The time passes. In the sky … in the trees. Around our tables. And soon, it will be labor day — a reminder of what labor, what work, can do. A pause before returning to efforts and turning to fall.

Summer will be over. As Buffalo Tom said, “you’ve wasted every day.”

But you squander entire summers to have one afternoon of food with friends, in the best way. A dear friend asked me a few weeks ago about trying to win his family BBQ competition — or rock some bbq for his family, I can’t recall, because I am a bad friend — and wrote me. And George, I let you down. But there’s one more weekend before fall, George — one last chance to see friends and family. One last chance to drink a cold drink in the warm light of a lowering sun. And one last chance to enjoy the night and fire by the grill.

I would have told George this, and I still can: While I know very little, what I know I share. I would have told him that nothing you put on a chicken or piece of pork before cooking or on during the cooking will matter one tenth as much as what you put that chicken or pork in before cooking and on after the cooking is done. Brining, George. Sugar, salt and water. Some other aromatics. We’ll talk. You get jucier meat that cooks more thoroughly and more swiftly while still maintaining a rich, true flavor that’s best for indirect grilling. Something to do with ions. I don’t pretend to understand it. I just eat it. Here’s three examples.

1) Anise-Cinnamon Pork Chops (Simple)

Salt. Sugar. Water. Star Anise. Cinnamon Sticks. Two Evenly-Cut Pork Chops — same size, shape and weight.

Indirect-grilling Charcoal Grill.

In large measuring cup, mix water, sugar, salt. If it’s not part of the solution, it’s part of the precipitate. Don’t overdo it, but, at the same time, you almost can’t. Maybe, the first time, back it off a little. (A pro — in re: #3 — told me it should never be more than 5% of the water, each; see more later.) Add cinnamon sticks and star anise pods and put in Ziploc bag with scored porkchops. Refridgerate in bowl for up to 24 hours. Remove.

Discard cold brine safely in sink, discarding solids. Rinse pork chops; pat dry.

Grill less than one minute on direct-coal side of grill, cook on indirect side until good sense tells you, return opposite side to sear alternate side for one min; move to indirect side. You will taste a difference. You will feel it. Serve with sides — crisp and grilled vegetables.

2) Cherry-Ginger-Jalapeno Chicken (Spatchcocked and Breasts) (Moderate)

A friend brings you —

A Pound of Cherries. Inspired, you rinse, pit and divide them.  You chop Two Jalapenos. Rings. Thin. Divided. As much Ginger as you think you might like. Divided.

Brine Chicken in Salt/Sugar, 1/2 Pound cherries, One Jalapeno, One part Ginger, Cold Water. (I cooked 1 whole chicken and … 4 breasts with this amount of brine, safely, in two large Ziploc bags. )

Refrigerate for 24 Hours. (Long-term planners can hypothetically leave the whole bird in fridge for 24 hours to dry skin, but, nonsense. You’re saucing this. It’s not a turkey.)

Grill spatchcocked chicken (keel bone removed, rendered flat) and breasts on indirect and direct heat, minimizing motion, with, often, lid closed.

Cook until done. Clear juices, firm white flesh to the bone … but it also won’t look desiccated or coarse. (I always say to guests that if they are, for one moment, dissatisfied with he doneness of their chicken, they should let me know so I can finish it with the residual grill heat.)

During above (perhaps while your charcoal chimney is starting), boil water, cherries, jalapenos, ginger on low heat, stirring often, until soft but still vital. Did I add sugar? I hope not. Run through a food mill — or food process very fine — and baste cooked pieces in warm sauce, replacing on grill briefly for final glaze. Section Spatchcocked chicken, serve alongside breasts. Side dishes are great.

3) The Chuleta Pork Tacos (from the tacqueria I would tell you about, Dr. Jones, if only you spoke Hovito …) (Hypothetical)

The cook told me — but would not tell me the quantities — of the brine are salt/sugar (No more than 5% of the weight or volume or, uh, as Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush said, “I was told there would be no math involved.”) plus cinnamon, star anise, cloves, ginger … and Orange, Lime and Lemon Zest.

That brine is then boiled, strained to discard the aromatics, cooled definitively below 40 degrees F … and then used to brine cuts of pork for 24 hours before grilling. Chops? Shoulder chops? I don’t know. I need to try a few things.

Grill Pork. Cool to warm. With large, deft, careful blade, chop pork fine.

Serve with Avocado Slice and Sea Salt on warm (but not in the dammed microwave) Corn Tortillas.

George, you wanna come over and try that in October?

Summer isn’t over, some lucky years, until we say it is.

James.

Because Cookies are freaking awesome. 

