tongue tied

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

October 24, 2009

So last summer, my husband and I bought a quarter of a cow. Hung, butchered, wrapped, and frozen, it filled our entire chest freezer. Most of it wound up as ground beef, but a few less-than-choice cuts come with the territory. Thus far, we’ve tackled beef liver and beef tongue.

The liver was, to put it succinctly, a bust. We soaked it in milk for a few days, on the theory that this would dull some of the, well, livery taste. (It’s a good theory, since, as Matthew Amster-Burton explained in his column on milkshakes, the fat in dairy can flatten out sharper flavors.) Then we pan-fried it, ate a few bites, looked at each other, and gave the rest to the cat.

It was just too strong a taste for us. And, heck, we like liver, at least the kind that comes in poultry; we’re happy to pan-fry that stuff and spread it on bread any day. But this? This was overwhelming.

At least, until I unwrapped the beef tongue. Holy cow. Holy cow.

One raw beef tongue, ready for braising.

This was, recognizably, a tongue. An enormous tongue — from a 1,000-pound steer, remember? A black tongue, covered in bristly-looking taste buds.

I was, momentarily, horrified. I mean, I was perfectly willing to butcher and grill three of my chickens, but those were birds. Not mammals. For an instant, I fully understood vegetarianism, on that visceral level where disgust and revulsion congregate.

But we had friends coming over for dinner the next night, friends who had also bought a quarter-cow with us and had expressed a willingness to try the tongue. And I had come up with an ambitious plan for cooking it: braising it and saucing it the way we’d had something sort of similar — beef cheeks — at a popular Walla Walla restaurant, Saffron. (Thanks to local food-and-wine magazine Northwest Palate, we also had the recipes for both beef and sauce.)

So I dropped the tongue — thunk — into a Dutch oven and began braising it in red wine. It simmered for a few hours, and then I let it cool. It was still black, and quite firm. I poked it with a finger, watching the rubbery surface bounce back. Jesus. What was I supposed to do next?

“Call Anya,” my husband said. “She’ll know what to do.”

It was 8:30 on a Friday night, but why not? Anya Fernald — the former director of Slow Food Nation and the current force behind Live Culture — knows meat. She’d already suggested asking our cow’s butcher for eye of round, so we could cure our own bresaola in a wine fridge. (Alas, our butcher’s skills were limited to only a few basic cuts, and eye of round wasn’t one of them.) She would definitely know what to do.

Fortunately, she was home. “OK, first you take off the taste buds. Then cut off the cartilage at the back. Then slice it really thin,” she said. “Do you have a meat slicer? No? Well, take it to your local butcher shop and have them cut it for you. Buy a sausage or something, then hold up your tongue and say, ‘By the way, would you cut this for me?’ Once you’ve got it sliced, fan it out and pour a sauce over it, like a tonnato sauce or a salsa verde. Salt. You’ll need salt. And that’s it.”

Excellent. I took a knife to the taste buds and lo, they peeled away like, well, leather. The next night, my husband tackled the cartilage and the thin-slicing while I reheated my version of Saffron’s sweet-and-sour eggplant sauce.

Our friends arrived. If the tongue was truly terrible, I thought, we could always ditch it and boil water for pasta, using the eggplant as a pasta sauce. But it wasn’t. It was good. Soft, pleasantly chewy, and good. Our pals even took some home with them as leftovers.

Will I tackle a beef tongue again? Probably not; I like lengua tacos, but not enough to devote an entire day’s worth of braising and chopping and saucing to them. Still, it’s good to know that nose-to-tail cooking at home can be successful.

Related recipe: Eggplant Agrodolce

african cooking challenge

By Caroline Cummins

August 20, 2009

we have friends currently living in lesotho. (never heard of it? think south africa, and you’re about there.) they are culinarily challenged right now, given their limited food options and kitchen supplies. check out their post about it and feel free to leave them suggestions for one-pot meals.

how much $ does gardening really save?

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

April 30, 2009

everybody these days is gardening to save money on produce. or raising chickens to do the same on eggs.

the articles tell you things like, say, one flat of bok choy starts will save you hundreds of dollars come harvesttime. sure, if your boy choy starts actually produce a prolific (i.e., lots of crop) and edible (i.e., the bugs and birds don’t destroy it) harvest. and if you can actually eat the dozens of pounds of bok choy you’ve grown come harvesttime. freezing all that extra bok choy? not so appetizing.

at my house, we’ve already blown several hundred dollars in the past year on raising chickens (counting the cost of building a home for them, plus their feed costs) and another several hundred dollars on gardening supplies and classes for the veggie beds.

yes, we get 1 to 3 eggs a day. yes, we have unlimited amounts of parsley in the yard. but our radish crop has already failed. and we love eggs so much, we still buy supplemental eggs at the store.

are we raising chickens and growing a garden to save moola? heck no. we do it because it’s fun and, when the urban-homesteading stars align, über-fresh and therefore way tastier than anything at the farmers’ market. our eggs are awesome and so, in years past, have been our raspberries, peas, favas, and eggplants. but are we laughing all the way to the bank? no way.

hospital food

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

March 27, 2009

After three post-partum days in the hospital, it was a relief to get home to genuine homemade food.

