Eat Your Books

Posted on November 11, 2011 by David

I recently received an invitation to attend a reception at the headquarters of America’s Test Kitchen to celebrate the launch of The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook. I don’t know how I came to their attention, but I never turn down an opportunity to mingle with other cooking geeks, so I spent a pleasant two hours at ATK world HQ, meeting the staff as well as every food blogger in Boston*.

Despite founder Christopher Kimball’s “ship of fools” dismissal of food blogging (and his follow-up), he has come to acknowledge to power of social media, going so far as to create a social media group in his own publishing empire. In addition to featuring the new book, they were introducing the ATK Feed (and their very entertaining Tumblr blog — don’t miss the Friday fail/win feature). This is me with senior books editor Lori Galvin in front of the “wall of awesome,” a collection of tweets, Instagrams, and posts about ATK projects.

The new cookbook collects almost every recipe from every issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine into a single 890-page tome, complete with index. This is a boon for cooks like me who have limited shelf space but still want to refer to any issue for a particular recipe — I can replace a few linear feet of magazines with one volume.

Of course, the modestly-sized Belm Utility Research Kitchen Reference Library is dwarfed by the ATK cookbook collection, a library so large that is has multiple shelves devoted to individual regional cuisines. As we inhaled miniature chocolate pots de crème, I mentioned that Cook’s had the only index to which I regularly referred, relying on my memory to find recipes in other cookbooks.

“How many cookbooks do you own?” someone asked.

“About 150.”

“Then you have a library of at least fifteen thousand recipes. There’s no way you can remember where they all are.”

The math checks out if you assume the average cookbook contains one hundred recipes. Truth be told, I only remember where my frequently-used recipes are located. The rest are… somewhere. And the person who brought this to my attention was Jane Kelly, the founder of Eat Your Books, a web site created to answer the question most cooks ask: “Where is that recipe?”

The site provides a search engine for your cookbooks. When you join, you populate your library by adding the titles of your cookbooks, many of which are already in the EYB database. Books will be categorized as indexed, “index soon,” and unindexed, with an option for you to request that  book be indexed. Indexed books can be searched by recipe title, ingredient, recipe type, and ethnicity, with search results showing what’s available in your library as well as the 90,000 books in the complete database. What is not found in Eat Your Books are the actual recipes or page numbering. There are copyright issues involved with publishing entire recipes online, and page numbering can change as books get revised or go into new editions.

When I discover sites that claim to be comprehensive, I do my best to find out how they break, looking for the odd case or the search term that blows up the database. I have not been able to do that with EYB, a testament to the thoroughness and precision of their indexing. (They just recently completed the indexing of Modernist Cuisine, and I can say without hesitation that the EYB index is easier to use then MC‘s own index.) What I have been able to do is customize my library by adding the location of each cookbook by specifying the room and shelf on which it can be found.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I could do on the site. There’s an active community that discusses everything from organizing cookbook collections to polling members about favorite books and recipes. (Number 1 cookbook found on most members’ shelves: The Silver Palate Cookbook. Number 2: Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 1, followed by The Joy of Cooking. But three Barefoot Contessa cookbooks in the top ten? I don’t get it.) You can also search food magazines and blogs, a recently added feature.

So how do I use Eat Your Books? When I begin planning a menu, I can search for a particular ingredient (“What do I do with 20 duck legs?”) or a recipe (“Which chicken soup looks interesting?”), all without having to drag out dozens of books. Once I’ve settled on the menu, I can compile a list of ingredients for a shopping list. If I’m away from home and am asked to cook a meal, I can look for recipes that can be found in the kitchen of the home in which I plan to cook – no more photocopying or emailing myself recipes. And I can do all of that for only $25/year, which isn’t much more that what I’ve paid for the Cook’s annual index.

If you’re the kind of person who obsesses about the proper tagging of every song in your music library, or how books and CDs are organized on your shelves, then Eat Your Books is just what your inner cookbook geek needs. Apart from more cookbooks, of course.

* Hello again to A Thought for Food, Beantown Baker, Boston Tweet, Cake, Batter, and Bowl, Cooking Whims, Delicious Dishings, The Food in My Beard, Free Food Boston, Pixelated Crumb,  La Tartine Gourmande, Travel, Wine, and Dine, Tri to Cook, We Are Not Martha, and anyone else I missed.

