Food! Glorious Food!

[lsanderson]

Reclaiming Puerto Rico’s Food Paradise
By JEFF GORDINIER

At Chipotle, How Many Calories Do People Really Eat?
By KEVIN QUEALY, AMANDA COX and JOSH KATZ

Tom Bullock’s ‘The Ideal Bartender’ Offers Words of Advice
By ROBERT SIMONSON

Why Popcorn Also Jumps
By JAMES GORMAN

Gene-Altered Apples Get U.S. Approval
By ANDREW POLLACK

Meatloaf That Conquers the Mundane
By DAVID TANIS
Recipes:

Polpettone With Spinach and Provolone
More Meatloaf Recipes

A Moroccan Stew With Spice and Sweetness
By MELISSA CLARK
Recipe:

Moroccan Chickpeas With Chard

The Slow Cooker, Redeemed
By SAM SIFTON
Recipes:

Vaguely Vietnamese Slow Cooker Pork Tacos
Christina Tosi’s Crockpot Cake

A Measured Approach to Cooking
By TAMAR ADLER
Recipe:

Unmeasured Crepes

A Peek at the Promised Land
By ERIC ASIMOV
The best Côte Chalonnaise reds convey what makes Burgundy ideal for pinot noir wines, and often at far more affordable rates.

Michele Ferrero, Tycoon Who Gave the World Nutella, Dies at 89
By HILARY STOUT

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

The slow-cooker article is superb -- Sifton articulates my understanding of the tool; it's marvelous for stocks, but for practically everything else (except possibly brown-bread and some soups & stews with horribly tough meat) four hours at high or eight at low is going to be Too Much. And it's pretty much like any other cooking (that "dump all the stuff in and forget about it" approach is bullshit) -- add the things that are more tasty with less lcooking towards the end.

I currently have going a mix of water, chicken paws, a couple of chopped onions, and possibly too much sliced ginger (I have a surplus). I'll soon add the skins and fat trimmed from a package of chicken thighs, the least meaty portions & most of †he skin of a pre-roasted duck, a chopped carrot or two and maybe another onion or so, fried until clear. Possibly also two or four of the chicken thighs, to give a more meaty flavor. If I can find some star anise (there ought to be some somewhere around here, but I'm so old I'm falling apart) I'll add one or two. Somewhere in there, at least once, I'll remove the fat (reserving some (aka too much) of it for making a white sauce for Creamed Chicken, but this excess white sauce -- I can't resist an additional tablespoonful of fat and flour, which almost always results in an overflow of the utensil I'm cooking it in --, with several kinds of chopped & sauteed mushrooms & a little more milk, makes great soup). Not that we're having Soup Weather out here in Southern California -- a bit chilly at night, yeah, but with daytime highs often in the 80s ... in mid-February!

This stock I'll probably cook on low until tomorow morning (about 15 hours). Then I'll remove and toss out all the solids, add the skinned chicken thighs, and simmer for... maybe three hours, checking carefully after the first one or two and removing as soon as the juices run clear.

Hey, I grew up spending part of my summer vacations on Uncle George's and Aunt Peggy's farm -- 40 acres near Wolf Creek, near Adrian, in southern Michigan. I fully understand that "Coc au Vin" is a (delicious) way of cooking extremely tough old roosters (& hens), and that the most tasty (albeit not tender) duck linvolves (as Aunt Peggy always said) "watch out for buckshot -- it can crack your teeth". It's almost impossible for most Americans to find food like that any more, and I think it's seriously stupid to cook farm-raised tender young animals by those ancient recipies.

I'm recalling someting we had back in the 1930s called a "fireless cooker" -- a highly-insulated (asbestos, I suppose) cylndrical container with a thick Iron disk to be heated almost red-hot on the wood-burning kitchen stove in the evening, then various dishes in individual stacking pans (brought to boiling on the stove) were stacked in it, the top clamped on, and the foods were ready to serve the following afternoon. I seem to recall that most of the food from it tasted pretty good, but then we were young, and worked hard, so just about _any_ food would taste good.

{N.B: I'd say that Aunt Peggy (and my mother, of Swiss/German descent, from Louisville KY) were fine examples of what the famoust French Gastronome meant when the said that American/U.S. Home Cooking was the best in the world.. Alas, that was long ago.)