough.

I, however, was after transcendence, and there are a number of things that can go wrong with potato salad, rendering it only OK, not delicious. For instance, different kinds of potatoes -- and even different specimens of the same kind of potato at different seasons or phases of the moon or whatever -- absorb radically different amounts of dressing. Sometimes the dressing slips off as if the potato has been shellacked, and sits in a sullen pool at the bottom of the bowl. Sometimes the potatoes go the opposite direction and suck up so much mayonnaise that they become stodgy and you can feel your arteries hardening while you eat them. Stodginess is the major enemy of potato salad, to my mind. Then there's the issue of the onion element; I find that the kind of onion is less important than how it is sliced. Too fine and it will all end up as sad onion confetti stuck to the bottom of the bowl with the capers; too coarse and it will make everyone's eyes water. Also, there is the debate about chunky vs. smooth. I have had potato salad consisting of intransigent chunks of potato the size of my fist, with poor dressing permeation; I have also eaten potato salad that was basically mashed potatoes with mayo in, which is vaguely disgusting. Some people get around this by lightly mashing the potatoes before dressing them, leaving some mushy and some chunky, but this causes the potatoes to leak free starch, which makes them sticky. Sticky potato salad is to be avoided at all costs.

I have defeated all these obstacles. You can too. Here is how it is done.

A word of warning: this method is a giant pain in the ass. It takes a fair amount of time, contains several steps that appear superfluous, produces a great many dirty implements, and requires a semi-obscure piece of equipment (a potato ricer). IT IS WORTH IT AND I AM NOT KIDDING.

So, potatoes. A beautiful thing about my method is that it renders the red vs. russet debate obsolete. It truly does not matter what kind of potato you use. Buy the ones that are on sale, or grown at the human-manure organic potato concern, or whatever. Get about two pounds, and know that when it comes to potato salad measurements are an inexact science.

Take these potatoes home and scrub them and peel them or not -- this is another thing that doesn't really matter -- and cut them up into bite-size chunks. I like a smallish chunk myself, maybe an eighth of a red potato or a twelfth of a russet. This facilitates good dressing distribution. Then you boil the potatoes. You will boil them until they are just barely done. Just, just barely over the edge from crunchy. This is because they will continue to cook for awhile, and that's a good segue to the next step, and some exposition.

Dressing permeation, as discussed above, is a significant issue associated with potato salad. My mother, who is a genius, mentioned diffidently during one of the many conversations we have had on this topic that one does not necessarily want dressing permeation per se, but one does most definitely want delicious flavor permeation. Potatoes are most permeable when they are first boiled and very hot; they slurp up all manner of things as they cool down, and then become inert. One can take advantage of this easily. So while your potatoes are boiling, mix up the following in a microwave-safe cup:

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup filtered water
1 1/2 tsps Dijon mustard (more if you like mustard, but please do not use French's unless you like hot dog-flavored potato salad)
1 large clove garlic, roughly smashed
Quite a lot of salt; maybe a tablespoon -- less if you heavily salted the potato water

Or you can just use a cup of pickle juice. It works just as well, being basically the above ingredients pre-mixed.

Nuke this for about a minute, to allow the garlic to give up the goods. Then let it sit. When the potatoes are really really really almost done, nuke the juice for another minute to get it good and hot. Then drain the potatoes lickety-split and DASH them back into the hot pot you cooked them in. Quickly pour the flavor juice (sans garlic clove) over the potatoes and stir all around. Cover the pot and allow the potatoes to come to room temperature.

While they are doing this, they are hoovering up that yummy juice, making the heart-stopping gallons of mayonnaise that are usually involved in the making of potato salad unnecessary. You will be amazed at how parsimonious you can be with the mayo here -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Once the potatoes are cool, drain them again if there is any juice left. Dig up your ricer, chase the spiders out of it, and rice about a third of the potatoes -- less for russets, slightly more for reds. You can rice them right back into the same pot.

Side note: I was inspired to try ricing in this context after eating Fogo de Chao's potato salad, which was very good and appeared to be of the partially-mashed variety, but was not stodgy at all. I wondered how this was accomplished, until I remembered that it is only the act of mashing which releases free starch, and riced potatoes are basically sublimely fluffy, velvety mashed potatoes. This was a giant leap towards potato salad transcendence.