I don’t know about you, but, wow, it’s been one hell of a summer. And one of the highlights was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which contains a scene set in a primate jailhouse in a third-world hellhole (aka San Bruno) where a simian demonstrates the classic meaning of fascism with a bundle of sticks, inspired by the tactically and psychologically relevant question “Why Cookie Rocket?” 

I also, during the recent lacuna here at Cooking With Rocchi, got sent a picture of my most recent niece standing like a colossus over a bowl of cookie batter. My brother noted that “She doesn’t get all that science bullshit you keep going on about, but she sure likes eating the batter.” And why shouldn’t she? Batter is delicious, a civilized luxury, and packed with flavor, plus evoking a thousand memories of a thousand childhood batches where you’d steal just a primal taste of the cool, sweet-fat batter, a gritty graininess that was only improved upon by reversal, where the oven’s heat melts and smooths and flows and browns everything together. (If I can be really pretentious here, might I suggest that if Proust knew how to bake, or had baked. his trip back into the past would have been with the madeline’s batter, long before the baked finished product came from the oven. Also, really? Worrying about being pretentious on your baking blog is like worrying about being wet in the ocean.) 

With that said — and within the original guidelines of this, where I wanted to write every day, i wanted to write for under a half-hour, etc, which have to come back at some point — here are some cookie variations. They’re both built upon Cook’s Illustrated’s browned-butter Chocolate-Chip Cookie Recipe, which is worth having in it’s own right. When I see my niece in a few weeks, I really hope I get to make cookies with her and her dad, my big brother — who hand-skins his hazelnuts for his biscotti, knows why the cork is on the fork, and also knows what the chocolate-chip cookie recipe at 2171 Trinity Church Road tastes like. 

COOK’S ILLUSTRATED BROWNED BUTTER CHOCOLATE CHIP-COOKIE RECIPE

1 3/4 C Unbbleached All-Purpose Flour

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

14 Tablespoons Unsalted Butter

1/2 C Granulated Sugar

3/4 C Packed Dark Brown Sugar

1 Tsp Salt

2 Tsp Vanilla

1 Lg. Egg

1 Lg. Egg Yolk

1 1/4 c Chocolate chips or chunks

3/4 C Chopped Pecans or Walnuts, Toasted

1. Adjust Oven Rack to middle position; heat oven to 375 degrees. Line baking sheets with parchment. Mix flour and baking soda, set aside. 

2. Heat 10 Tbsp Butter in saucepan with gentle heat and attention until melted, cooking until butter is dark, rich golden brown and yet not burned. (I know this seems like a pain in the ass, but, seriously trust me: a) it is, and b) It’s is also the key to an end result that the quality of the final cookie will ably compensate foe that 10 minutes you couldn’t check Twitter while watching a pan.) Using rubber spatula, transfer butter to large heatproof bowl. Stir remaining 4 Tbsp butter in until melted. 

3) Add sugars, salt and vanilla to bowl. Whisk. add egg and yolk and whisk until smooth, Let stand 3 minutes. Whisk again. Let stand three minutes; whisk again. (Again this sounds like a huge pain in the ass, but a) maybe it’s the closest you’ll ever get to a state of Zen satori, huh, did you think of that? and b) you’re going to like how these cookies wind up.) Mix in Flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips and optional nuts, making sure no pockets of flour remain. 

4) Divide dough into portions — 2-ish tablespoons each should make 2 dozen —arrange on parchment-lined cooking sheet. (Right now is an excellent time — especially if you live alone, and should not have access to 14 tablespoon’s worth of butter — to place cookie dough balls on parchment-lined plate, freeze, and then place in ziplock bags in batches of four in case friends drop by or you want to give them to the catsitting super-neighbor next door. Just bake any frozen cookie dough as long as you would the fresh, at the same temperature, and eyeball it from there.)

5) Bake until golden brown and still puffy, with set edges and soft centers, 10-14 minutes, rotating cookie sheet halfway through. 

VARIATIONS: 

The Bacon-Bourbon Chocolate-Chip Cookie (Above photo credit C.Godfrey)

Remove two of four Tablespoons of Unbrowned Butter. Add 8 slices of bacon, cooked until medium-crisp, diced fine and cooled, with chocolate chips. (Rushing this makes for a semi-molten dough that’s tough to work with. again, you’re making cookies here. Why would you rush it? Do you look at your iPad while you kiss people?) Replace vanilla with 3 Tbsp bourbon. (Add more to taste, but again, too much makes the dough unworkable and the cookie too fluid. Also, for this? This is the ONE PLACE where you can know in your heart that a great bourbon and a mediocre one will be interchangeable, because your boring-ass kind-of-not-friend Ted can’t drone on about malts and oak-y flavors when it’s in a cookie with chocolate and bacon.)