My hospital made an effort towards food awareness (statements on the patient menu about trying to source food locally, etc.), and some of the food was actually quite flavorful (salmon with fresh lemon and sour cream). But, by and large, the food was the expected amalgam of blah (lots of Jell-O and saltines) and pseudo-healthy (a breakfast sandwich that featured “reduced-fat cheese, lean ham, and a low-cholesterol egg”).

Most of the selections tasted canned (cream of tomato soup) instead of homemade as the menu promised. Worse, the food-service staff had been instructed to keep patients off whole grains and fiber for the first few days after surgery, on the theory that such foods would be difficult for recovering patients to digest. But if you’re already used to, say, oat-bran bread — and if you’re on constipation-inducing pain relievers — wouldn’t it be better to down some whole grains instead of white bread?

the mysteries of powdered milk

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

March 12, 2009

Still haven’t made any homemade yogurt — although I like Sarah’s idea of using a slow cooker, a gadget I’ve been fooling around with lately. (See her comment in the Nancy’s Yogurt blog post, below.)

Mostly I’ve been poking around the Interweb and the library, trying to find out basic information about milk powder. It’s kind of like trying to research atomic scientists during WWII — very hush-hush.

One thing I’ve noticed, on ingredient labels and in the bulk bins at various local grocery stores, is that all the milk powder circulating out there seems to be of the nonfat variety. As Anne Mendelson points out in her book Milk, milk fat causes problems in the dehydration process, specifically the fat’s “tendency to develop spoiled or harsh flavors . . . This is why virtually all commercial brands [of dried milk powder] are nonfat.”

So maybe dried milk powder made from whole milk has more oxidized cholesterol than dried milk powder made from nonfat milk?

Wikipedia’s various articles about powdered milk and spray drying touch on the controversy over whether the process of turning liquid milk into powder creates oxidized cholesterol without really giving much data either way, and without discussing the whole milk/nonfat milk thing.

If you read Nina Planck (Real Food) or hang out on the Weston A. Price Foundation website, you’ll hear a lot about how powdered milk is one of the modern industrial food system’s many evils. But neither Planck nor the foundation backs up their claims with citations of actual scientific studies about the topic.

As one newspaper writer would have it, worrying about dried milk powder is silly, because there just isn't enough oxidized cholesterol in, say, a carton of yogurt to worry about.

On the other hand, I’d like to be able to buy yogurt, kefir, milk, and other liquid dairy products without fretting that they’re full of additives that I wasn’t expecting — milk powder, pectin, corn syrup, etc.

My latest purchase? Goat-milk kefir from Redwood Hill, bought because — shocking concept — it contains nothing more than goat milk and active cultures. The packaging brags that it’s “completely natural — no sugar, artificial coloring, preservatives, stabilizers, or powdered milk.” And why is powdered milk bad? Redwood Hill ain’t saying.

However, I just don’t think the powdered-milk thing is going to go away, especially as folks like the New York Times’ Jane Brody are touting it yet again as a great way to get cheap milk in tough times. Hm. Me, I’ll stick to trying to find good fresh whole milk, like Matthew Amster-Burton.

ultimate chocolate pudding

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

March 8, 2009

Carrie Floyd, our food editor, was raving about a chocolate pudding her daughter made recently, from a Martha Stewart recipe designed to encourage parents to cook with their kids.

So I decided to try it out, although I was a little nonplussed by the instructions to stir the pudding in an ice bath to cool it after cooking it. I’ve done this for gelatin puddings, but never for a cornstarch pudding. The results? A lot of stirring and a rather grainy texture. And for all that the Martha recipe calls for a ton of melted chocolate chips, the recipe wasn’t particularly chocolatey.

So I flipped to the cornstarch-pudding section of my 1990s edition of Joy of Cooking, which promptly admonished me for stirring a cornstarch pudding after it’s thickened — a big no-no in the cornstarch-pudding world, apparently. The extra stirring explained the graininess.

OK, then. So what about the lack of chocolate oomph? I flipped through a variety of chocolate-pudding recipes in books and online, and came up with my own version: Creamy Chocolate Pudding. Plenty of dairy, like the Martha recipe. But more cocoa powder to boost the chocolate quotient and a dash of butter for extra richness.

