Stomachs on legs are proud to present

A stodgy rendition of chestnut rice

Saturday
Boom - in between a batch of sweet potato oven fries and a soup, our oven went kaput. Ironically, it's the only appliance in the kitchen wired up by a qualified electrician. Yes, an electrician who works in the warehouse of a music distribution company and moonlights as a hip hop promoter, but totally qualified, he assured us...
We sometimes get electric shocks off our dishwasher too, so maybe it's time to get a professional electrician over. Thank god I have house shoes with rubber soles.
I'm sad that we may have to part with the brown 70s AEG porcelain-top oven that we got for 60 euros on ebay.

Maybe it's cold cuts and cheeses with bread for dinner the next 2 weeks - how very German.

Sunday

I turn the house upside down looking for the Singaporean cookbook that came with our Panasonic rice cooker, but can't find it. I'm sure it's possible to cook a whole fish in that thing.
I do find the user-manual, which has basic instructions for using the rice cooker to steam food or bake cakes. I'm thinking a Mexican pineapple upside down cake cooked in a rice cooker could be elegant.
We have some frozen Korean dumplings. Fill the rice cooker with luke warm water, put dumplings in on plastic steamer insert, and set the steam function for ten minutes. A few minutes later and there's no sign or sound of the water heating.
We boil the jug and add boiling water to the ricecooker, and steam starts coming through the vent. And continues long enough to cook the dumplings. Success!

Monday

A simple spread with tomatoes from our colleague Wulf's balcony, and good Manufactum sourdough. Nothing beats the enchanting slimy stringiness of buffalo mozzarella.



Tuesday

Seems like a good idea to test drive the rice cooker with other grains, so it's time to try a wholegrain barley pilaf. The word 'pilaf' brings to mind '80s cooking magazines - and wholegrain barley is probably considered pig food in many parts of the world - but this dish was a very refined sort of pig food. Hearty, speckled with pine nuts and sprinkled with pecorino, complimented by a side of grilled eggplant done on the George Foreman grill.

If you close the lid in between adding ingredients to trap heat, you can definitely get a gentle simmer on and sauté ingredients to build up the flavour in your rice-cooker stew. You don't need much oil since the heat is low and the moisture is trapped. Of course, it helps if the recipe contains lots of umami components like red wine, mushrooms and a touch of curry powder... Although the rice cooker couldn't achieve a high enough heat to 'toast' the grains beforehand, it didn't affect the quality of the dish.

Note: there are some rice cooker recipes on the net for browning whole legs of lamb (presumably in big-ass industrial sized cookers), but it's very dubious that you could get the heat high enough to do so. The rice cooker is better for slow simmering and flavoursome hodge-podges.





Wednesday

I contemplate the eggs in the fridge and wonder if there's a way to microwave them. Better instead to cook some veg on our beat-up old George Foreman grill...hmmm, or maybe not. The George Foreman grill gave us a few good years of service, but chose to kark it tonight. Extraneous electrical appliances are all destined for the dust heap in the end...I'm all about manual egg-beaters and bicycle-powered dishwasher from now on.

Extraneous or not, it's now a choice between microwave and rice cooker if we want to have a hot meal. We choose the latter, and adapt a pumpkin curry recipe from Mira Mehta's 'Hajimete No Ryoori: Healthy Way to Indian Cooking'. It works really well in the rice cooker if you close the lid and let stew for 5 minutes when the recipe asks for stir frying, or cooking gently for that matter. It's one of those dishes which creates a magical chemistry between seemingly simple ingredients: the whole house is filled with a tantalising pumpkin-cinnamon scent from the vapours escaping the rice cooker vent. Highly recommended.

Mira Mehta's Pumpkin Curry - serves 4
1 kg butternut peeled & cut into bite size chunks
1 large tomato chopped
1 green chilli finely chopped
1 dried red chilli
3 cm cinnamon stick
3/4 tsp turmeric, 1 tsp coriander powder, 1 tsp cumin powder, 1/2 tsp chilli powder
3/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp oil
coriander leaves for garnish

1. add oil to pan or rice cooker, when hot add red chilli & cinnamon stick - as soon as they become fragrant, add the tomato & cook gently for a minute or two. Add the green chilli, turmeric, coriander powder, cumin and chili powder and stirfry 2-3 min.
3. Add pumpkin, stir, marinate for a minute or so then add salt & 2 cups water.
4. Cover or close lid, turn heat to low. Cook circa 20 min (or one white-rice-setting cycle) until pumpkin is tender. Serve & garnish with coriander (or not..).