The Blondie Cookie (Pictured at top, with cellphone pic of salted Variation above.)

Replace chocolate chips with a mix of 1/3 white, chocolate and peanut-butter or butterscotch chips. Double vanilla. Add 3/4 cup toasted chopped pecans.

If you really want to BLOW SOME MINDS at your daughter’s bake sale, sprinkle with coarse sea salt 1/2 to 3/4 through the cookies, at moment when cookies are crisp enough that salt will not melt into cookie, but molten enough to let salt adhere. Again, trust me, the effort is worth it. And you’ve read this far, right?

I have this idea for a fake Errol Morris film where we learn that for one disastrous month under Nixon, Cookie Monster was Secretary of the Treasury, 

James. 

So a new taqueria opened in my neighborhood — Escuela, which means ‘School’ — at Beverly and Stanley, and it is good. So good — so simple and real, $6 for two tacos, made with love, cash only — that it set me to cooking. i had a few people over last weekend, and I wanted a savory, fast hot app perfect for a summer day — easy to serve, easy to handle indoor or out, but not too fatty or insane. Thus, I recreated one of Escuela’s dishes, but taking the red meat out. 

(Mid-Cooking Process, Above)

SHRIMP AND TURKEY CHORIZO TACOS: Serves 7 as an appetizer, 3-4 as a main

1/3 onion, minced

1 pckg Turkey Chorizo (16 oz) 

1 pound 20-26 Shrimp, uncooked

Finely chopped cilantro

16-20 Corn Tortillas (if you double-ply, less if you don’t) 

1) Place Corn tortillas in tea towel in shallow dish; place in microwave and set for 2 mins at 70%. 

2) Heat wide skillet. Add Onions. Stir for 2 mins. Add Chorizo. Stir until broken up, losing rawness and browning. 

3) Add shrimp. Cook briefly and briskly until translucent flesh becomes opaque. The savory spiced flavors of the chorizo should suffuse the shrimp.

4) Turn on Microwave. While tortillas warm enough to be flexible, toss shrimp-chorizo-onion mix with half cilantro. Serve. 

(If you want to be sure the shrimp brown — which is tasty — remove the Chorizo from the pan and briefly heat on high to e vaporate water from pan (A pan with water, or anything wet in it, will never get above 212 f until the water is gone — science. And 212 F is too low a temperature to create the browning Malliard reaction — NOT carmelization, as is believed — that makes dry-grilled and seared proteins so lovely. Then just add the chorizo back for a warm-up.)

Now, the original of this uses Pork Chorizo, which, as fat equals flavor, is awesome, But these were pretty tasty and marginally less immediately unhealthy. (You could also do it with Soy-Rizo, bluntly, for pescatarian friends and to make things even healthier). And I’m not gonna say ‘serve with lime wedges’ or ‘with jalapeno-flavored creme fraiche’ or ‘with teaspoon of guacamole’ — all of which would be lovely — but when I made these and served them and ate them, they had five ingredients, they looked and tasted like what they were, and they were good. And as my friend Rachel would quote ‘Pippin’ to say, ‘Simple joys got a simple voice.’

Every culture in human civilization has a flatbread you put protein on, 

James. 

Cooking is, for me, primarily social. Not just in that egomanical ‘good host’ way where you get to unveil each dish with the turning step of a Matador working the cape — although there is that — but also in the way people connect over food and its rituals. I spent more of my youth in the kitchen than in any other room, and life at our home not only had flavor in every sense of the word but never lacked a lively table, whether two were seated or all seven. 

So you have people over. 

Cooking is also scientific, however, and science, in a godless universe, is often just how the universe messes with you. No argument or stirring music or slow-clap has ever changed a degree of temperature, or weakened the sharp molecular bonds of an acid. 

And if Cooking is a science, then you have to experiment. And I had two things go wrong in a pie I made for dear friends. One was a question of judgment; another, the unquestionable facts of physics. 

NUTTER-BUTTER CRUMB-CRUST CHOCOLATE CREAM PIE WITH BANNANAS

First, the experimental failure; I’d been told that you could use 16-18 of any sandwich-type cookie — Oreos, etc — and blend them to form a crumb crust, with the hydrogenated filling providing the needed fat. In a hubristic attempt to build strong flavor — please note wistful sound, in background, of wax wings melting as I flew too, too close to the sun — I thought I would try this trick with Nutter Butters. Grind, press into pie plate, bake, use — how hard could it be? 

But the resulting crumb crust was too crumbly. I think that — and this is a sentence that will make whoever the Surgeon General is wake up in the night with a silent scream — I think it’s because Nutter Butters are too lean, with a lower filing-to-cookie ratio than an Oreo. Next time, I’ll add melted butter — like, 2 tbsp or less — in the grinding process. 

