Remember the Wonder

In today's New York Times, "A Soft Spot for the Anti-Artisanal" a brilliant pro-Kraft/Hostess/Wonderbread manifesto:

Into every life some Kraft Singles, Hostess Sno Balls and Snickers bars must fall. Could you possibly substitute a wedge of that pampered Camembert for a workaday Kraft Single on a tuna melt? Never. And equal only to the fetishistic satisfaction of eating the filling of an Oreo before you eat the cookie is peeling the Sno Ball’s coconut-sprinkled dome of marshmallow from the chocolate cupcake beneath it and saving its creamy center for last. These products are sui generis in our great American culture where variety rules; you can’t find a real substitute for any of them....

Don’t get me wrong. I’m genuinely glad about the progress being made in the culinary world, and I’m grateful that our daily diets are improving thanks to the tireless efforts of local farmers and obsessive compulsives who have chosen heritage pork as their final frontier instead of space. I salute them.

All I’m saying is that sometimes, people, you’ve still got to remember the wonder.

Kangaroo with Fig Sauce

Welcome to Part II of the ToastPoint exotic meat series. Today, kangaroo in fig sauce. When we ordered from exoticmeats.com, there was some sort of procurement delay. To make up for the dreadful incovenience of tardy deliver of bits of dead exotic animals, the fine people at Exotic Meats sent some extra kangaroo with our order.

We decided to pay the windfall forward by having a kangaroo dinner party, fairly bold considering that we figured there was a decent chance the meal would be inedible, either through native nastiness or ineptitude of preparation. To up the ante, we even invited a gen-u-ine Australian to the table.

We stocked up on cheese, made extra large portions of side dishes, plied our guests with (Australian) wine, and crossed our fingers. And lo and behold, the kangaroo was awesome. The tender, extremely flavorful, appealingly rosy meat was wolfed down (apologies for mixing species) by one and all. I can only assume that the reason humanity domesticated cows and not kangaroos is that cows are easier to catch in the first place. The sweetness of the caramelized fig complimented the meat perfectly.

Discussion at the table revolved around whether a kangaroo was, in fact, a giant rodent and its status as a pest Down Under--all of which were basically efforts to keep ourselves from feeling bad about eating such a charismatic megafauna.

It will seem like there is a lot of oil in the marinade, but kangaroo is very lean so many recipes recommend variations on a oil bath before cooking. And since the meat is so lean, it will dry out if you try for anything more the medium-rare--thus the quick sear and little else.

This fig sauce would be brilliant with pork or beef as well. So if you can't lay your paws on some kangaroo, you can still give it a whirl.

***
Kangaroo with Fig Sauce

Combine:
2-3 Tablespoons fig preserves
1 small onion, minced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 inch fresh ginger, minced
4 generous Tablespoons olive oil
1 Tablespoon French mustard
1 lemon, juiced
2 Tablespoons fig vinegar, or balsamic vinegar with a bit for extra fig preserves

Pour marinade into a freezer bag and add:
1- 1 1/2 pounds of kangaroo loin filets

Marinate for as long as possible. I marinated mine overnight in the fridge.

About 1 hour before dinner, removed the bag from the fridge and bring kangaroo to room temperature.

Heat on high in a non-non-stick pan (cast iron or aluminum is best. If all you have is non-stick, it just means a little less tasty brown crust on the meat):
1 scant Tablespoon oil

When oil begins to shimmer and smoke, removed kangaroo from marinade, shake off excess and add to the pan. After 3 minutes, turn the filets. After three more minutes, removed the filets to a warm oven (250 degrees) and keep them there until ready to serve.

Meanwhile, reduce heat and pour the marinade into the pan. Deglaze with a little wine or water if things are too dry. Reduce the juices to a thick, syrupy sauce and serve on in a little pitcher or bowl on the side of the kangaroo.

Buckwheat Noodles with Napa Cabbage and Almonds

Charmingly, the recipe that inspired this dish calls for crunched up packages of ramen noodles, not the snooty buckwheat soba you see above. If you have some TopRamen on hand, go for it and tell me how it turned out. I've never had anything like what this recipe--and the dozens of others like it I found online--so I don't know what it was really supposed to be like. I suspect it was meant to be more like an asiany crunchy salad or slaw. What I wound up with was more in the spirit of the sesame noodles or peanut noodles from your local Chinese place as an appetizer.