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Breakfast for Dessert

Posted on November 5, 2011 by David

As soon as The Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook arrived, I knew I would be revisiting one of my failures – the cereal milk panna cotta, certified by the authors of Momofuku as a non-working recipe. The first chapter is devoted to cereal milk and its variations, as if author Christina Tosi knew she had some ‘splainin’ to do. I gave the rest of the book a quick skim, but I was already thinking about my mise en place for dessert.

Rather than use corn flakes as a base, I switched to Cap’n Crunch – 100 grams worth.

I crushed the cereal in a plastic bag until it had the consistency of coarse sand, steeped it for twenty minutes in 825 grams of cold whole milk, then passed the milky sludge twice through a fine mesh strainer. I stirred in 20 grams of light brown sugar and a gram of kosher salt, then let the mixture rest in the fridge.

To make the panna cotta, I measured out 320 grams of the sweetened milk along with one and a half sheets of gelatin, a gram of kosher salt, and 30 more grams of light brown sugar.

I warmed up about a quarter of the milk over low heat and added the gelatin sheets to dissolve.

Off heat I added the salt, sugar, and the rest of the milk, stirring gently until the mix was well combined. I divided the milk into four small ramekins.

I let the milk sit covered in the fridge for an overnight chill while I considered the rest of the dessert. I figured some ice cream would go with the panna cotta, which is when I remembered the French toast ice cream – miraculously unconsumed – still in the freezer. I wanted a bit of color on the plate to offset the beige and brown main components, which made me think of raspberry jam.

I topped the panna cotta with some cornflake crunch I had left over from the first attempt, added a scoop of the ice cream topped with powdered French toast crumbs, smeared some jam on the plate, and topped it with a few fresh raspberries. Served with a shot of Berkshire Brewing Coffeehouse Porter , the dish became a complete breakfast: cereal, milk, French toast, jam, and coffee.

The panna cotta was noticeably firmer than my previous attempt. When I compared the ratios of  gelatin (sheets) to milk (cups) from both recipes, I saw that the previous version had a 1:1 ratio while the new version altered the ratio to 1.25:1. That extra 25% change made all the difference, but still produced a smooth, silky gel.

Now that I know this recipe works, I’ll be moving on to some of the more ambitions projects. There’s something called “crack pie” that looks irresistible.

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The Power of Pancakes

Posted on November 2, 2011 by David

Yet another of my friends has managed to make a blog into a book. Michael Goudeau, author of The Pancake Project, has finally turned what started as a way to make entertaining breakfasts for his kids into a how-to book, Extreme Pancakes. Now you can learn how to make the creations he documented by following the simple step-by-step methods outlined in the recipes. In addition to the book you get a “battery delivery system” (plastic squeeze bottle) and a reference card with a backwards letter template, the master batter recipe, and a temperature & color chart.

Michael starts you off easy with pancakes based on simple circles before moving on to shaded creations based on incremental cooking times. Master that technique, and this edible Munch can hit your plate every morning:

If you’re a sophisticated cook you probably have a large collection of squeeze bottles. Fill up each one with a different colored batter and whip up this “taco platter.”

The recipes and techniques may require a bit more work than busting out a Batter Blaster, but isn’t all great art worth the extra effort?

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Rabbit Wrapped in Fennel and Bacon

Posted on October 28, 2011 by David

When I saw the rabbit in my local market’s freezer, I knew it was time to take the plunge and cook a bunny for dinner. I wanted a simple recipe that would highlight the flavor of  the meat without obscuring it with a highly seasoned sauce, so I chose this preparation from Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast.

I needed dried fennel, which Henderson assured me could “be obtained from good food shops,” but I had no luck finding any. I made my own by buying a few bulbs of exceptionally frond-y fennel and drying the stalks in my dehydrator.

While the fennel dried, I thawed out Mr. Bunny, a large-ish five pound specimen.

I rubbed the rabbit inside and out with olive oil, seasoned with salt an pepper, and filled the cavity with some of the dried fennel. The rest of the stalks were supposed to be wrapped “from end to end and tummy to back (so it starts to look like a scene from The Wicker Man).” I laid out enough overlapping strips of bacon to span the length of the rabbit, then laid half of the remaining fennel across the lower half.