Now you need to think about your onion element. Red, white, yellow, it doesn't matter. What matters is the shape the onions take when they are sliced. You are aiming for a translucently thin crescent -- picture the onion lovingly hugging the chunks of potato. You'll need half of a large onion for this. Cut it in quarters and shave those slices right off of there. If you are worried about alienating people, you can soak the slices in ice water for about half an hour before you put them in the salad -- I recommend this anyway, actually. Do it before you cut up the potatoes. Then add your onions to the potatoes.

Put in two-thirds of a cup of mayo. Yes, you heard right. The riced potato will enhance its creaminess to the point that it will probably be unnecessary to add more -- taste and see, though; maybe another quarter-cup might be just the ticket. Hellmann's/Best Foods please, or homemade if you make a really superlative scratch mayo (I do not). And a squeeze of lemon or a dash of white-wine vinegar if it seems apropos. And a lot of pepper. You probably won't need salt. If this is all looking too pale, some chopped dill is definitely a good idea, as is parsley, or even both -- just be sure to mince that shit really fine; you don't want your potato salad experience to be hampered by green teeth.

There you have it. And by golly, between the riced potato dressing extender and the flavor juice, it isn't even all that terrible for you.

See if you can get someone else to do the dishes, though.

First in a series: bar snacks I would serve if I ever own a gastropub...

... if the economy does not tank to the point that "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" is no longer a fanciful '80s cinematic misfire, but cold reality; also if I ever inherit a million billion dollars and can run my gastropub as a vanity project.

Deep-fried tiny fish spines

Last September Ceej and I ate dinner at Alinea, which I am still trying to find the words to adequately describe. After a long struggle, I realized that I can only do Alinea justice by using it as the setting for a longish piece of science fiction with dashes of romance, Vodoun, and politics; watch for it here, once I finish exorcising the demons.

ANYWAY, at one point during the four-hour BDSM routine that is dinner at Grant Achatz' crown jewel, we were served a thing like a napoleon, except instead of pastry it had watermelon -- immaculate organic watermelon that had been fed the blood of virgins, no doubt -- and instead of Bavarian cream it had a slice of nearly-raw fish that was totally unfamiliar to me. I couldn't even find the fucker on Wikipedia. I think Alinea may have a crack team of oceanographers on the payroll, who routinely explore the depths of Lake Michigan to discover new and exciting species of delicious, delicious fish and render them extinct before the French Laundry has a crack at them. I think there was some basil oil involved, and some obscure peppery microgreen.

So this thing was presented to us, and it was so awe-inspiringly brilliant that it almost made me cry -- the kind of thing Bach would have come up with if he were a chef. But the best thing was the garnish: a minute, deep-fried fish spine, aligned in such a way that it looked like it was diving headfirst into the watermelon part. I think this spine used to belong to an anchovy, or something similar that flits around in great silvery schools until the dolphins eat giant wads of them, and it's sad, on the nature special.

It was not sad when I polished off my napoleon and said (too loudly, fueled by a great deal of the finest Barolo known to humanity), "YUM. TIME FOR TINY FISH SPINE." I excavated my neglected fish spine from the microgreens and ate its wonderful, shattering, spiky, oceanic self, and experienced a major HOLY SHIT rush. It tasted like the very essence of ocean: the faint odor of rotting, and the strong odor of fresh bright ozone, and the possibility of being eaten by something, or eating something. Waving weeds, blowing froth, pointy things under your feet, coming to the surface with a ribbon of blood unspooling from your heel...

It also tasted like DELICIOUS FISHY FRITOS. And removed from their exalted homeland, fancy deep-fried fish spines would be so comforting piled in a basket to be crunched by the handful alongside a Stella Artois or three, with the game on TV and the faint memory of the last time you were on a boat... the spray and the creak of the ropes and leaning over the rail to watch the fish, the little silvery fish...

tomato panic: cold tomato soup with bread and herbs

The salmonella outbreak done pissed me off some, because I was on a serious tear making this soup every other day or so, and I had almost -- almost -- perfected it when the maters disappeared.

However, today I went over to Bill and Louisa's house to discover them, their four girls, two friends and the dog up to their ears -- almost literally -- in tomatoes. I shit you not, there were five giant Rubbermaid crates full of tomatoes, and most of the refrigerator full as well. It turned out that Bill's friend Mike does some work for an organic farm, and the farmer got a bumper crop of tomatoes; so many tomatoes, in fact, that he could afford to enhance his brand by only sending the really good-looking ones to the market. The rest -- the lumpy ones, the funny-colored ones, the ones with mushy spots where they lay on the ground -- Mike took home with him.

