While yukon_jack and the lovely A. were here, we ate at Enoteca Roma, a remarkably good north-Italian restaurant where the specialty, they informed us, was the polenta. Only mollpeartree took them up on it, and she was unanimously declared the winner by conquest, especially after we all tried tiny morsels of her meal and then savored our own choices with the bitter tears of regret.

Previously, I have been familiar with polenta mostly as a boat for other things, such as the 'mazing Gruyere polenta I had beneath my pork chop with righteousfist at whatever that place was in Alexandria, VA a few years back. But the Enoteca Roma experience made me decide -- nay, vow -- to make polenta worth eating in its own right. And then to pile it with something really good just in case I was wrong about my polenta-making skills. A quick page through Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World, suitably adjusted for Enoteca-worthiness, and I felt ready to court the goddess Fortune, in her guise as cornmeal.

Short answer: I was not wrong.

( The long answer, coquettishly hidden beneath the cut... )

Every so often, I'll post an abbreviated menu to Facebook, usually while in a state of self-satisfied repletion. But this recipe is what it says up there on the tin. In honor of picnics in honor of the Fourth, here's the best deviled egg recipe I've ever made, by far:

DEVA'D EGGS

12 eggs, hard-boiled, halved, yolks separated

6 TBSP mayonnaise
1 1/2 TSP curry powder (we're dangerously low on Penzey's Maharajah blend, and I may have to devote an afternoon to cloning it. Or break down and buy another jar)
3/4 TSP garlic paste
1/3 TSP celery salt

1/2 TSP salt (or more to taste)
1/4 TSP fresh ground black pepper (or more to taste)
1/2 TSP lemon juice (or more to taste)

Dump your yolks in a big glass bowl, and mix in the next four ingredients. Then comes the slightly tricky bit with the salt and pepper -- don't over-salt the things; over-peppering them is more forgivable because the curry powder will give you some breathing room there. Once you've got the saltiness where you want it (or just a little below that, ideally), add lemon juice to brighten the flavor -- there will be a kind of hole in the top notes that slowly adding lemon juice will fill. If you over-lemon it, you can add another TSP or so of mayo to smooth it back out in the middle register.

Then take your little spoon and moosh the filling back into the hard-boiled whites, making sure to accidentally split one or three of them so that you have to eat the failures. (I usually have mollpeartree do this part -- only the willpower of someone who's quit smoking is up to the task of filling deviled eggs. If it were me doing it, this dozen egg recipe would result in about five eggs left over for company.)

One could, I suspect, make a slightly lighter version of this with olive oil in for the mayo, though you'd want to cut the amount by half or more, and you'd risk making it too sweet -- maybe some chili pepper would cut through that, but by now, you're talking about a whole different recipe, really. So I'd just stick with the mayo, myself.

I've made this meal three times, most recently last week, and all kidding aside, it's freaking wonderful. I don't even have a clever introduction for it; I was just struck by the desire to make risotto one day, and found a promising version of Red Bell Pepper Risotto online at the New York Times site, and modded it (via Bittman) as follows:

( Herein, What Followed )

Then, piling a Lucullan Pelion on Ossa in my Titanic hubris, I dug up a recipe for Paprika Pork Chops (Molise Style), reasoning infallibly that paprika would complement its red bell pepper co-varietal quite nicely. Again tweaking the recipe as I saw fit, I surmounted Olympus, raining down scarlet tastiness on the cowering gods below.

( Tweaking The Beard of Jove, Culinarily Speaking )

And I was right. The pork and the risotto blend to perfection with every bite. I serve it with a green salad and whatever vinaigrette I dig out of the fridge -- a little acid on the side helps out, too.

It seems like an awful waste of an LJ post just to point you good people to an interview with me on technoir's podcast, The Basics of the Game, but not a lot else is going on.

Snow covers my city, the New Capital of the World, as is good and right, but it makes getting out and doing things inconvenient. And cold. Which is good for GURPS Horror 4E, at which I'm plugging along. Next up: re-read all of GURPS Powers to see what else dr_kromm has done that I don't need to. I did have the pretty great brain wave of doing up Powers for all the various Fears from the monster section. That should be good.

In response to ratmmjess' challenge of a few weeks ago, I've started re-reading the Smiley novels, which is also good ground-work for the ongoing vampire espionage thriller game. I read them eons ago, and I'd forgotten just how good a writer LeCarre was back in the day, so that's been fun. It's also instilled in me a burning desire to read Declare for the dozenth time, but maybe I'll read that godawful brick by Robert Littell, or my Alan Furst book instead. Once I can get out and do some last-minute shopping, I'll see if there's more Alan Furst lying around used.