Thursday
Hiroko Shimbo's book The Japanese Kitchen has a lot of great rice cooker recipes: rice with oysters, rice with beef, burdock and porcini, etc. We decide to go for the classic chestnut rice - but it doesn't turn out perfectly, even though I spend what feels like 30min washing the short grain rice beforehand. Maybe the brand of rice was sub par, maybe the fancy canned french chestnuts weren't strong enough in flavour. Next time we'll try the dish with brown rice (for its sturdy flavour and sturdily shaped grains) and roast some of the fresh chestnuts that have just come into season.


Friday
Carbs galore. Craving a more hearty sort of rice dish, we try out the brown rice & tea porridge (genmai chagayu) from the website Just Hungry. Cooked in roasted bancha tea using the rice cooker's 'slow cook/porridge' setting, dotted with tasty lentils, dusted with furikake flavour sprinkles, and accompanied with salad and a soft-boiled egg, it is a satisfyingly simple brothy autumn dish, but due to brown rice being a little TOO impervious to mushiness, it doesn't really achieve the proper gloopy okayu texture until it's reheated the next morning.



Saturday

Our new ebay stovetop and oven arrive, but oops - we somehow manage to smash the door of the oven into a million tiny pieces...Apparently you are not supposed to lift it up by the handle on the front.
Sandwiches for dinner, anyone?

White bread, black bread or even rye bread? Ask your friends and neighbours and they will tell you that toast is a first-class delicacy. It tastes good and has never been the cause of anyone losing their drivers' license. It keeps you fit and your body needs it.

While in London recently, I visited one of the UK's first major Dieter Rams retrospectives at the London Design Museum close to Tower Bridge.

The stylishly be-spectacled Dieter Rams was director of design for Braun for nearly three decades.
Attractive archaic Rams pieces include the cucumber slicer in the video below and the pretty drip coffee machines.

The Braun toaster, which was selected for inclusion at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is another fine Rams creation: but it's a design innovation which may have been lost on Rams' compatriots.

Germans are not big on toast, and most people I know would not dream of toasting brown or black bread. The only bread deemed worthy of toasting in Germany is '50s-esque miniature white bread squares for toasted sandwiches, packets of which are actually labeled specifically as 'toast'.

Dieter Rams: toast visionary?

"it is a lot of food huh"

Scroll down and listen

Thanks AB for playing this to me. I have been giggling to myself all week.

Hock and I are both currently living in different countries in studio apartments

Yes sad, I know. I'm currently in Bangkok though, but only for a two week conjugal visit.

But given that we are both facing the challenges of living alone and cooking in kitchenettes (two stove top elements, no oven, microwave) I thought I would begin a series on kitchenette cooking solutions

My most recent ingenious solution, if I do say so myself is pressure cooker dumplings

Take said frozen pre-purchased or pre-made dumpling from your freezer and place in a bamboo steamer



Place a cup of water and a rack inside your newly purchased pressure cooker

Place bamboo steamer on rack

Secure pressure cooker lid and place on stove top. Bring to pressure, reduce heat and cook for 15 minutes.



Turn off heat and let steam release slowly

Eat dumpling

This seriously speeds up the cooking of frozen dumplings. It also works well for sticky rice parcels, various bao and other steamable items

I haven't managed to figure out precise cooking times for different items, but I find between 15 to 20 minutes does the trick

By definition a refrigerator stands alone in its corner and, withdrawn from the world, it controls its atmosphere and protects its contents. Its door must be kept closed, otherwise it looses its cool. This withdrawal explains the isolation of refrigerators.
Is it possible to envision the encounter between two refrigerators? In this installation, two solitudes unite through a canal connecting their inside worlds. This unusual encounter produces a mist on the surface that binds them together.