With the strains of “Sumer Is Icumen In” rolling around in my head, I laid the rabbit across the fennel, placed the rest on top of the rabbit, and then folded the bacon over the top. I placed the bunny bundle in a roasting pan, added two quarts of chicken stock, a cup of white wine, and four whole heads of garlic.

I set the pan in a 375 °F oven for an hour and a half. After a while, the entire house began to smell of bacon and fennel. He Who Will Not Be Ignored asked why I was singing “we’re gonna have roast rabbit!” – I obviously need to expand the boy’s cultural horizons. The rabbit was ready when the bacon had gone all crispy and the thighs were tender when tested with a knife.

While the rabbit rested, I made a sauce from some of the cooking liquid and the roasted garlic (squeezed out of the heads and passed through a strainer to make a paste). I peeled back the bacon layer, removed the now inedible fennel, and separated the rabbit into front and back legs and three saddle sections.

I plated rabbit sections on top of the crispy bacon, added a splash of the sauce, and served with sautéed hen of the woods mushrooms and braised carrots and fennel, as seen at the top of the post.

The meat was perfectly cooked, moist from the braising liquid and the  protective coating of bacon. It had a subtle gamy flavor along with a hint of anise perfume from the fennel. My section of saddle still had the kidneys attached, an extra bonus I shared with She Who Must Be Obeyed. This was my favorite kind of dinner: a lot of flavor for very little work. And now that both He and She Who have given their approval, rabbit may show up more often on the Chez Belm menu.

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Packin’ Heat

Posted on October 21, 2011 by David

My success with growing jalapeños led me to try a crop of mixed pepper varietals. I set up my AeroGarden to grow two each of three varieties: more jalapeños, purple super hots and red fires. Unfortunately, during the week I was away in Chicago, one of the red fire plants took over and wiped out the competition in a bloodless coup that left me with one huge plant and a five withered stalks. Fortunately, that plant has been very prolific, which allowed me to harvest three dozen peppers.

I considered freezing them, but instead I opted to dry them out. Rather than put them in my newly-acquired dehydrator, I decided to go low-tech and use a method I had seen in my grandmother’s kitchen: I strung them together so they can air dry.

I have the string tacked to the side of a kitchen cabinet where I’ll see them when I cook. I’ll be much more likely to remember to use them than if they were buried in the Deep Storage Facility. Another batch of two dozen will be ripe in about two weeks, so I’ll add another string.

I did use the dehydrator for another batch of peppers, some purple poblanos I found at the farmer’s market.

I cut long slits on either side of each pepper, then gave them a four-hour dose of cold smoke.

After three days in the dehydrator at 125 °F, I wound up with a batch of ancho chiles.

Now that I know the technique works, I plan on making a much larger batch and turning some of it into chile powder, a custom blend that includes some of the dried red fires. Why settle for the pre-made stuff when you can fine-tune your own?

Packin' Heat on Punk Domestics
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Hunt, Gather, Cook

Posted on October 19, 2011 by David

During my Boy Scouting career (before it became just “Scouting”), I spent quite a bit of time in the woods learning how to fell a tree, catch a fish, pitch a tent, tie knots, and navigate by the sun and stars. I was convinced that particular set of skills would serve me in good stead for the rest of my life, and I have called upon those distant memories more than once in recent years.

Hoever, some of the more ambitious scouts in my troop believed those skills were insufficient. It wasn’t enough to know how to live outdoors; we had to know how to survive. While the rest of us made jokes about Euell Gibbons‘ Grape Nut ads (“Did you ever eat a pine tree?”), the hardcores were reading Stalking the Wild Asparagus and supplementing it with intensive study of the Air Force Survival Manual (AF Regulation 64-4). They convinced the troop leaders that we should spend a weekend in the woods with no food, insisting that we’d be able to forage for everything we needed.

They were wrong. We spent two days outdoors looking for the edible plants whose appearances we had dutifully memorized, only to realize that they were all out of season. I subsisted on a few handfuls of dandelion greens and a couple of frogs I managed to catch, all washed down with iodine-disinfected stream water. I ate the best peanut butter sandwich of my life on the car ride home, and resolved never to repeat that experience again.