I think it kicks Martha’s kiddie version in the pants.

my sad break-up with nancy’s yogurt

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

February 10, 2009

i’ve eaten nancy's yogurt for years. it’s local. it’s organic. it actually has live bacterial cultures in it, unlike many commercial yogurts.

but yesterday i took a look at the ingredients list on a tub of nancy’s yogurt (my husband had bought a different type of nancy’s than our usual plain whole-milk variety) and was startled to see that the yogurt contains milk powder. i grabbed our usual variety for comparison purposes and yep, it has the powdered stuff, too.

if i wanted dried milk powder — which is manufactured in a process that oxidizes the milk's cholesterol, making it not exactly healthy for your heart — i’d buy, you know, dried milk powder and mix it with water, telling myself that i’m saving money in my milk budget (short-term savings!) while presumably wreaking havoc on my arteries (long-term expense!).

i feel betrayed. kind of like i felt all those years ago, when the news on trans fats began to come out, saying, “sorry, we told you to eat margarine because it was good for you, but actually it’s way worse for you than butter.”

i also feel stupid, for not reading the nancy’s label more carefully. silly me, for assuming that yogurt was just yogurt!

any suggestions on other yogurts to buy? or should i just make my own at home now?

not sure how I feel about Sally Fallon

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

February 9, 2009

skimmed her 2001 book Nourishing Traditions over the weekend. seems like a book with a useful niche, but I doubt that niche is on my shelf.

sure, there’s a lotta footnotes backing up Fallon’s various health claims, but am I really gonna go look up all those studies and see if my take on them jives with hers? nah.

and I know she’s got a lotta fans, but I really couldn’t, erm, stomach the bossy tone of the book. attitude goes a long way toward converting the masses, ya know, and this one wasn’t for me.

at the very end of the book is a brief section with suggestions for how busy people can apply some of the book’s principles to their own hectic lives. the list is very short (make your own salad dressing, for example) and feels like a literal afterthought.

because, really, this book is for people who don’t have careers and are willing to devote their days not only to near-impossible sourcing of ingredients (perfectly fresh, unpasteurized, totally clean, pure raw milk) and hours of fermentation, soaking, simmering, and the like (all nuts should be soaked for a day and then dried out in an oven for a day before eating).

um, unless I get a Bessie of my own in my back yard, I’m not sure where to get that ideal raw-milk ingredient Fallon deems necessary for what feels like half the book’s recipes.

and I’d rather eat my nuts freshly toasted for a few minutes instead of spending a day soaking and a day cooking. am I missing out on vital nutrients by being such a lazy bum? Fallon would say yes. but I’m not so sure.

as for the section on homemade baby formula made from raw cow’s milk or meat — since when we were supposed to give babies formula made from cow’s milk (a known allergen in little tots) or meat? not that industrially produced formula is exactly fabuloso, but yikes!

Who brings home the bacon?

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

February 4, 2009

Last fall, the New Yorker ran a Malcolm Gladwell article about late bloomers. Ostensibly about the nature of genius — youthful prodigies vs. late-emerging talents — the piece was actually strongest in its assessment of what it takes to produce late bloomers.

The answer? A twist on the old adage of “Behind every succesful man is a woman.”

In the New Yorker’s case study, the answer was indeed a woman — the supportive wife of novelist Ben Fountain, who bore his children and brought home the bacon as a lawyer while he spent years trying to make it as a writer.

Statistically speaking, of course, men make more money than women. But there are exceptions to every rule. Julia Child was supported by her diplomat husband, Paul Child, while she learned to cook. That’s “traditional.” But Mark Bittman, according to an article last fall in the New York Observer, was also supported by his spouse, becoming the family cook and, eventually, a local (New Haven, Conn.) restaurant critic, which marked the start of his career in food writing.

Filmmaker Ang Lee spent years in obscurity, writing screenplays and, yes, learning how to cook to feed his family, while his molecular-biologist wife paid the bills. All those domestic skills paid off in his early films, which frequently featured or emphasized food: “The Wedding Banquet” and “Eat Drink Man Woman.”

The most recent presidential election also provided notable examples of women supporting their husbands’ thrones. Forget Sarah Palin; I’m talking here about Cindy McCain, whose family money and connections were crucial to the overall success of hubby John McCain, and Michelle Obama, who exemplifies the Ginger Rogers trope: doing everything her man does, except backwards and in high heels. Ya think Barack would’ve gotten as far as he did on charisma and talent alone? Nah, he needed Michelle, who held down the steady jobs and oh, yeah, did the mommy thing while he politicked.

Of course, there are countless women out there struggling to fulfill their true callings with the financial and emotional support of their spouses, partners, families, and the like. And for everyone, male or female, who grows up learning to cook at Mommy or Daddy’s knee, there’s plenty more of us who learned to cook in a supportive environment that provided time, space, and money for groceries — in the luxury environs of college, say, or while saving money living in a shared housing setup, or during a career lull or parenting-transition time.

Gender politics aside, let’s hear it for the oft-unsung heroes who made sure their loved ones were allowed to bloom, grow, and even cook.

roast duck

From Caroline — Blog by Caroline Cummins

February 3, 2009

we have a duck (labeled “Peking duck,” although I always thought this was a dish, not a breed) defrosting in our fridge. I guess we’ll roast it, although other suggestions are welcome .... especially for dealing with all the fat that will probably run off the bird (how best to roast it so we can, you know, catch all that fat and save it for cooking potatoes?) ...