No movies to speak of; TiVoed and watched the Will Smith I Am Legend, which is another red-hot brick Akiva Goldsman will be carrying in Hell. You will likely hear my anguished response to The Spirit once I see it in a week or so, although I can bet it will be a threnody on the theme: "Frank Miller has no sense of humor. Will Eisner's The Spirit is good-humored. Discuss." Hopefully, I will be able to ignore Will Eisner at least as much as Frank Miller looks to have done, which may make the movie enjoyable. Cross fingers.

I made French onion soup last night, along with roast potatoes (in olive oil, with kosher salt, pepper, and herbes de Provence) and Craig Claiborne's recommended mushroom accompaniment to venison steaks, which his_regard brought over, along with a bottle of very upscale Chianti. I swapped a glug of that for the dry white that Claiborne recommended, and on Claiborne's suggestion used beef gravy in a jar (!) instead of sauce espagnole, which I didn't make as I don't happen to have five pounds of veal bones lying around. The mushrooms came out better than fine, so there. I swapped about three recipes around for the French onion soup to approach a non-psychotic version, so if you care: ( The Final Version? )

Tonight, I may use up the rest of the baguette on ham-and-Brie sandwiches, or I may make chili, or I may make venison goulash with the leftover steak. More importantly, right about 11:30, Darlene Love sings "Christmas Baby Please Come Home" on Letterman, and it's officially Christmas. Have a merry one, everybody.

What I would have twittered today if I twittered: "Tom Yum Kai Soup Recipe, Ergo All Else, Lost."

I've had the Chest Cold From Hell (the one everyone has, apparently) all weekend as punishment for enjoying myself too thoroughly while apple picking on Saturday. So I determined to make my famous Tom Yum Kai soup and cure myself and mollpeartree through the magic of Warming Heat. But today I emptied out my little recipe box and hunted all over the kitchen to no avail: The card for my absolutely perfect Tom Yum Kai recipe had vanished, carried up to Olympus by the jealous gods, most likely.

So I was forced to re-create it in much the same way I created it: Hunting all across the Internet for tom yum kai recipes. I shan't keep you in suspense any longer: I found the Ur-Recipe from which I had derived the perfected dish here; it's by a chef in Bangalore, India, of all things, and it is truly wonderful.

The search was perhaps unnecessarily lengthened by his choice of transliteration: tom yam gai instead of tom yum kai. But while searching, I discovered all manner of other ways to make tom yum soup, and decided to run a change-up on my perfected dish and add more Stuff in the quest for Mega-Health. I think I succeeded, what say you all?

( Tom Yum Kai II: The Ong Is Bak In Town )

A Note on Ingredients: The garlic, shallots, and tomatoes are my additions for Mega-Health, over and above the already mighty health benefits of chicken, ginger, galangal, lime, and chile hotness. Finding tom yum paste probably means a trip to your nearest Thai or pan-Asian supermarket: I bought mine at Broadway Supermarket (4879 N. Broadway) and one tub has lasted me a good while. (I have a spare tub in the pantry.) It also provided massaman curry paste and other wonderful goodies. A return visit snagged me my galangal, which is like ginger and coriander having a party in your mouth. Broadway also has Gigandous Bags of dried shiitake mushrooms for like a nickel, and has thus comprehensively spoiled me for buying shiitakes anywhere else. Broadway has, however, consistently let me down in the matter of Kaffir lime leaves, which is just as well for my Calvinist soul, given the thin-ness of the boundary between this fallen world and the divine when it comes to this soup, and to shopping in Asian supermarkets.

I love eating Mexican food. Since I live in Chicago, but not in walking distance from Pilsen, that means I need to cook Mexican food. This is not a particularly onerous burden, except for the burden of finding the right peppers, which is harder than it should be considering that I have a produce store about 100 yards from my front door. But you didn't come here for my whining; you came here for the: ( Chicken Corn Tortilla Soup Recipe )

Because it's me, and because this is what I love to do, I built the recipe out of six other recipes, from Mark Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World all the way down to Rachael Ray. No stone unturned, I mean to say. Although everybody already no doubt knows Rick Bayless (I bought his Mexican Everyday, just to have a Bayless book -- and it's a pretty good one to have) and Diana Kennedy (whose The Art of Mexican Cooking I scored off Amazon Z-shops for THREE LOUSY BUCKS!), let me give a big shout-out to Jim Peyton's New Cooking from Old Mexico. This was a sheerly serendipitous find, used on the Cookbooks table at Brandeis-Booksale-That-Was a couple years back, and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of its magnificent potential. (Nor will I ever -- it has a day-and-a-half mole recipe adopted from the original convent in Puebla from whence mole sprang.) For example, I still owe kaynorr and gracefuleigh Peyton's Pork Loin Vampiro. Maybe closer to Halloween.