So, FOR NEXT TIME: 

16-18 Nutter Butter Cookies; 2 TBSP molten butter. 

Grind cookies into fine crumbs; add molten butter for a few pulse of food processor. Press into pie plate; bake at 350 until golden brown and firm; remove from oven. 

FILLING: 

1.5 Bananas, ripe, cut into slices

Place layer of banana slices on top of cooled-to-warm crumb crust. 

(ROBERT EVANS NOTE: “Do I think about going back and tossing those banana slices in brown sugar and rum? Every Day. Would I change it? Like Hell.” (That sounds yummy, but also like the kind of thing that over-sugars a dish into inedibility. Since, you know, THE CRUST IS COOKIES.)

for CHOCOLATE CREAM, from Mark Bittman’s HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING. 

3/4 c Granulated Sugar

2 Tbsp Corn Starch

Salt

4 Eggs, separated (You just need the yolks — save the whites for a hearty breakfast, on which more later.) 

2 1/2 C Whole milk

2 Tsp vanilla

2 Tablespoons Butter, softened

2 oz. chopped/grated bittersweet chocolate (or unsweetened, You know,since THE CRUST IS COOKIES)

1) Combine granulated sugar with cornstarch and salt in medium saucepan. Mix in egg yolks. Add vanilla to milk; add milk and vanilla to egg-sugar mixture, and heat on medium to a low boil; add chocolate; whisk consistently for 10 mins; mixture should thicken. (Slow and low is the key to this, and make sure it comes to and stays above a boil to kill the egg-based enzyme that eats starch and makes it into water that cannot live past 167 degrees — science is awesome) 

2) Pour into crust over bananas with light hand; cool on rack; chill; serve with whip cream. (Which was my second, pure-physics error; I don’t think i gave the pie time to set, and rushed its service. No one noticed — as it was served with whip cream, because, uh, America, that’s why — but I wish I’d had allotted more time for the pie to set. 

And I am only thinking about this now, because when all this was going down, I was with my friends. And we laughed. I don’t know if I’d make that pie again — remembering more butter and more time, because cooking is an experiment, and here, as in life, mistakes are made — I know I’ll have those people over for dinner again in an eyeblink.  

I started worrying about the style guide, which is like naming your imaginary friends, 

James. 

Now and then, you want a cake — and not some layer cake made of frou-frou icing and piped flowers and such, but, rather, a substantive cake of slices and richness, pulled from a Bundt pan steaming and luscious. Hence this go-to crowd pleaser cake for me, which is a) taken from the first volume of the San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook (the only worthwhile enterprise that squalling ruin of a ‘paper’ has ever given us) and b) named, in P.T. Barnum-style by me as ‘El Torte Del Diablo.’ But really, it’s …

CHOCOLATE ANCHO CHILE AND ORANGE CAKE

2 sticks butter at room temperature

1.5 C White Sugar

5  Eggs, room temperature

1 3/4 C sifted all-purpose flour (Don’t use Cake Flour; it’ll be too delicate)

1/2 tsp salt

Zest of 2 oranges

2 Tbsp Orange Juice

1 tsp Baking Soda

1/2 cup Chocolate syrup (See note)

4 Tbsp Ancho Chile Puree

2 Tbsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350; butter a 10-inch Bundt pan. 

1) Beat butter with electric mixer; gradually add sugar. Add eggs, 1 at a time, mixing well after each. Add flour and salt. 

2) Divide batter IN HALF. 

3) To half batter, add orange zest, orange juice and 1/2 tsp of the Baking Soda; spoon into buttered bundt pan. 

4) To other half batter, add chocolate syrup, ancho puree, remaining 1/2 tsp baking soda and vanilla. Pour over Orange Batter. 

5) Bake for 45-50 minutes, or until cake tester inserted comes out clean. Cool cake in pan on rack for 10 minutes, then unmold onto plate. (DO NOT wait too much longer than 10 minutes to do this — a too-hot cake is fragile, but a cold cake locks into the pan.)

6) Brush with a simple orange glaze — orange juice, orange zest and confectioner’s sugar — while warm. 

CHOCOLATE SYRUP: 

You’ll have a little left over. You can use it in plenty of places. 

1/4 c water

1/8 cup butter (2 Tbsp)

1 Tbsp honey

4 oz Semisweet chocolate

.5 oz unsweetened chocolate

Combine in saucepan under gentle heat. Stir until smooth. Take your time. 

ANCHO CHILE PUREE

4 Dried ancho chiles

Boiling water to cover. 