Michel de Broin

Item 3: Cupcake Transporter

I don't know about you but for years I've been searching for the perfect vessel for transporting cupcakes



Item 4: To Do Tatoo



And this looks kinda handy....OMG, this blog is reaching new lows

Item 5: Herb Saver



When herbs hit USD$100 per bunch you might like to invest in one of these babies

Item 6: Banana Hanger



Store your bananas, naturally, hanging as god meant them to hang

Item 7: Over-stuffed sandwich maker



Finally, there is nothing ironic to be said about the overstuffed sandwich maker, I sincerely want one

I spent the best part of an hour procrastinating on Amazon's kitchen section, hunting down useless but mildly appealing kitchen equipment

So for lack of better things to blog about at present I will begin a new series on stupid kitchen equipment

Item 1:

Cake-Sicle Pan



I like things on sticks, but I don't see why you can't just jam a stick into a muffin and call it a muffin-sicle...

Item 2

Hello Kitty Toaster



This being Bangkok I'm surprised I haven't seen one of these earlier.

At last...at long last. The German fine hand-crafted goods emporium Manufaktum, and its signature Bread & Butter bakery/cafe, has come to Cologne. It's in the Disch-haus, a beautiful curved building built in '28, seen as an early 'manifesto of modernism'. We went along on their second day of business.

I first ate Manufaktum's signature sour 'sauerteig' bread at their branch in Munich - Erik and me ate a whole half loaf drowned in pumpkin-cinnamon jam. I then discovered that they do a very good short black espresso at their branch in Duesseldorf (served on a small silver tray with a glass of water), so I've been looking forward to the Cologne branch opening, a lot.

I'm looking forward to trying out the nicely curated offerings of delicatessan goods over the coming months. And it's always fun to browse the kitchenware like raclette machines, utilitarian yet impracticle modernist toaster models from the 50s, Haussler wood-burning ovens for 3000 euros, Kenyo Warikomi knives, hand-made copper & porcelain bain-maries from France, and very serious looking small metal gadgets for removing plum or cherry stones.
And the gardening section is fun too.

Bread tapas, anyone? !



Manfaktum's cafe Bread & Butter is mostly for 'brotzeit' - not as in dinner but as in a snack of something on bread. They have a selection of thick cut sour rye bread with a thick layer of hand-made butter and then cheese, salami or a gouache of quark, taramasalata, sun dried tomatoes or other spread.

The bread with a blue-shot creamy cheese or italian salami both came daubed with barbieri aprikosen-senf - a sharp, tangy apricot 'Mostarda' jam from Lombardia Italy.



The poppy seed cake was the yummiest thing actually. I recommend to order that and take a loaf of bread home. These bread snacks are overpriced at 4 euros each. Whereas half a loaf will cost you 2 euros.

The poppyseed 'mohnkuchen' is nutty tasting and minimally sweet.





Latte art is mocked (mocca-ed?) by some, but in Europe it's a crucial indication that the barista has paid due care to a velvety texture milk and a well-extracted oily espresso. If you are ever in Cologne, come here and order an espresso macchiato: you'll be served a nice small-sized flat white as in the photo above (no, not as strong as in NZ, but thank god, not a milky milkshake - unless you order a latte macchiato, which was my first folly). A capuccino here means something similar to the espresso macchiato pictured, but in a slightly larger size.

Bread & Butter use Mokaflor beans from Florence, (70 & arabica, 30% robusta) available from the store in a gold shrink-wrapped packet.

Or you can have this delicious fizzy French grapefruit drink instead:



And across the road is the rather attractive new Kolumba museum which, when seen from the inside, has really quite amazing natural light effects, star bursts and jagged rows of pin pricks, from the holes in the facade.



Felt a bit sick after this maiden voyage to Manufaktum Koeln though. Probably too much bread and butter.

Some basic stuff here that all kids know, but I guess we're all guilty of boiling with the lid off the pot sometimes...

The most interesting point to me is about the extreme energy inefficiency of gas burners. I suppose the main argument for them was always the level of control, but in the end taking a pot off the heat can be as fast a movement as switching off a flame...

But soaking pasta? I can just see the expression on Marco Passarani's face now - and Erik's too for that matter. Still, I'll try it, since these days I make myself a separate pot of wholegrain pasta anyway! Some might say I've already thrown the real pasta experience out the window, so what's the diff huh? May as well presoak and throw out the baby with the bathwater (wholegrain takes longer to cook, so it makes even more sense). I'll let you know how it goes.

You will notice if you pay more attention to your kitchen’s thermal landscape, even in terms of what you can feel, how much heat escapes without ever getting into the food.