My much-loved friends snowy_owlet and iamnikchick both just blogged recipes, which reminds me that I had intended to blog Tuesday's dinner, because it worked out really, really well.

But first, a little backstory. Our neighborhood's terrible grocery store, the Hyde Park Co-Op, attempted a monopolistic expansion a few years back, and took over a smaller store, Mr. G's. Our house is about 200 yards from the Mr. G's-Co-Op location, which after a long decline, went out of business last summer. The vastly superior and much smaller Hyde Park Produce store, about a block east, bought the location, and after finding God knows what in the floorboards and paying off God knows how many city officials, finally opened in the old Mr. G's location last week, and used part of their new space to add a small fish section. Which means that this is the first time since I've moved to Chicago that I've had edible fish that I wanted to buy within walking distance.

So I wanted to buy some fish from them as a good positive-feedback "thank you," and I wanted to use my new cast-iron skillet (a Christmas present from gnosticpi), and it all came together as "Marco Polo Salmon" (so named by me because its mysterious flavor country lies halfway between Italy and China) on Tuesday night.

( How, specifically, it came together )

For whatever reason, the mix of flavors just plain works, and it's rich enough that you'll hum quietly to yourself in repletion for the rest of the night.

I built that recipe out of two recipes; the one in my first responder, Marc Bittman's redoubtable How To Cook Everything, for "Pan-Grilled Salmon Fillets With Sesame-Oil Drizzle" and the "Penne With Grilled Salmon, Asparagus, and Lemon Butter" from, believe it or not, 365 Ways to Cook Pasta by Marie Simmons. I find these "365 Ways To Cook X" books, for all that they look kind of low-rent, surprisingly full of good, even sophisticated ideas.

I've had good luck with 365 Ways to Cook Chicken (which I see by my cunning little Amazon widget thing is available from the Z-shops for the unbeatable price of ONE PENNY), and only my practice of not copying published recipes directly into my blog prevents me from crowing about the amazing "Dilled Artichoke Soup With Lemon" that I got out of Georgia Chan Downard and Jane Galton's 365 Great Soups and Stews and made on Epiphany. Downard and Galton, specifically, have never led me astray. The books are apparently staples of yard sales, library sales, and the like everywhere, so keep an eye out. (Or help me out, and hit one of these links and order them used along with a bunch of other stuff from Amazon so that I can buy more salmon with my Associates Rewards money. It's all good.)

As a last fling before mollpeartree came home, gnosticpi came over yesterday to play wargames (Twilight Struggle, at which he beat me like a rented mule, and History of the World, which is broken for two players), crank Graham Parker CDs on the stereo, and watch some Veronica Mars third season DVD goodness.

The highlight of all of that was dinner, which since it's none of it my recipe I ordinarily wouldn't post, but it turned out so well I can't in good conscience refuse to share. Being male, gnosticpi and I are both fans of Nigella Lawson, and I just followed her recipes donkey-fashion for Scallops With Chorizo and (translated to the American) Garbanzos With Cumin and Arugula. The first makes essentially the best Manhattan chowder variation you can imagine, being basically a pound and a quarter of protein (we doubled the recipe) swimming in bright vermilion chorizo-flavored scallop juice. The second is a real nice side dish -- as gnosticpi put it, "it's way too good to be a salad." The only changes I rang were in the side dish; since our main course was doubled in mass, I only used one can of garbanzos. I kept all the other amounts the same, so the flavors were more intense with half the beans. (Oh, I also used amontillado instead of cream sherry, to more than good enough effect.)

Possibly fifteen minutes total from firing up the first burner to hunting out the napkins, with time left over to make limoncello-and-champagnes. (Dump a couple shots of raspberry liqueur in there, and it's even better, albeit even girlier.) It's a real shame that mollpeartree isn't a fan of frozen scallops, because that meal is fast, tasty, and pretty much perfect.

Normally, I like to post only perfected dishes, as they say on Iron Chef, in these hallowed precincts, but I haven't posted in a while, and I'd kind of like some feedback on this one, as the soup is good, but can be (and has been) better.

So consider this the state-of-play report for the Massively Multi-Mushroom Soup, which I made yesterday to reward kaynorr and gnosticpi for their yeoman work at restringing all the cables and wires behind Omar for the New Bigger TV (a hand-me-down from kaynorr) and (eventually, once we get some speaker wire) the New Bosser Tuner and Speakers (a gift from luagha). We also grilled terrible steaks (marinated like billy-oh with half a large onion sliced up in soy, garlic, ginger pulp, and pepper) on the grill (in good weather, the single best thing about being a homeowner and an American) and mollpeartree made her patented awesome mashed potatoes. We drank bourbon punch, and dinner was good. Just not as good as it maybe could have been...

