All Heat and No Light

Dragonfruit! Wow! I found them in the grocery store for $7.99 apiece! I winced at the price, but paid anyway. How often does a Minnesotan get to try a fruit so exotic-looking that it had a cameo role in a futuristic movie like AEon Flux?! (I’m not the only one who spotted it; this indignant testimony contains movie spoilers, though.)

I rushed mine home and looked up instructions about how to prepare it. I cut it up, mounded the fruit chunks in the empty skin, and took a bite.

As it turns out, dragon fruit is less like a futuristic action movie than it is like one of the Kardashian sisters. It’s attractive, maybe, but hmm… after all, a bit garish. It’s expensive. And it’s pretty much tasteless.

Meh!

Pineapple vinegar? The hell you say!

10:00 PM, 29 May 2012

Fail.

I screwed my courage to the sticking point today and tasted the foetid brew. Not pineappley. Not vinegary. Just washed-out, watery, and vaguely beery.

Here is a picture of the pineapple not-vinegar. In the background is the sink down which the not-vinegar is about to get dumped. In the foreground is a beadwork snail who will be the sole witness to the dumping.

“About time," says the beadwork snail. “To the sewers with that nasty crap.”

The experiment was a flop from start to finish. Its fruit-corpse odor never gave way to the clean vinegary tang I wanted. The white scum on the top and the thickening dregs of yeast on the bottom make it resemble nothing so much as... well, if I tell you, I’ll have violated my own comments policy. Maybe, instead of the kitchen sink, this should go down a porcelain drain in a different room.

You know that when even a pretend snail is talking smack about something, it’s time to cut your losses and move on.

4:54 PM, 20 May 2012

There are actually two installments today. Scroll down for the news at the three-week mark.

I skipped taking a picture at the four-week mark because it was just getting grosser and grosser in that jar. But at Week 5, I can't take it anymore. I no longer wish to pretend that the pink and white scum on top is a vinegar mother.

I skimmed off that nasty crap, strained out the solids, washed the jar, and put back the liquid. I don't anymore believe this is turning into vinegar, but I have little to lose and it's hard to shake the effects of the sunk cost fallacy. We'll give it more time.

4:56 PM, 6 May 2012:

After the Week 1 picture, I found a small plate to drop in there. At three weeks, the vinegar was growing a pink and white cap. I surmised the cap was made of mold, yeast, and/or bacteria. Does anyone know what a vinegar mother looks like?

Quite a bit of bubbling going on in there, too. A big old bubble of what can only be carbon dioxide was collecting under the plate:

I do not approve. But rather than make time to deal with it, I left it alone.

11:41 AM, 22 April 2012:

At one week old, the proto-pineapple-vinegar is cloudy. It smells yeasty and sickly sweet. I had to fish some moldy pineapple bits off the top, and I failed to convince the rest of the pineapple to submerge. Maybe I can find a plate or something that will fit inside this jar.

Assessment: This is not fun yet, but it’s no skin off my nose. To be continued.

****
7:09 PM, 17 April 2012:

So.

Diana Kennedy, one of my food heroes, writes in The Art of Mexican Cooking that I can and should try to make pineapple vinegar. That Mexican cooks make escabeche (lightly pickled things) in it. That a fair substitute is half wine vinegar and half rice vinegar, but it’s not quite right.

She says it takes six weeks or more but that it is well worth the wait. A likely story. We’ll just see about that.

This is actually my second attempt. The first time, I stuffed the pineapple and liquid into a half-gallon juice bottle with no headroom and then screwed on the cap. On the fifth day of fermentation, I opened the cap and most of the liquid fizzed up and out of the bottle. FAIL. So I got a better jar.

It occurs to me that, for a person acting all skeptical and dismissive, I am investing rather a lot of resources in this idea.

Pineapple Vinegar
Peelings and core of 1 pineapple, plus some chunks of the good part
4 T brown sugar
1½ qt water

We mix it in a vessel. We set it in a sunny spot. We wait. Fizz happens, then stops happening. A viscous disc is to form, and then firm up, at the top of the jar. This is mother of vinegar and should be retrieved, then put in with the next batch to hasten the process. The other solids should be strained out and discarded. The liquid is supposedly the deliciousest thing ever.

I’ll keep you posted.

Pie Haven, Pizza Fail

My kitchen’s still not ready for cooking, but it’s getting close!

This weekend, dear sweet Katrina welcomed me into her well-appointed kitchen so I could work out some of my pie issues. Katrina and my sweetheart, Beth, who have been friends since their freshman year of college, sat at the kitchen table and talked.

I listened with only half an ear, enjoying the piano song of women’s voices in easy confidence with each other. My hands remembered the stiffness of butter cut into wheat flour, the elastic resistance of pastry as I rolled it out on Katrina’s vintage enamel baking cart with her wooden pin. I felt my shoulders release the fretfulness of paint chips, the uncertainty of countertops and light fixtures, the angst of constant shopping.

The next day I felt inspired to attempt some dough at home. I set out to answer this question: Can a person make a creditable pizza in an electric fry pan?

I’m loathe to say I couldn’t. But the fact remains I didn’t.

Were I to try again, I’d…

• Roll the dough out super-thin. The crust crisped up only to the thickness of a cracker. The rest of my quarter-inch-thick crust was rather steamed.
• Make the pan as hot as possible. Even this will not be hot enough.
• Flip the crust over like a pancake, then put sauce and fixings on top.
• Don’t expect the cheese to be toasted.
• Order delivery instead.

Cardoons: Once is Enough

Note: There is an F-bomb in this post. You were warned.

Cardoons! Limited supply! Only take some if you can experiment with them and report back! So said the CSA announcement this week. Cardoons! I’d heard of them and been hoping for years to try them.