Little did I know that my  rudimentary foraging skills would have made me a pro at sourcing ingredients for locavore “farm to table” restaurants. Every restaurant seems to have a personal mushroom wrangler, pig farmer, fisherman, and hunter at its service, but there are a few people who can do it all. One of them is Hank Shaw, who has been documenting his quest for “honest food” in his award-winning blog Hunter, Angler, Gardner, Cook, now condensed into his book Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast.

The book is divided into three parts – foraging, fishing, and hunting – with each chapter full of stories, identification tips, cooking techniques, and recipes. Hank’s conversational tone invites readers to go out and find wild eats on their own, which is something I’d love to do if I didn’t live in the most densely populated city in New England. I can obtain a lot of what he eats, but at one remove, which isn’t the same thing.

When I saw that Hank was embarking on a book tour (driving his truck to each location) in conjunction with local restaurants, I made sure to reserve a table at Craigie on Main for myslef and She Who Must Be Obeyed. We were both eager to see how chef Tony Maws, who designs each day’s menu on the morning’s market purchases, incorporated Hank’s philosophy. Much to our surprise, the menu wasn’t all that different than what we usually eat at Craigie, due in large part to the large overlap in the ingredients the two chefs commonly utilize.

Hank and I have corresponded online, and I’ve made lardo using his recipe, so I was excited to meet him in person. We talked about his book, and I bemoaned the lack of foraging opportunities in my neighborhood. He suggested that I was probably overlooking a lot of edible plants that I thought were common weeds, recommending that I take a closer look at my own yard.

A few days later I noticed this weed growing underneath my vinca:

It looked like one of the garnishes I had eaten at Hank’s dinner, so I emailed him the photo, asking “Is this purslane?” Yes, it was, and I had an entire yard full of it. I resolved to use it as soon as I could figure out a meal in which to incorporate it.

That meal turned out to be the roasted duck roulade. While it rested and my sauce reduced, I stepped outside, yanked up a hunk of purslane by the roots, and gave it a thorough wash and rinse.

When it came time to plate, I added a few sprigs as a final garnish.

Although the leaves were small, they had the same bitter finish as arugula or dandelion, which provided a contrast to the richness of the duck and the sweet sauce.

So, I made one small step toward becoming an urban forager. I hear the mushroom hunting is good around here, I think I’l try that next.

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On a Roll (Charcutepalooza Challenge 10)

Posted on October 15, 2011 by David

These Charcutepalooza challenges can be frustrating at times, mostly because of their timing. More often than not, I have already made something using the technique of the month, just not within the month required by the challenge. In the case of the October challenge Рstretching РI had already made confit, rillettes, and even a roulade, which left making a galantine as the one technique I had not yet tried. So, chicken galantine Рchicken p̢t̩ rolled in chicken skin, poached, and served cold Рwould be my challenge.

To begin, I had to turn this:

… into this:

It took me about 45 minutes to disassemble the chicken. The bones went into the stock pot, the skin into the freezer, and the rest of the meat into the fridge while I assembled the fillings and seasonings. I chose chopped pistachios and shaved black truffles for a garnish.

I trimmed and sautéed the breasts and let them cool.

I used the same pan to make a reduction of Madeira, shallots, and garlic.

I ran the dark meat, breast trimmings, reserved liver, and some additional pork fat (which improves anything to which it is added) through the grinder.

I puréed the ground meat and seasonings (including the shallot reduction) in a food processor, then folded in three quarters of a cup of heavy cream. The resulting forcemeat reminded me of the emulsion I made to fill my homemade hot dogs.

I removed the chicken skin from the freezer, scraped off bits of excess fat, then spread half of the chilled forcemeat into a rectangle in the center.  I spread a layer of half of the pistachios followed by half of the truffle slices on top.

I set the two breast halves on top, followed by a layer of truffles, then pistachios, before covering with the remaining forcemeat.

As you can probably tell from the photo, I had too much filling, so I shaved off about a cup with a spatula and reshaped the rest into a smaller cylinder. After struggling a bit with the asymmetrical skin, I managed to cover almost all of the filling (the small gap would become the bottom).

I rolled the package into a tight cheesecloth-covered log, tying the ends with string and cinching some cheesecloth strips along the length of the roll for support.