On the last sunny day in Boston before the recent bout of distinctly unspringlike weather, I tossed together this quick lunch for two while the H.V. napped upstairs between classes. When he descended, we munched these savory noodles in companionable quiet and enjoyed the warm sun coming in through the windows of our apartment. The toasty almonds and the tender cabbage seemed tentatively springlike, but the hot noodles were substantive enough to line our tummies and anchor us for one last battle with winter.

***
Buckwheat Noodles with Napa Cabbage and Almonds

Start some water boiling for the noodles. Meanwhile, melt in a large skillet:
3 Tablespoons butter

Add:
1/2 cup slivered almonds (I only had whole almonds, which I "slivered" with a large chef knife. The final result was rustic, but served its purpose)

Toast the almonds until golden, then add:
1 head Napa cabbage, chopped into coleslaw-like ribbons

While the cabbage softens, boil for a scant 2 minutes:
1 package buckwheat soba noodles, snapped in half or in quarters

Drain and rinse under cold water, then add them to the pan with the cabbage. Toss in:
4 scallions, green and white parts, chopped

Then add:
3 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 Tablespoon rice vinegar (or other white vinegar)
2 Tablespoons rice wine (or honey mixed with water, or maple syrup)

Let the whole thing bubble away for a minute or two on high heat, then garnish with sesame seeds and serve hot.

***
For more pasta, presto!

Crocodile in Lime and Ginger (Seriously)

The Human Vacuum is on the march. His campaign to consume bits of increasingly bizarre animals led him to ExoticMeats.com, where he bought crocodile and fragments of several other strange beasts, which will be featured here in the coming days. For now, our freezer is a veritable menagerie.

The results so far: I hate to say it, but crocodile really does taste like chicken. Maybe chicken with a touch of the spongy, fishiness of swordfish. But basically chicken. Which isn't to say that the dinner pictured above was lacking in any way. It was delicious. But you could probably make it with chicken or swordfish to excellent effect and at much less expense.

Still, half the fun is just beng able to casually mention that you had crocodile for dinner last night, right?

***
Crocodile in Lime and Ginger

Combine in a shallow bowl:
Juice of 2 limes
Pinch cayenne pepper
1 inch fresh ginger, minced or grated
1 Tablespoon soy sauce

Add:
1 pound crocodile, cut into 1 inch chunks (or chicken or swordfish)

Marinate for an hour, or as long as possible (see here for my laissez-faire policy on marinating)

In a large skillet over high heat, warm until shimmering:
1-2 Tablespoons olive oil

Retreive chunks of crocodile from marinade and add them to the pan, reserving the juices for later use. Sear the crocodile for about 2 minutes on each side, then remove and keep warm. Turn the heat down to medium high and pour the leftover marinade into the pan, along with:
1 scallion, minced
1 Tablespoon honey
1 Tablespoon olive oil

Let it bubble and reduce to a thick sauce. Put the chunks of crocodile, along with any juices that have accumulated on the plate, back into the pan and toss to coat.

I served the croc on a bed of cubed zucchini sauted with 1 Tablespoon butter, 2 Tablespoons of fresh mint, salt, and cracked pepper.
***
Check out more experiments in reptillian eating here.

Salmon with Soy, Maple, and Adobo

Thank god for people who refuse to follow directions. I was drafted into an email recipe exchange (sort of a chain letter/pyramid scheme, but with recipes) and, for the first time in my life, actually decided to participate. It was a simple calculation--potential for a bunch of good recipes, versus almost no effort to send a recipe since I already had a website full of them. I got a decent yield, but the best of the bunch was this salmon from a person who, by the rules of the recipe exchange, shouldn't have sent it to me, but to the next person down on the list.

I opted to saute a plastic bag of baby spinach in 2 Tablespoons of olive oil and 3 cloves of minced garlic, and serve with some Whole Food corn bread muffin tops. The original recipe suggested serving the salmon with brown rice and oven-roasted asparagus, which I'm confident would be delicious as well.

The Human Vacuum said "You could get exactly this plate for $27 dollars at a nouveau cuisine-type place." It's true. The glaze was just fresh interesting enough, and the plating was very attractive, even if I do say so myself.