According to a British gardening book that I have somewhere in my house but can no longer find, cardoons are a tall and dramatic-looking member of the thistle family, a relative of artichokes, and a back-of-the-garden oddity. It used to be a common vegetable but fell out of favor sometime before the invention of the combustion engine. I’d filed the bit of information away in case I ever met this plant. And now, thanks to Harmony Valley, it was staring me in the face!


Cardoon looks like celery crossed with an iguana. It is flocked with grayish-green fuzz....














....and studded with quarter-inch spines. It’s as if aliens planted a Jurassic-era garden; or some mild-mannered vegetable got blasted with gamma rays and then got pissed off. Wow! This was going to be so cool!

A little checking around revealed that cardoon should be de-leafed, de-thorned, and cleaned of tough strings; then boiled for fifteen minutes to an hour. It can then be made into things like crudités or salads. Joy of Cooking suggested it might taste like artichoke. I decided on a gratine. This was going to be great! I’d serve it as a surprise treat to Saturday’s dinner guests.

As I prepared the cardoons, excitement soured into doubt. These stalks were awfully big and stringy. That gray bloom turned out to be a layer that sometimes peeled off like onionskin. I cut them into the two-inch lengths that Joy suggested and set them to boil in water spiked with salt and lemon juice.

Beth arrived to help with dinner preparations. “What can I do?” she asked. “Oh,” I tossed back breezily, “how about if you make the Mornay sauce?” I rattled off the directions over my shoulder as I poked the boiling cardoons with a spoon. “Like this?” she asked, some minutes later. I looked into the pan. Beth had made a textbook sauce. It was perfectly smooth, white, and uniform. The sides of the pan weren’t even dirty. Damn!

I drained the cardoons. They looked as if they had lost an election of some sort, or perhaps as if they owed money to the Mob.

I poured Beth’s beautiful sauce into a buttered dish and started laying cardoon pieces in, grumbling all the while. “You don’t sound too confident. You’re going to serve this to guests?” Beth demanded. So, drums rolling, I tasted a cardoon.



A high note of baking soda sang above a base taste of overcooked silage, followed by a convulsive sourness. “Oh, try this,” I gasped. “No way,” said Beth, backing away. I snatched the pieces out of the Mornay, horrified that they would taint it. And then I looked down at them, all sauce-smeared in the colander.

I never until this day met a vegetable I didn’t like. And I hate to waste anything. I screwed my courage to the sticking point and picked up one of the sauced pieces. This one was tenderer. The silky Mornay smoothed away most of the bitterness. The flavor and texture were like a mild, soft artichoke heart. I saw how this might have worked: tender inner stalks broiled up with sauce and cheese could have made a not too unattractive presentation, and they might even approach enjoyable.

But you know what? Fuck it. Cardoons are a lot of work for something only a little bit delicious. And a lot of people, my guests included, don’t even like artichoke. I dumped the whole mess straight in the trash. Sorry, cardoons.

I can see why people stopped eating these things. What I can’t see is why anyone ever decided to eat this in the first place. Maybe some feudal peasant saw her donkey munching a roadside thistle and shoved him out of the way to grab it for herself. Maybe when the choices were cardoons or nothing, cardoons were worth the fuss.

Even though I didn’t like them, I’m thankful to Harmony Valley for the opportunity to try cardoons. It had been a longtime dream, and now I can mark it up as a lifetime achievement.

Don’t try this at home
Here’s what I was going to do, had my initial bite not been so shatteringly unpleasant.

1 lb de-thorned, de-leafed, de-stringed cardoon stalks, cut in 2" pieces
2 T lemon juice
1 t salt
2 T butter
2 T flour
1½ c whole milk at room temperature
¾ c grated Swiss cheese, divided in half

Put the cardoon pieces in a pot with 8 cups of water, the lemon and salt. Boil for 15 to 20 minutes and drain.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a saucepan and whisk in the flour. Whisk until very smooth. Add the milk, whisking constantly to avoid lumps. Whisk and whisk over medium heat until the sauce thickens. Take it off the heat and whisk in half the cheese.

Butter a glass or ceramic baking dish and pour in half the sauce. Lay the cardoon pieces in the sauce, overlapping each other slightly, and cover them with the rest of the sauce. Sprinkle with the remaining cheese. Bake in a 375° oven until the sauce is bubbly and the cheese is toasty and just browned, about 20 minutes.

They Can't All Be Champions

Two things converged today. First, my friend Judy found out last week that if you do a Google image search on "bacon cupcakes," you get 55,000 hits. Second, the temperature failed to reach her minimum threshhold for us to go to the Art Shanty Projects. That's how we ended up in my kitchen trying to make our own bacon cupcakes on a Sunday afternoon.

They say you learn not from your successes, but from your failures. Today has been an education. Did you know that you cannot make a credible peanut butter frosting from the Joy of Cooking recipe using natural peanut butter? Did you know that there is a razor-thin line between crisp-cooked bacon and burned-to-a-crisp bacon? Did you know that a quarter pound of bacon is nowhere near enough to make any kind of flavor impression on the old Walker Museum Gallery 8's Wellesley fudge cake?

That's OK. We learned all kinds of things for next time. For instance, next time we should cook a full pound of bacon to crumble into the batter. Next time we might try a spice cake with brown butter frosting instead of fudge cake with peanut butter frosting. Next time we might even try replacing a tablespoon or two of the butter with bacon grease.

Next time. Except there's probably not going to be a next time. Upon tasting our handiwork, Judy commented, "It's not the best use of bacon, but if you're going to make cupcakes, you might as well put some in."

Meh. We should have gone to the shanties.