I set the roll into a hotel pan, filled it with hot chicken stock, and poached it at 170 °F for 45 minutes. The middle long burner on my stove was ideally suited for the job.

I let the pan cool, then put it in the fridge for an overnight chill, which also re-set the stock into a think gelatinous mass. The next day, I extracted the cheesecloth bundle from the gelatin, and unwrapped it to reveal the finished galantine. (You’d never know there was a hole in the bottom.)

I sliced it through the middle of one of the breast pieces, revealing a well-centered inset surrounded by a layer of truffles and pistachios.

To serve, I plated a slice with a spoonful each of my homemade cranberry/orange/ginger compote and blueberry/onion jam.

The pâté was smooth and well-spiced, the breast meat cooked but still moist, and the pistachios added needed crunch. One slice of this rich, fatty galantine is enough; the sauces provided needed citrus notes and acidity. I’ll make this again, knowing that I can spread the work out over a few days instead of the twelve our mad rush I endured.

Duck Variations: Roasted Duck Roulade

As I prepared the galantine, I kept thinking about the duck roulade I had cooked previously. With the techniques fresh in my mind, I applied my newly-acquired skills to making  duck roulade filled with duck forcemeat and wrapped in duck skin. The steps were similar up to the trussing of the roulade, as you can see:

Similar, with one notable difference: removing the skin from a duck in one piece is considerably more difficult that skinning a chicken. And there is a lot of fat that has to be scraped off from the chilled skin before it can be rolled. Fellow blogger Peter came up with a much better solution, which is to debone the duck and leave the meat attached to the skin. D’oh!

Instead of wrapping the roulade in cheesecloth, I tied off the ends and trussed the rest as I would with a roast. (Yes, that’s another hole in the skin. Did I mention that skinning a duck is difficult?)

To provide better temperature control and avoid drying out the interior, I sealed the roulade in a sous vide bag with the sautéed vegetables (frozen to solidify the cooking juices, which would have been sucked out during the vacuum sealing).

After the roulade cooked in a 60 °C water bath for about two hours, I crisped the skin over high heat, which also rendered more of the subcutaneous fat.

After a fifteen minute rest, it was time to slice open the bundle of ducky goodness.

I served slices of the roulade over puy lentils, with haricots verts, chanterelles, a sauce made from roasted duck stock and sherry, and a purslane garnish.

This is some of the best duck I’ve ever eaten, more refined that the confit-based dishes I like to throw together. The moist filling was a contrast of smooth and chunky textures (although I’ll use a smaller sized dice of the breast meat next time) surrounded by crispy skin. Earthy lentils, meaty mushrooms, rich sauce – this was definitely a fall meal.

The advance-prep aspects of this dish haven’t escaped my notice. I can build a few roulades, sous vide them, store them in the fridge for a few days, and have a large-scale dinner ready to go after a quick reheating and crisping. But now I have to buy another batch of duck legs; I have a hankering for confit.

On a Roll on Punk Domestics
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Thinking Differently

Posted on October 6, 2011 by David

Steve Jobs changed my life. It was a gradual process that began in the fall of 1984, when I first interacted with a Macintosh.

I had moved into Castle Moose, a house full of game-playing Harvard graduates and later the location of some of my culinary milestones, including the legendary pumpkin pie story. In addition to my three housemates, another friend, Andy Greenberg, was couch surfing while he worked on various computer game projects. Andy was one of the authors of the Wizardry series of role-playing games, and had been asked by Steve Jobs to port the game from the Apple II to the new Macintosh. Having games available for the new machine was a key selling point, so Jobs sent Andy one of the first Macs to come off the production line. It sat on a table in our gaming room, where Andy worked away at it at all hours.

Soon after I moved in, I found myself alone in the house for a day, which gave me an opportunity to check out the new machine. I powered it up and stared at the screen, which was displaying a blinking floppy disk icon. The disk labeled “System,” sitting in a box next to the Mac, seemed to be the most likely candidate, and a minute or two later I was mousing and clicking around on the desktop. I discovered the MacPaint and MacDraw program disks, and by the end of the day I was hooked.