( Recipe, in its yet-imperfect state, behind the cut )

Variants I've done before include: bacon instead of butter for the initial fat, add some celery or half a leek along with the onion, different mixes of mushrooms depending on what was on sale or found at the Asian market, white wine instead of red, no sour cream.

Variant I'm thinking about: no cream of any kind, which seems to go against all that is good and holy.

Variants I've seen done, but remain dubious on: two bottles of good beer instead of the wine and half of the stock.

The flavors are very good, but the mushroomy awesomeness, which smells so great cooking, and which is the entire point of the soup, is a bit too muted on the palate when you get down to it. Last night, it couldn't stand up to the parsley. So, any feedback from the gourmanderie out there?

To postpone the inevitable confrontation, further on down the Tour, with "The Other Gods," let me seek the wisdom of the assembled multitude about rarebit.

On Friday, the plan was to grill some lamb shoulder blade chops, which I got for cheap, and which are perfectly nice if you marinate the hell out of them first. (In diced onion, olive oil, cumin, salt, pepper, and cilantro, in my case; grill two or three minutes a side, top with more cilantro and fresh lime juice.) Alongside, we were going to have baked or roast potatoes. But while paging through the Moosewood Cookbook for something interesting to do with potatoes (vegetarians can be counted on for some things, I find) I discovered a recipe for Welsh rarebit, which I had never eaten, much less made. That was so obviously the mote juste that it left me spent and gasping. Giddy with experimental vim, I adjusted the recipe as follows:( Recipe Follows )

I poured it over the baked potatoes to ringing acclaim. It was a huge hit not just with mollpeartree (who aside from her other charming eccentricities of judgement, is vastly biased in favor of food she didn't have to cook) but with kaynorr, who was over that night to lay hands on TiVo. Better yet, rarebit turns out to be huge fun to make, and is clearly a beautiful, sturdy template for male-cooking-syndrome-style experimentation.

So I open it up to you, my beloved LJ Friends: What's your rarebit secret? What beer and cheese combo do you swear by? What's the best beer to use with Gouda, or the best cheese with Hefeweissen? What don't I add that I ought? (Some recipes call for cayenne, which I didn't bother with, although I put Tabasco on the table. James Beard apparently adds an egg, which seems weird; Bittman claims you can make it with tomato juice instead of beer, which seems pointless.) Feel free to rarebit on in comments.

We interrupt this discussion of crawly things from the deeps in order to discuss how to cook and eat them.

As I may have mentioned in this space before, I realized that I had a cooking Thing going on when I decided to make gumbo from scratch in order to have something to eat with a brand of instant red beans and rice. This Saturday is the third or fourth time I've made it, and while I will likely continue to tinker around the edges of it, I think the recipe is ready to be shared with an aghast world.

I should state up front that my preference in soups, stews, and braises, either because it's more fun to cook, or because it's more fun to eat, is for complex flavors. Lots of stuff going on. This works for gumbo, but I'm the first to admit that you can put a lot less stuff in and still get perfectly tasty gumbo back out. But that said ... ( Recipe follows )

This is how everything about me works, so why shouldn't it apply to cooking? I read about feijoada somewhere and was instantly smitten by the description of Brazil's national dish, something about "a rich blend of layered flavors" or maybe "four or five kinds of meat." I Googled around and nothing looked terribly simple, and a lot of recipes called for pig ears or whole trotters or such, which would strain our mediocre area grocers to the limit even if I wanted to eat a pig ear, which I don't, much. So I forgot about it until Christmas, when I was looking to see what wine I should be serving with the roast lamb. (I went with a Beaune. Sue me.) And in one of my BookExpo finds, Perfect Pairings, right after it told me I should have found a robust California red Zinfandel instead, I found a recipe for feijoada made with Accessible Meat. And there was much rejoicing, and I swapped Gumbo Battle out on the calendar for Feijoada Battle, and did a little more Googling around, and swapped in some ideas from elsewhere, and made it last weekend.

( Recipe Follows... )

Modesty forbids me to go into rapturous detail, but it Worked. The most amazing thing about it was the way that the Polish sausage served as kind of a repository for all the flavors in the pot, almost like tofu except, you know, made of meat and grease. I'm tempted to try making a winter vegetable stew with Polish sausage to see if it does that all the time. But yes, long story short, wondrous good; the leftover goo makes the world's best rice and beans even without leftover meat. (But there is leftover meat.)

And I don't think the absence of pig ear hurt the final product one little bit.