Rinse chiles. Place in bowl, cover with boiling water. Soak at least 2 h. remove stems, seeds. Place chiles and 1/2 cup water (use soaking water, if not bitter) in blender. puree until smooth. (Yields 3/4 of a cup; freeze leftovers. Use for things like insta-tacos, adding frozen puree to taste to browned meat.)

Originally, the whole idea of this was to write for a half-hour every day about food as a head-clearing exercise, and then I got all intense and thought I have to offer something, something empirical each time, like a recipe.

But that’s kinda not good, either, because I wanted to start this, really start this, to change how I think about of food. I wanted to get back in touch with certain things — ingredients, the sun, water — and spend time thinking about others. And eat better, as an aware act of choice, rather than as just shoving refined carbs into my head during the pauses in the Breaking Bad episode.

Yesterday a friend brought fruit and cherries by in the morning, and two other friends brought a loaf of bread and a shepherd’s pie for dinner— both almost untouched, but how we laughed, Last night I had a really powerful sense-memory, blossomed into ripeness by the dizzying delight of an afternoon spent phoning into a family reunion, of one of my late mother’s quick-but-amazing summer deserts, and the taste of fresh berries mixed with the cool crumb of sandwich bread in a trifle or a fool. And so I wanted that — but with a bite to it, the acid of Autumn cutting in as July turns to August.

I should note that the bread is not only excellent, but my proud friend’s first ever effort at making bread, which was met with joy — Yeah, we of the 21st Century can make bread! Suck on that, Etruscans! — and that I am seriously thinking of both a) sending my friend’s bread back to her as bread pudding and b) Juicing the rest of the cherries, food milling the pulp and then sugar-salt brining a spatchocked chicken in cherry-chili-ginger puree for two days before grilling it.

Thirteen Cherries, Two Ways

1) Rinse thirteen cherries.

2) Place seven aside and eat throughout subsequent preparation; savor them in their natural state.

3) Stone and coarsely chop six.

4) Toss in small saucepan with juice 1 lemon, lemon zest, 1 tbsp sugar.

5) Pour over reasonable slice of fresh-made rustic bread.

6) Drop line of fresh cream. Garnish with jalapeno slices.

7) Enjoy. 

Hello, friends; it’s been a while, for reasons many of you that know me know and many of you that don’t know me don’t need to. But when I awoke this morning after days — nay, was it weeks? of not being able to cook for myself and having minimal appetite, lo, something in my my weary soul cried out ‘Uh, t’heck with that …” and wanted to make scones. 

Which, it should be noted, I’ve never done before. I’m not much of a biscuit man, and if you’re gonna make something sweet, I figure, why not make a cake — but something about the hearty idea of a scone, its heft and shape, appealed to me. And I didn’t want any plain old currant-and-excuses scone; i wanted something specific, and that meant trying to figure out variations for a recipe I’d never tackled before. So, what did we wind up with? 

TURKEY-BACON/CHEDDAR/JALAPENO SCONES (adapted from Mark Bittman) 

If you cook — novice or advanced kitchen denizen — I can’t recommend Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything enough. it is even a $4.99 iPhone/iPad app — which is a crazy-awesome investment, considering that the book (while more browsable and butter-smear-safe than any app) is $35.)

1 Cup Cake Flour

1 Cup Regular Flour

2 Tbsp Flaxseed Meal (NOTE: Bittman just calls for 2 C Cake Flour, but I wanted something more substantial while still flaky — hence these modifications)

4 Tsp Baking Powder

1 scant Tsp Salt

1 Tbsp Sugar (Counter-Intuitive, but, Trust me.) 

5 Tbsp Cold Butter

2 Eggs (plus, part of one for wash —or if you have egg white in your fridge, use that for wash and don’t waste 2/3 of an egg)

3/4 Cup Cream

3 Oz Sharp Cheddar cheese, grated

4 Slices Turkey Bacon Thick, not thin — think Trader Joe’s (which has the advantage of being pre-cooked, as well)  not hyper-processed big-brand) lightly browned with …

Small-diced Jalapeno to taste. 

1) Preheat Oven to 450 degrees; toss bacon and jalapenos in small skillet on low heat, tossing sporadically. 

2) Combine dry ingredients in bowl of food processor, pulse once or twice. Cut butter into five pieces, add to bowl, pulse until thoroughly blended. 

3) Beat 2 eggs and cream in large bowl; add flour-butter mix and turn with rubber spatula until just mixed. Fold in cheese, bacon and jalapenos. Turn dough onto floured board, knead ten times while forming into flat disc approx. 1.5-2 in thick; add flour as necessary if things stick. (I used a little extra cake flour that was around; I can’t tell you if using the regular for forming purposes would make that much of a difference.) Cut into 8 equal wedges with large, sharp knife. (I find, for stuff like this, bisecting then quartering then halving the quarters — as opposed to doing around like cutting a cake — makes for more even results.) 

