gloating

It's been a while since I gloated about my cooking and home-brewing exploits in this space. Sunday night I made mahi-mahi for dinner, steamed in foil in the oven, with garlic, sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger, coriander, white pepper, and hot chili. As sides, I made jasmine rice cooked with coriander (to marry flavors, you see - and incidentally, if anyone ever asks you if it's a good idea to cook jasmine rice with a handful of whole coriander in the water, you say "yes"), and stir-fried green beans, julienned carrots, and mushrooms, with spicy black bean sauce.

As I was finishing cooking I realized this meal deserved a classy presentation, and the square black plates I found to be part of the celebration of my loveliest's birthday in September came to mind. Beautiful, no?

After dinner we bottled the new porter, brewed with molasses (which is a key element of the appropriately-named English beer, Old Peculier [sic]). It''ll take 4-5 weeks to develop its finish, but already it was smooth. Should be a damned good 'un.



Here are the bottles waiting to be filled. Sigfried and Roy (the Bettas) look on in rapt anticipation.

and then, there were things

In fact, there were

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

68. Portabella mushrooms. I just love 'em. For the totally uninitiated, portabellas are the honking big mushrooms with the flat to slightly concave caps. I don't actually remember what made me decide to start eating them (I've never been mushroom-averse, so it wasn't a leap of some kind, unlike a few friends), but hot damn, do I love these suckers.

I tend to prefer them stuffed, with their stems, chopped and sautéed, with various herbs and spices, some grated parmigiano reggiano, bread crumbs, and so forth, and then roasted in this state. Holy jumpin'! But then again, they are tremendous marinated and grilled or broiled, and here my tendency is to soak them down in some kinda booze, garlic, pepper, herbs-a-go-go, and olive oil, and let nature take its inevitable course toward pleasing my palate. (A little-known and still-less-appreciated fact is that nature exists primarily and for the most part to please my palate. Basically, the universe is here so I can eat. It.)

I'd offer a recipe at this point, but I don't really have one. Almost anything a practiced cook would marinate meat in will do wonderful things for portabellas. Stuffing I regard as more complex, but on the whole, not at all unlike stuffing meat fillets.

... Which raises the question: Why not just do the same thing with a steak? For one thing, some of us don't want to eat animal flesh every day. For another, although portabellas are sold as steak substitutes (because, for the life of me, they are awfully steaky in this context), sometimes nonmeat entrées are preferable. So there.

Portabellas cooked this way are the way to convert non-mushroom-eaters. There is nothing quite like a well-cooked shroom, and enough people haven't had this experience that just one is all it takes.

67. Home-brewed beers. I just love 'em. I am at this moment fomenting (not to say fermenting) a home-brewed porter. Porter is a dark, usually somewhat sweet, medium-to-heavy-bodied beer, with sweet accents despite a good bitterness. The beer I'm making should be interesting, because I've added molasses to the brew, and tried to reach my usual porter balance of body, sweetness, bitterness, and color. We'll see, in about 8 weeks.

One may notice a distinct culinary bent in this list of top 100 things. This is certainly not an accident, but some may wonder whether the list is particularly targeted towards the pleasures of the maw. This is not my intent. I suggest that the aesthetic sensibility represented by the numbers of entries related to food correctly represent the importance of taste in my daily life. It figures. I am the philosopher-chef, after all, and I am saucier than thou.

life, liberty, and the pursuit of hoppyness

Lauren and I bottled the new stout yesterday. This is the beer that boiled over on the stove, twice. This is the beer that scalded Lauren when we poured the hot wort (unfermented beer) into the glass carboy through a funnel. We had three or four false starts siphoning the stout into a plastic fermenter we use for bottling.

It's also a dark, smoky tasting stout, at least at this point in its still raw state. Time will tell ultimately, but for now, this may either be called *^@#in' Stout or the Stout of the Apocalypse.

This weekend was also the date of a kitchen mishap involving a food as innocent as a portabella mushroom. As I was removing the mushrooms from the oven, I somehow burned my thumb on the baking sheet, through a pot-holder. It gave me a 1/2 inch square blister on right next to the little bulby pad part of my thumb. It's not very painful, but it's disconcerting to hold a guitar pick with it or shuffle cards (two things I do oftener than most people). I'm about to see how it might affect my teaching.

Later: Why Forest Whittaker is not allowed in the house, along with a brief current list of others who are either banished or who are permitted entry only under specified conditions.