***
Salmon with Soy, Maple and Adobo

Mix together in a shallow bowl:
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 Tablespoon adobo, the red tomato-based sauce from a can of chipotle peppers (you can get these in the Mexican section of almost any grocery store, even though they sound fancy)
1/4 cup soy sauce

Add:
1 pound salmon filet

Marinate for a bit. (I had already broken that age-old rule and gone to the grocery store while absolutely starving. When I got home, I threw the marinade together, put the groceries away, and started cooking. 10 minutes at best. It was still awesome. The original recipe says to marinate for half an hour, which you should feel free to do. I consider it a point of honor to treat marinating times as loose suggestions at best--and am willing to do away with that step altogether if I'm in a hurry. Sort of like stop signs at deserted intersections.)

Anyway, saute the salmon in a skillet, browning both sides and cooking until just approaching opaque in the middle (see below for my super no-fail salmon sauteing technique). Meanwhile, briskly simmer the marinade in a separate saucepan until it is reduced to a scant 1/4 cup.

Drizzle glaze over fish and serve with the sides of your choice.

***
Super no-fail salmon sauteing technique
Heat up a dry skillet on high. When the skillet is very hot, drop in the salmon, skin side down. Wait for 2-3 minutes until the fat starts to render out. Then flip the salmon, scrape the skin off (which will be incredibly easy at this point), and throw the skin away. If the skin sticks to the surface of the pan, all the better. Just flip the fish to another part of the pan, scrape it up and throw it away. Sear the other side well (another 2 minutes, until a brown crust forms). Flip once more, then turn the heat to medium-low and cook until the fish starts to threaten to become opaque in the center. The gorgeous brown crust this technique creates is worth the house full of fishy smoke it produces, so open the windows before you try this technique and enjoy.

Roasted Grapefruit with Yogurt

Generally, I don't do fussy weekday breakfasts. In fact, solitary breakfast is almost always consists of toasting whatever carb is at hand and smearing it with the sugary contents of the first jar that comes to my attention in the refrigerator door. I find, though, that on the rare occasions when I get my act together and do something more elaborate for my first meal, it gives me the feeling that I'm really in control of my life. To be the kind of person who prepares breakfast for herself on a weekday morning is to be the anti-Bridget Jones, the sort of person who has an organized sock drawer and an empty inbox. There's meditative serenity in kitchen puttering that I can rarely manage to leave time for on a Tuesday morning. When I actually do carry it off, I have the distinct (slightly smug) sense that I have ascended to a higher plane of being.

For Christmas, I received a subscription to Martha Stewart's pint-sized magazine Good Food. Martha, of course, dwells perennially in the aforementioned higher plane of being. To date, I'd mostly used the magazine for breakfast reading, not actual breakfast recipes. But the first recipe in this month's issue was this grapefruit concoction, which was easy and insanely delicious. It turns out that attaining a higher plane of being isn't as hard as it looks.

***
Roasted Grapefruit with Yogurt
adapted from Martha Stewart's Good Food magazine

When you stumble downstairs half awake, turn on your broiler. Do not--I repeat, do not--forget that you turned it on and fall back asleep on the couch. Cut in half:
1 red grapefruit

Sprinkle each half with:
1 Tablespoon brown sugar (more if you suspect the grapefruit of being unsweet)

Stick the sugar-dusted grapefruit under the broiler for 4-5 minutes, or until you are too impatient to wait any longer. Remove and top each half with:
Large spoonful plain yogurt
pinch cinnamon

Martha suggests that you cut the grapefruit before broiling to make it easier to separate fruit from pith and peel. If you can manage this kind of knife work before breakfast, fine. For me, there are limits even to my ascension.

Beets and Cheese

The second in a series of odd eating when the Human Vacuum is out of town.

I consoled myself over the H.V.'s departure by buying about $30 worth of fancy cheese. One of the sillier purchases was a tiny glass jar of something called Miticrema, which I now know is a soft cream cheese-like sheep's milk cheese with a yogurty tang. I didn't know what it was when I bought it, of course. I'm just a sucker for tiny glass jars of expensive foodstuffs (see fig spread, caviar, french full fat yogurt, saffron, et al.)

Elsewhere in the grocery cart, a significantly less expensive pair of beets. I've never really loved beets. In salad bars, I find them quite alarming, lying there in coins that bleed magenta into the bin of chickpeas next door. But the recent craze for salads of layered roasted beet and goat cheese and walnuts/whatever in snooty restaurants has convinced me that I have been giving beets short shift. Having never bought a beet in my life, now was the time to face the beast, err, beet on my own turf. This dish always has a fancy description on restaurant menus, like "roasted beet napoleon" or something silly. You know what it really is? Beets and cheese, thank you very much.

And what better way to face the unfamiliar than with cheese?