I was no stranger to computers. I was from an IBM family: my father programmed System 360 and 370 mainframes (in assembly language) and my mother worked at corporate headquarters in Armonk, NY. She had used her employee discount to buy me the PCjr that sat in my bedroom, but those first few hours with the Mac revealed the IBM box to be a ugly, clunky, underpowered, inflexible hunk of plastic and metal. Almost every lab I worked in had at least one Apple II for data collection and analysis (usually running Visicalc), but they had green-on-black low-resolution displays – the Mac had fonts. My interest in design and typography began with the Mac.

I worked in biotech, but I knew I would only advance so far before hitting the PhD glass ceiling. I soon became “the computer guy,” which is when I learned that I was ideally unsuited for tech support positions – I couldn’t comprehend how anyone could have a problem with the Mac’s interface and ease of use. Between tech jobs one summer, I attended a Macworld Expo and convinced the booth monkey at MacTemps that I had page layout and illustration skills. I bought software how-to books and was able to bluff my way though the first few jobs, teaching myself Pagemaker and Freehand in the process. A job editing chemistry illustrations turned into a full-time position at McGraw-Hill, which led to my working for a multimedia developer.

Although I worked with Macs every day, I wasn’t able to afford one of my own. I had a hand-me-down IIci that She Who Must Be Obeyed had rescued from Polaroid, but we finally saved up enough to buy a 7100, a machine that I still use to recover files from friends’ antiquated storage media (floppies, SyQuest cartridges, Zip disks). Our next Mac, an original turquoise clamshell iBook, arrived shortly after He Who Will Not Be Ignored. He Who has no concept of a life without computers.

And then there are the gadgets, the non-tradtitional computing devices that I can’t imagine living without.

That’s a limited edition Newton, which She Who used for two years until she replaced it with a Palm Pilot. I paid $500 for the 10 GB first-generation iPod and recently spent half that amount for a smaller, faster version that holds 160 GB of music. I remember a conversation in which I pulled a cell phone, an iPod, and a Palm Pilot out of my pockets and lined them up on a table. “The day that someone comes up with a single device that combines the capabilities and ease of use of all three of these devices is the day you will find me standing in line to buy one” I declared. That would be the iPhone, a slab of black glass that has more computing power than the entire operations center Dad worked at three decades earlier.

I have a closet full of Macs that I can’t bear to get rid of: my trusty old Iici, the 7100, the blue iBook – and they all still work. My web design work requires me to have a PC for browser testing, and I’ve lost count of how many I’ve had to throw away due to fundamental failures of circuit boards or connectors. You may pay a premium for a Mac, but it is guaranteed to outlive any PC by a wide margin. There are active web servers out there running on 128K Macs. I have been a member for 25 years of an email list server that is still running on an first-generation iMac equipped with Claris Emailer and Hypercard.

Even the dead Macs have found new lives. I converted a Mac Plus shell into an aquarium, home of He Who’s beloved pet betta, Spatula. (He never noticed that Spatula frequently changed size and color.)

Next to the machine on which I’m writing this is a terrarium retrofitted into an iMac shell.

I owe my second career, the one I’m happy with, to Steve jobs. Years of working with machines that got out of the way of creativity opened my eyes to clean design, usability, and elegance – factors I strive to incorporate into my own work. I never knew the man, but I’ll mis him just the same.

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Fried Chicken, Again

Posted on September 30, 2011 by David

Once again, He Who Will Not Be Ignored demanded fried chicken for dinner, and did so with less than twenty-four hours notice. I was inclined to indulge his whim, but didn’t have the time to make something as time-consuming as the Ad Hoc recipe. The fried chicken recipe in Momofuku promised crispy chicken in less than a day – problem solved.

I knew I’d need to get an early start to have any chance of serving dinner at our usual hour, so at 9 AM I cut a whole chicken into quarters and soaked it in a brine made from a quart of water and a half cup each of sugar and kosher salt.

After four hours in the brine, I cooked the chicken for 40 minutes in a bamboo steamer over medium heat, with the legs in the lower basket.

I transferred the chicken to a cooling rack and let it air dry in the fridge for two hours. While it cooled, I assembled the ingredients for “Octo Vinaigrette”: a quarter cup each of rice vinegar and soy, two tablespoons of vegetable oil, two tablespoons each of finely minced garlic and ginger, one and a half tablespoons of sugar, a quarter teaspoon of pickled chiles, a quarter teaspoon of sesame oil (not shown), and a few grinds of black pepper.