Among the major culprits here are inefficient appliances. According to the United States Department of Energy, a gas burner delivers only 35 to 40 percent of its heat energy to the pan; a standard electrical element conveys about 70 percent. Anyone thinking about kitchen renovation should know that induction cooktops, which generate heat directly within the pan itself, are around 90 percent efficient. They can out-cook big-B.T.U. gas burners, work faster, don’t heat up the whole kitchen, and are becoming more common in restaurant kitchens.

Maximizing the transfer of heat from burner to pot produces better food. In deep frying, the faster the burner can bring the oil temperature back up after the food is added, the quicker the food cooks and the less oil it absorbs. In boiling green vegetables, a fast recovery time means better retention of vibrant color and vitamins.

No matter how efficient an appliance is, the cook can help simply by covering pots and pans with their lids. Some of the heat that enters through the bottom of the pot exits through the top, but a lid prevents much of it from escaping into the air. This is especially true when you’re bringing a pot of water to the boil. With the lid on, it will start bubbling in as little as half the time. Turning water into steam takes a lot of energy, and every molecule that flies away from the water surface takes all that energy with it into the air. Prevent its escape, and the energy stays with the pot to heat the rest of the water.

Once a liquid starts to boil and is turning to steam throughout the pot — the bubbles of a boil are bubbles of water vapor — nearly all the energy from the burner is going into steam production. The temperature of the water itself remains steady at the boiling point, no matter how high the flame is underneath it. So turn the burner down. A gentle boil is just as hot as a furious one.

In fact it’s easy to save loads of time and energy and potential discomfort with grains, dry beans and lentils, and even pasta. But it requires a little thinking ahead. It turns out that the most time-consuming part of the process is not the movement of boiling heat to the center of each small bean or noodle, which takes only a few minutes, but the movement of moisture, which can take hours. Grains and dry legumes therefore cook much faster if they have been soaked. However heretical it may sound to soak dried pasta, doing so can cut its cooking time by two-thirds — and eliminates the problem of dry noodles getting stuck to each other as they slide into the pot.

The trickiest foods to heat just right are meats and fish. The problem is that we want to heat the center of the piece to 130 or 140 degrees, but we often want a browned, tasty crust on the surface, and that requires 400 degrees.

It takes time for heat to move inward from the surface to the center, so the default method is to fry or grill or broil and hope that the browning time equals the heat-through time. Even if that math works out, the area between the center and surface will then range in temperature between 130 and 400 degrees. The meat will be overcooked everywhere but right at the center.

The solution is to cook with more than one level of heat. Start with very cold meat and very high heat to get the surface browned as quickly as possible with minimal cooking inside; then switch to very low heat to cook the interior gently and evenly, leaving it moist and tender.

On the grill, this means having high- and low-heat zones and moving the food from one to the other. On the stove top or in the oven, start at 450 or 500 degrees, and then turn the heat down to around 250, ideally taking the food out until the pan or oven temperature has fallen significantly.

Another solution is to cook the food perfectly with low heat, let it cool some, and then flavor its surface with a brief blast of intense heat from a hot pan or even a gas torch. More and more restaurants are adopting this method, especially those that practice sous-vide cooking, in which food is sealed in a plastic bag, placed in a precisely controlled water bath and heated through at exactly the temperature that gives the desired doneness.

All these are two-step processes, but the same principle works for three steps or more. Rotisserie cooking alternates high and low heat many times: as the meat turns on the spit, each area of the surface is briefly exposed to high browning heat, then given time for that dose of energy to dissipate, part of it into the meat but part back out into the cool air. So the meat interior cooks through at a more moderate temperature. Similarly, steaks and chops cook more evenly on high grill heat — and faster as well — if you become a human rotisserie and turn them not once or twice but as often as you can stand to, even dozens of times, every 15 or 30 seconds.

Heat knocks molecules at the surface of food into the air where we can sniff them, so it increases the aroma. Inside the food, agitated molecules make sauces more fluid and hot meat more tender. And the sensation of a food’s warmth is satisfying in itself. The moment hot food is put on a plate, its heat energy begins to flow out into the cooler surroundings. Aromas fade, sauces thicken, fats congeal.

So when you transfer heat’s handiwork from the kitchen to the table, take along some extra. Warm the plates to prolong the pleasure. And encourage everyone to sit down and eat it while it’s hot.

from article: 'The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen', NY Times, Jan 2nd, 2008

"You will avoid the awful people" - Hervé This

This is the Kitchen Julia Child used for nearly 50 years. This is it as it appears on display at the American History Museum in Washington D.C.