4) Place cut scones on ungreased baking sheet Brush with egg white/ an egg beaten with 1 tsp water. (Or melted butter. Or, uh, anything that sounds good — I was imagining a little egg white-green Tabasco wash, which I may try next time.)

5) Bake for approx. 15 minutes, or until golden brown; cool on rack. Eat while warm. And I will so make these again.

Next time: EL TORTE DEL DIABLO!

Let us be frank: Growing up in Rural Ontario is not exactly a hotbed of ethnic diversity, unless your idea of diversity is Protestants and Catholics. (I joke that growing up in an Italian-Catholic community until I was 18, and discovered Woody Allen, I thought Jews was the plural of You.) And so, while I grew up with Scottish and Northern Italian cuisine — two cuisines based on similar principles of boiling, grinding poverty, organ meats and other food that required fortitude — it took later in my life to open up the horizons of my eating, even with a stint driving delivery at the Forbidden City Chinese restaurant in Hamilton in my teens (The Forbidden City is still in operation, which, some days, is more than can be said of me) to push my palate out of Europe’s colder climes.

For example, until I came to America, Mexican food was Taco Bell and Ortega Hard Taco Shells (with the lame spice packet you sprinkled over sautéed ground beef), to which I can only say now, what the what? it’s like suggesting that, having seen everything Adam Sandler’s done with Dennis Dugan, you truly have experienced cinema. Since then, I’ve eaten — and cooked — plenty of Mexican-style food, and reverse-engineered more than a few recipes. but the one taste of real Mexican cooking I love? Baja Fish tacos. Which I now know how to make a variation on, Beer Battered Fish Tacos.

(Photo: Casey Revkin)

Now, this is dangerous stuff, because it involves deep frying — and that can be tricky. (“Tricky” being a euphemism for ‘“If you are not careful, you could severely disfigure yourself or other doing this, so pay attention, be sober and anyone who doesn’t need to be near the kitchen shouldn’t be.”)  You have to be careful, and you need a deep fat frying thermometer — if you’re a pro fry cook, you can eyeball this stuff, but we are not pro fry cooks; when you dump cold battered fish into hot oil, its temperature drops, and you want to bring the temperature back up to 375 every time with a careful hand on the burner temperature. But, if you can pull it off? It’s tasty stuff. I didn’t know about this stuff when I was a kid, but I do now — and, really, I’m luckier for it.

Beer Battered Fish Tacos

1.5 pounds firm white fish, cut into small pieces. I’ve used Mahi-Mahi and Cod; you want the pieces to be large enough to matter but small enough to cook swiftly and fit in a taco — 1.5 in long by, say, .75 in wide max.

1 12-Oz bottle beer (I recommend something light and cheap — a Corona, a Dos Equis. You don’t want to deep fry some fancy-schmancy microbrew.

2 Cups flour, with dashes of seasoning to taste — salt, pepper, chili, garlic powder, etc. Keep it light and simple.

1) CAREFULLY fill Heavy pot w/heavy bottom (I recommend a cast-iron Dutch oven) with 3 in. cooking oil. carefully place deep-frying thermometer until tip is in oil and not on bottom of pot.

2) Pour beer into large bowl; sift 1.5 cups  seasoned flour into bowl; whisk until combined.

3) Pat fish dry and coat the fish in the beer batter. Dredge the pieces of fish in 1/2 cup of remaining flour and slide into oil as coated, INCREDIBLY CAREFULLY. Fry fish, turning over frequently with tongs or slotted spoon, until deep golden and cooked through, 4 to 5 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel-lined baking sheet and keep warm in oven. Fry remaining fish in batches, returning oil to 375 degrees F between batches.

(Jalapeno Cole Slaw) 

Serve with warmed tortillas and accoutrements; I’ve found Jalapeno Cole-Slaw (Recipe at link) an excellent base, with cool Guacamole as a great accompaniment, or shredded lettuce and Pico de Gallo and lime wedges. Serve with a crisp, light ale. 

(For those of you who’ve been wondering, this is a microplane grater. GET ONE.)

Now and then, you feel like trying a recipe, and then you realize that you can’t make all of it because it’d be a little much. I mean, yes, having your own 9x13 dish of some baked good would be awesome, but, again, moderation in all things, etc, etc. And as ever, baking is like chemistry — you mess with ingredients too much, you break the balance of sugar and egg, flour and fat. (My mom — who, as she taught me to bake and cook, with my dad an expert in sauces and proteins, deserves much of the credit for this blog, even if, were she still with us, she’d be dissecting it for grammar errors and unwieldy language — once said it to me best: Putting twice as many chocolate chips in the chocolate chip cookies doesn’t make them more chocolaty; it just makes a mess.)