So there we were, and there was this embarrassment of tomatoes; we all spent the afternoon putting them up in jars, which was a nice companionable thing to do, and we were all very jolly despite being hot and sweaty and covered with tomato seeds and bits of skin. And I went home with a big box full of quart jars -- the apocalypse will have spaghetti sauce, by God -- and a smaller box full of fresh, almost-perfect organic tomatoes with which to make cold tomato soup.

I am not officially calling this soup gazpacho, because "real" gazpacho is one of those things about which people regularly come to blows, and mine is not orthodox. For instance, I cook my tomatoes, and I understand that Real Gazpacho is never cooked. But raw-tomato gazpacho can taste pallid and salsa-like unless the tomatoes are immaculate, and they rarely are these days -- cooking concentrates the flavor a bit, which seems like a good idea. I also add tomato paste, which is anathema. But my soup is tomato, and it is cold, and it has bits of cucumber and onion and soaked bread in it, and if you wanted to call it gazpacho I sure wouldn't object.

This is the perfect thing to eat on a sweltering-hot day. I like mine with a dab of yogurt in it, which must horrify the Gazpacho Gods still further, but it is just fine plain. Here is how it is done.

Get a couple of pounds of tomatoes. Since they will be cooked, it's OK if they're not awesome, but they should be pretty good. Wash them and cut them in half, or in quarters if they're really huge, and seed them - you do this by holding the tomato over a bowl and squeezing it so the seeds pop out, and then you chase the strays out with your fingers. Reserve the seeds and tomato water in the bowl.

Heat kind of a lot of good olive oil over medium-low heat in a large, deep skillet or pot with a lid, and throw in a chopped garlic clove or two -- go easy, you are not making marinara. Gently cook until garlic is fragrant and translucent; do not allow it to brown. Then add the tomatoes just as they are, stir them around a bit and cover the pot. If you are adding herbs -- I like tarragon in this application -- that need some cooking, add them now too.

While the tomatoes are sweating, strain the seedy tomato water in a fine mesh sieve into a small bowl. Reserve tomato water; throw the seeds away, or feed them to the chickens, or take them somewhere and germinate them, whatever. Into the tomato water put a medium-sized piece of the middle of a loaf of firm white bread, French or Italian or sourdough or whatever, with no crusts. Stir around and leave to disintegrate.

The tomatoes are done when they are squishy and their peels slip off easily. Do not cook them further unless you want to try drinking a glass of sticky red sauce. When they are done, let them cool until they can be easily handled, and pull off the peels. Then put the whole shebang -- tomatoes, bread and tomato water -- along with a couple teaspoons of tomato paste in the blender and whizz till smooth. If you want parsley, add it towards the end of the whizzing. Taste for salt and pepper; it will need a fair bit of both. If it seems impossibly bland, try adding some vegetable bouillon -- I am hopelessly addicted to Better Than Bouillon brand concentrate. If it is too thick, add some water. Set it aside.

You can start chilling it now, or you can do like I do and put in some finely chopped cucumber, red onion and/or red pepper first. Either way, put it in the fridge and do not touch it until it has chilled at least overnight. The flavors need time to bloom and meld. Taste again for salt before serving. It might need more pepper too, or a dash of sherry vinegar, and it isn't a bad idea to stir in a drop or two of really excellent olive oil to finish.

This is extremely good for you and will make you feel virtuous as hell. Since we don't know how long tomatoes will be offlimits in the stores, I do recommend acquiring friends who are farmers.

the critic: fogo de chao

My personal standard for restaurants has evolved over the years, but these days it's pretty consistent, and, I think, reasonable. I like restaurants that are at the very top of their game (Gourmet's top 100 is a reasonable barometer); I like restaurants that specialize in food that I will never, ever cook myself (barbecue, pho, damn good burgers, migas); and I like restaurants with freakish gimmicks that are impossible to duplicate at home, provided the food is good.