***
Beets and Cheese

Turn the oven on to 450 degrees.

Wrap in foil:
1 beet, peeled
Put it in the oven (no need to wait for it to preheat). After an hour or so, unwrap the beet and stick a knife in to make sure it's soft and tender. If not, rewrap and give it another 10 minutes or so.

Slice the beet into rounds and rub on a little:
Balsamic vinegar (I used a nifty fig balsamic which was a gift from my oldest ToastFriend, which added even more rich sweetness to the beet)

Then build a tower of alternating layers of beet and:
Spoonfuls of miticrema, goat cheese, or other creamy, strongly-flavored cheese

Eat standing up in the kitchen with a side of leftover chickpeas from a pan in the fridge. Or as a fancy hors d'oeuvre. Whatever.

(Note: I could only make myself eat about half of a beet in this manner--the cheese is quite rich.)

Gnawing on Bones, Alone

Tonight at 8:45 p.m., I found myself savagely digging the marrow out of my third and final roasted beef bone with a grapefruit spoon. All because the Human Vacuum is out of town. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

I thought the absence of the H.V. would be a good opportunity to load up the sort of food he tends to shun. Thus my impulse buy of three fat beef bones at the grocery store last night. I had the vague idea that people in British novels did something with marrow, and that it was considered a treat by small children. Fueled by that single blurry thought, I tossed them in my mini-cart at Whole Foods. Tonight, after fiddling around waiting for the Falcon 1 launch (aborted, again. sigh.), I cranked up the oven and tossed them in.

In the sprirt of the novels that inspired this dinner, I must tell you, Dear Reader, that the resulting dinner was scrumptious. Crunchy lemony salad, rich unctuous marrow, warm buttery toast. It was just what I dreamed it would be, and it was precisely the sort of thing best eaten alone, away from prying eyes--even of those who love us most. While eating, I descended into savagery, rasping my spoon around the inside of the bones to retrieve the last tasty morsels.

Hey, at least I was still using utensils, right?

***
Roasted Marrow on Toast
(Despite the rarity and seeming fancy-pantsness of this meal, it was quite easy to make. Rachel Ray could do a 30 Minute Meal of marrow bones and still have time left over to make a box cake. And it's a one-pan meal, so clean up is quick, too.)

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Place on a foil-lined pan:
3 beef or veal bones, cut into 3 inch pieces

Arrange the bones cut sides down so that they stand like a tiny, meaty Stonehenge in the pan. Stick them in the oven for about 20 minutes. They'll be done when they bleed a little fat and the marrow is soft all the way through, which you can check by poking them with a skewer or thin knife.

While the bones are a-roastin', make a tiny salad. All the recipes I found online call for a parsely salad, which I'm sure would be lovely. But when you've impulse-bought beef bones, it's unlikely that you've also coincidentally impulse-bought two handfuls of parsely. So, I just used:
1 handful salad greens, torn small

Dress with the following, whisked together:
1/2 lemon, juiced
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced or microplaned (I used a squeeze of the preprocessed stuff--no one was looking, so I figured I could get away with lazy man's garlic)
Salt and pepper

Then toast:
2 pieces plain white bread

Yank the bones out of the oven, arrange everything on a plate and serve with a small spoon for savage digging. To eat: scrape out the marrow, smoosh it onto triangle of toast, and (this step is very important) sprinkle with salt. Alternate with bites of salad.

Shrimp, Black Bean, and Corn Salsa

What follows is what is quaintly called a "pantry supper" in certain old-fashioned cookbooks. The genteel emphemism conceals this less-than-ladylike sentiment: "&%$#ing hell. There are zero fresh vegetables or meat in this house, but there is no way on God's green earth that I am going to the grocery store in this weather/this time of day/in this mood/in this shirt." This meal can be made entirely from the freezer and cupboards. The ingredients are, of course, suggestions. If you have pinto beans or chickpeas but no black beans, go for it. If you're fresh out of frozen corn, throw in peas or edamame, or whatever. The point is reduce stress, not create more.

***
Shrimp, Black Bean, and Corn Salsa

Combine in a large bowl:
1 can black beans, drained
2 cups frozen corn, thawed in the microwave.
1 pound shrimp, cooked and roughly chopped
1 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper
Splash of soy sauce

Eat directly out of the bowl with tortilla chips, enjoying the hypnotic, soothing crunch that they create inside your head. If you're very lucky, and your freezer happened to have some Costco guacamole in it, eat it in alternate bites.