But some dishes look too good to pass up, and if cooking is chemistry, it’s also math. Now and then, this math is annoying — I was in Whole Foods on Sunday, muttering darkly to myself “Okay, how many goddamn ounces are in a pint?” — but now and then it’s easy, like the fact that 9x13 = 127, while 8x8 = 64, meaning that, yes, a 8x8 square Pyrex baking dish is half the area of a 9x13 one. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can take any 8x8-dish centered recipe and double it — there’s often a long, sad road of soggy, sunken centers that happens with that, as the inverse-square cube law takes over, where you double the size but cube the mass  —but it does mean that, if you have a good eye on the actual dish as it bakes, you can halve any 9x13-centered dish for an 8x8. Like I did with this Texas-Style Berry Cobbler.

(I am a bad scatter-er)

I read this recipe in Cook’s Country — which I jokingly  call “Cook’s Illustrated’s slovenly, backwoods, overall-wearing cousin” — and Blueberries are in season. AND it gave me chance to use my microplane grater. Come on. Like I wasn’t going to try the recipe; at the same time, they have a name for people with a 9x13 dish of cobbler in their house all by their lonesome, and that name is ‘Diabetic.’ Hence, the half-dish version. And I wound up giving 80% of it away, which is fine; that just means I can’t wait to make it again.  As for the name, what makes the Cobbler Texas-Style isn’t that it’s drunk or armed or friendly — ha, ha — but rather than instead of being dough over fruit, it’s fruit over dough — or, rather, batter — and the photos will explain all.

(Close-Up. The strawberries got a little juicy, but to paraphrase Robert Evans, did I mind? You bet your ass I didn’t …) 

TEXAS-STYLE BERRY COBBLER  

(The recipe reductions for the 8x8 version will be in parentheses. Yes, I know you can all do math, but now and then, it’s nice to look at the divisions instead of doing them in your head.)

4 Tablespoons unsalted butter cut into 4 pieces, 8 tablespoons melted and cooled.  (2 and 4 Tbsp.)

1 1/2 C. Sugar (3/4 C.)

1 1/2 Tsp. grated lemons zest. (NOTE: I left this the same in the half-size, because, mmmm, lemon.)

15 Oz./3 Cups Blueberries (Note: I used 6oz Blueberries and some frozen strawberries I had int he fridge, thawed, to bring it up to 8 oz. Improvisation!)

1 1/2 C All-Purpose Flour (3/4 C)

2 1/2 Teaspoons Baking Powder (1 1/4)

3/4 tsp salt (Really, just add, like, a dash. You don’t have to be counting grains of salt here.)

1 1/2 cups milk (3/4 cups — this recipe is a bit nebulous, as it doesn’t say if you want whole, 2% or skim; I used 2%, and it was fine.)

(Lemon Sugar, Mmmmm.)

1) Preheat oven to 350. Put unmelted butter in 9x13 baking dish until melted, 8-10 minutes.

2) While above occurs, pulse sugar and lemon zest in food processor until combined, about 5 pulses.

3) With potato masher, mash berries and 1 Tbsp. sugar until berries are coarsely mashed.

4) Combine flour, baking powder, and salt; put aside 2 Tbsp sugar and reserve; add sugar and whisk.

5) Whisk in milk, melted butter until smooth. Remove dish from oven safely, and place on rack. Pour in batter.

6) Scatter blueberries on batter, sprinkle with remaining lemon sugar and bake until golden brown with crisp edges, 45-50 minutes. (The 8x8 version took approx. 35-40; again, use judgment and your eyeballs.) Rotate halfway during baking. Cool on rack for 30 minutes. Serve warm. Or, rather, devour.

TOMORROW: Oh, I have no clue. I haven’t cooked yet. Any ideas? Any requests? 

In our consumerist age, it seems people are always trying to sell us things we don’t need — Sport Utility Vehicles, hair transplants, Sarah Palin. And this is nowhere more true than in the kitchen, where gadgetry promises solutions to problems you didn’t even know you had. Whether a $2.99 silicone egg poaching pod or a $299 ice-cream maker attachment for your standing mixer, the kitchen-industrial complex longs to have you fill your kitchen with a whole buncha junk you don’t have the space or money for.