Fogo de Chao, the Bahia-based churrascaria, falls in the latter two categories. The Austin branch of this mighty chain opened recently, and we went there last night to celebrate my recent promotion (from shit pay and no responsibilities to only crap pay and lots of responsibilities). It was my understanding that Fogo deals in something like dim sum, except Brazilian and with hunks of meat instead of shumai and chicken feet, and I was correct; however, it is much more than that. The Fogo Experience is the ultimate in gluttony and gourmandism; it's deeply weird and yet comfortingly familiar; and it's faintly ridiculous in the best possible way.

Here's how it works: you show up and are ushered to your table by one of the approximately one thousand wait staff with whom you will interact in some fashion during your stay. This person suggestively sells you a couple of jaw-droppingly expensive capirinhas (a shame about the price tag; the capirinha may be my favorite cocktail in the world, and I've met a few), and gives you The Drill.

The drill is that on your table, next to each place setting, is a little doohickey that looks like a coaster, green on one side and red on the other. Green means "go"; red means "whoa". This doohickey is the cue for the roving masses of stern Latino men brandishing swords laden with giant hunks of charred meat to avoid you or descend with alarming rapidity. There is also a small set of tongs at each place. The tongs are there so you can catch the meat as it falls off the swords, and spare the tablecloth (rather a futile enterprise, but a cute conceit).

That meat. The meat is good. The meat is very good. It isn't USDA Prime or anything, but it is beautifully done -- rotated over a hot fire until it reaches a perfect balance of caramelized crunchiness and translucent bloodiness. There are fifteen kinds of meat, of which our favorite, by a landslide, was the top sirloin roast. The ribeye, oozing cholesterol, was also very good, as were the lamb chops. The house special garlic beef is still knocking over anyone who speaks to us today. The chicken, pork sausage, and filet mignon were forgettable, and we were crying "uncle" long before the ribs showed up. I was extremely impressed with how deft the servers were at accommodating our preferred level of doneness just with their knifework, hewing close to the surface of the meat for well-done and deeper for rare. I think I may have ordered more meat than was sensible, just to watch them do this. It was like a floorshow for anyone who likes meat.

With the meat come a selection of faintly peculiar side dishes, which you don't know you want until you are eating them. There are little squares of deep-friend polenta that taste like the avatar of Fried. Actually, they taste like that heavenly frying smell you encounter on fairgrounds and run all over the place stuffing unsatisfactory things in your face trying to capture. There are fried bananas, superfluous garlic mashed potatoes with cheese, and some divine but deadly little greasy popover-esque buns, also with cheese. (I have added them to my internal catalogue of snacks I will serve if I ever own a gastropub -- a lengthy list by now, and one unlikely to ever see the light of day except maybe in a blog entry sometime). Fortunately there are not a whole lot of these things; if Fogo served them in conventional American-sized portions there would probably be lawsuits.

So what do you do when your arteries are screaming for mercy and your eyes are tearing from this onslaught? You turn up the red side of your coaster and hit the salad bar. Fogo's may be the best salad bar I have yet encountered. There are not a great many items; this isn't some epic casino-style smorgasbord. But the selections are all startlingly good, a little weird, and just the thing to combat the meat. There are beautiful butter lettuce and glorious pickles, prosciutto and smoked salmon (somewhere between hot-smoked and lox, dry but easy to slice) and salami and smoked cheese and Swiss cheese; there are fresh hearts of palm and artichoke hearts, free of stringiness, that have never seen the inside of a can, and really good potato salad and really good shiitake mushrooms in a garlicky marinade, and olives, and a transcendent cucumber salad, and, glory of glories, a big basket of rough-hewn chunks of real Parmesan cheese. I have never been tempted to steal from an all-you-can-eat buffet before I saw that Parmesan; I have a bad habit of eating it in chunks at home, and it's so expensive that I always feel guilty. Apparently Fogo has a salad-bar-only price point, and I am tempted to go down there on the regular to take advantage of it.

If you survive all this, there is dessert. Our creme brulee was lousy. The prix fixe, $45 a head for the meat option, does not cover dessert or drinks, and it sounds reasonable until you learn that the lousy creme brulee costs $14. I'd say skip it, and roll your sorry ass on home for Haagen-Dazs instead. You can and should beat the system.

It is difficult to describe how awful I feel today. Churrascaria is terrible for you, and my very bones are informing me of this fact. But once in awhile, eating a whole cow in charmingly theatrical circumstances -- with the world's best pickles on the side -- is just the ticket.

8/10
Go again? Once a year, please.