Combining the ingredients was as simple as tossing them all into container shaking them.

I removed the chicken from the fridge and gave it an hour to come up to room temperature. After half an hour I heated a quart of canola oil in a deep skillet until it reached 375°F. I fried the legs and breasts separately for about eight minutes each, turning halfway through.

I let the pieces drain foe a minute before cutting the legs in half, removing the wings, and cutting the breasts in half. I tossed all of the pieces in a bowl with about half of the vinaigrette.

I served the chicken over steamed rice that had been liberally soaked with the rest of the vinaigrette (top). This recipe is all about the chicken taste, with the crunch of the skin being a secondary consideration. The steaming step takes care of most of the cooking, the drying step ensures crisp skin, and the sugar in the brine provides the deep brown color. The revelation was how well the sauce worked with he chicken, adding acidity, heat, and a strong garlic/ginger bite – that sauce would taste good on almost anything.

So now I have a last-minute fried chicken recipe that I can rely on to satisfy He Who’s whims. It certainly beats this stuff:

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A Brief Career in Science Journalism

Posted on September 27, 2011 by David

Like Howl’s moving castle, Chez Belm houses a collection of autonomous processes over which I have little control. In the (almost) sixteen years that I’ve lived in the house, I have noticed that books and other printed matter eventually collect on the third floor in the room behind my office. In order to create a closed-loop cycle and accommodate the never-ending influx of new books, I have to clean out the back room shelves, toss old magazines, box up books, and carry them to the Archives section of the Deep Storage Facility.

I was halfway through one of those cycles when I unearthed a stack of Chem Matters, a magazine published by the Education Division of the American Chemical Society for high school chemistry students. Its purpose, as seen on front cover, is “demystifying everyday chemistry.” For two issues I participated in that effort, the result of a roundabout sequence of events that almost got me fired from my job.

Friends of mine were founding members of the National Capitol Area Skeptics (NCAS), an organization devoted to the promotion of critical thinking and scientific understanding. They publish a newsletter – Skeptical Eye – for which my friend was the editor. He suggested that I write a regular column, “Don’t Try This at Home,” in which I tested kitchen gadgets advertised on television to see if their claims were scientifically justified. I wrote about two products, which I tested in our condo’s tiny kitchen (prior to the establishment of the Belm Utility Research Kitchen), then got too busy to continue with the column.

A year later, I was contacted by the editor of Chem Matters, who was also a member of NCAS. She had read my two columns and wanted my permission to reprint them in the magazine. She had already obtained permission from the editor of Skeptical Eye, so my OK was all that was needed. I was happy to help out, and so in December of 1996 and then October of 1977 my examinations of the Silver Lightning silver cleaning product and the Miracle Thaw food defroster appeared. I even received a $150 honorarium, the first time – and last, to date – that I had been paid for something I had written.

Shortly after the publication of the second article, I received a phone call from my boss, who was a publisher in the college textbook division of McGraw-Hill, where I worked as a multimedia producer:

“The strangest thing happened yesterday. My son came home from school with a chemistry magazine with an article by someone named ‘David Shaw’. He asked me if it was the same ‘David Shaw’ that worked for me. I was ready to dismiss it as a coincidence until I saw the little bio that identified the author as ‘a multimedia producer for McGraw-Hill.’ Do yo know of any other ‘David Shaw’s that fit that description?”

“Nope, it’s me.”

“I’d hate to think you were unhappy with your current job, or that you thought you were underpaid and in need of a second freelance position. You’re not unhappy, are you?”

I didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken. “I’m not unhappy.” Rather than explain the chain of events that resulted I’m my being published, I waited to hear what Boss Man was going to say next.

“Good. Would a raise make you happier?”

“How could it not?”

“I’m glad we both agree. But it would be difficult to explain any further appearances of your articles in a science magazine not owned by McGraw-Hill, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, I’d have to agree.”

“Good. Then we’ll consider the mater settled.”

I wasn’t sure what “settled” meant in that context, but a few months later I was promoted to a position with a higher salary. Boss Man had made good on his threat/promise. Little did he know that set in motion a chain of events that resulted in my deciding that working for a huge corporation was a sucker’s game, one that I no longer wanted to play. And it had all begun with a magazine article.

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