If I were better at math, I’d offer my decision-making process re: kitchen equipment as a formula, (PDI = $/(UI x FSF)), where the Purchasing Decision Index, with low indices suggesting purchase, equaled the price in $ divided by a multiplication of the Utility Index multiplied by the Fuzzy Satisfaction Factor). But I’m not good at math, so what I’m saying is that a kitchen tool or gadget should be weighed in terms of price, what you can use it for and how much you’ll enjoy using it. A good knife, a good peeler, a cast-iron skillet — these are things any kitchen should have, as you can use them for many, many things and they are remarkably economical. (My cast Iron skillet was a $4 garage sale purchase I re-seasoned by hand; I’ve had it for 16 years, and use it around 5 times a week.)

But things like, say, sausage-grinding standing mixer attachments or chicken roasting stands or the Bluth Industries Cornballer are, to me, less purchasable because they’re costly, you don’t use them that often and you can pretty much recreate what they do with other items you probably have. It’s the in-between area that gets tricky — and that figures in the recipe today.

Often, a gadget purchase is aspirational — which is to say,” If I buy a Bundt pan, I will make more Bundt cakes” — and that’s often true. My immersion blender — the single-stem blender with a handle that looks kind of like a lightsaber, and again, another garage-sale purchase — was a buy because it opened up a whole new vista of soups for me. (‘Whole New Vista of Soups’ sounds like a Radiohead b-sides record, doesn’t it?) As for my Food Mill (a bowl with an open bottom with various discs with differing-sized cutting holes which snap into the bottom and an impeller-crank disc designed to force the contents of the bowl towards and through the holes in the discs, leaving seeds and skins behind) , I was curious, as I heard it was the secret to perfect mashed potatoes. And it is — but soon I was using it for things like, say, fruit purees to serve with cakes (strawberry-blueberry with a white-icing yogurt cake for the 4th of July last year, for example) and, yes, soups. Why am I talking about soup in hot, sunshiny L.A.? Because today’s soup is Gazpacho, my friends. I Frankensteined a group of recipes here — starting with Mark Bittman — but what really made it happen was the Immersion blender and food mill.

(Above: Immersion Blender, not lightsaber)

Again, I wanted to see if this worked well as a quick summer supper — and I pulled one time-saver (using canned organic tomatoes for half the tomatoes of the recipe) and timed myself from “Stand facing the cutting board” (to paraphrase The Joy of Cooking) to the point of having the gazpacho in the fridge mellowing:

In less time than the hour it takes to have a good pizza or Chinese food delivered, you can have tomato-y, bright, light, cool and healthy gazpacho ready to eat. And leftovers for a few days. Which makes having an Immersion Blender and Food Mill totally worth it the second you taste it, even without having to run through (PDI = $/(UI x FSF)).

GAZSPACHO: Serves 4-8 as a main, more as an appetizer.

1 Can 28 oz diced tomatoes, undrained

2 pounds plus 1 tomato extra fresh tomatoes, chopped rough (total 4 pounds)

5 pieces bread, toasted, crusts cut off, torn to small bits

1 large cucumber, peeled and chopped coarse

1 Bell pepper chopped coarse

1 Red pepper chopped coarse

Juice of 1 lemon

2 Tsp minced garlic

1/2 cup olive oil

4 tbsp Red Wine Vinegar

Salt and black pepper

1) In large bowl, combine tomatoes, bread pieces, 3/4 of peppers and 3/4 of cucumber and garlic. Use Immersion Blender to, uh, blend. (Don’t blend these items one by one — the water/juciness of the canned tomatoes will make it a lot easier.)

2) Add lemon, garlic, olive oil and red wine vinegar. Blend. (NOTE: I know a lot of cooking is ‘to taste,’ and a lot of people like Tabasco in their Gazpacho for bite; I do not, as it confuses people into thinking they’re eating watery salsa and then they start looking for chips. This recipe is aimed to create the traditional flavor profile for Gazpacho — light, bright, acid, cool, piquant but not ‘spicy’ )

3) Run combined ingredients through Food Mill with Coarsest disc inserted. (A lot of people carefully food process their Gazpacho, but I always worry about it being blended or pureed too much and not having enough dentition/mouthfeel/bite and thus feeling like fancy baby food; the food mill makes the end result a lovely balance of smooth and particulate.)

4) Run remaining peppers and cucumber through Food Mill (Which also lends crunch and little bits; if you have better knife skills than I do, which isn’t hard, and think it would be faster, you can finely mince the remaining peppers and cucumber, instead). You may have to scrape some pulp off the underside of the food mill with a rubber spatula; that’s cool.

(Above: Food Mill)

5) Add salt and pepper to taste; cover; chill for at least 30 mins.

6) Serve in bowls as a main; alternately, for a Summer party, serve in small glasses from a wide-mouthed pitcher as a tart starter.

Tomorrow: “No half measures,” why quoting Breaking Bad here makes sense, and Texas Berry Cobbler