Original Source

Warning - the language in this video is not safe for work, young children or your grandma.

Although not as much as these guys

But I have been cooking up a middle eastern desert storm lately

Last Friday I made this seriously labour intensive but very yummy chicken, mint, burghul and yoghurt soup with chili cumin sauce



Recipe from Gourmet Traveller but adapted by me

Chicken Stock
- a chicken carcass, a whole chicken or 2 chicken breasts or whatever
- onions say 2 chop in half skin on, it doesn't matter too much at this point
- celery stalks
- half a head of garlic
- 1 - 2 chilis halved lengthways
- 1 cinamon quill
- 1 - 2 cloves
- 1/2 a lemon
- water

Make stock or you can just get premade chicken stock and a flavour with the lemon, garlic, cinamon and cloves and chili and then poach a couple of breasts in the stock by bringing it up to boil adding the breast, put on a heavy lid, take off the heat and leave the breasts to cook for say 40 mins...
If making stock from scratch remember to start from cold water and wash chicken well to get a nice clear stock.

Once chicken is cooked shred it and put aside. Strain the stock if it is a bit scumy.

Now make the chili sauce
30 gms of dried chilis deseeded and then hydrated in water (be careful and don't touch your eyes or anything when doing this)
Pulse the hydrated chilis with 3 cloves of garlic, 1/2 cup of olive oil, 1 tsp each of ground corriander seed and cumin and a big pinch of salt.

Assemblage of Soup
Pulse/ Blitz 2 tbspns/ big gulp of olive oil, 1 onion, 2 cloves of garlic and 2 tspns of dried mint (or fresh) into a paste
Soak 100 gms of burghul (cracked wheat) in water until soft
Combine 500 gms of plain yoghurt, 1 beaten egg and 1 tbspn of cornflour in a little bowl
Fry onion paste until fragrant 5 mins or so and add stock (around 4 - 5 cups of stock) bring to the boil then simmer
Once simmering add your yoghurt mixture slowly while stirring and let simmer for 10 mins (do not boil)
Add burghul, salt to taste, squeeze of lemon juice and shredded chicken
Garnish with shredded fresh mint and some thinly sliced chili (optional)


Then Abla Amad's lamb shanks with chickpeas and rice



Recipe - inspired by Abla made tastier by me

Soak 1/2 cup of chickpeas overnight
In a heavey based pot fry lamb shanks until brown on the outside
Add some onion, leek and garlic (1 onion, a leek or more and a good amount of garlic 4 cloves perhaps) and fry until soft
Cover with some chicken stock and add chickpeas, bring to the boil and then simmer on low heat for 1 - 2 hours
Add rice maybe 1 - 2 cups depending on how many people you want to feed, add salt, 1 teaspoon of ground cumin, 1/2 tspn fresh ground pepper and 1/2 tsp of allspice (plus a bit more)
With the lid on continue to simmer until rice is cooked
Stir through some butter (optional)
Serve with yoghurt and the chili sauce you made for the soup

You can add carrots at the onion stage and lentils at the rice stage also


Later on this week I made zucchini fritters from recipe in newly acquired Greg Malouf's Saha book accompanied by babaganoush, tabouleh and humus.



And then I also made some felafels to freeze as quick study dinners. I can give you the recipes if you like

My job would be easier if I could get hold of an Ol'eb Felafeler - a felafel maker in plain English.

I had a look around on the web for one and found this gold felafel maker - for the arab who has everything



If this is too flashy for your liking you can instead go to the Jerusalem Depot online and pick up a plain stainless steel one, along with a pair of "down with the people" rootsy Biblical Sandals - it all adds to the authenticity you know. Although you probably couldn't wear them when making felafels if you owned the souless monster that is the Felafel Robot, safety factor aside, mass produced felafels and biblical sandals just don't go together .

Today's issue of the New York Times has a style section about various foodstuffs, worth your perusal. You might need to join the site as a member to read the articles (it's free).

"Bertolli makes 5,000 pounds of fresh sausage a week. Today he’s scaled it down, using a Biro tabletop grinder to turn 10 pounds of cold butt and belly into ribbons. Coolness is key, he says: “If meat is at 30 to 32 degrees when it’s mixed, it favors the extraction of protein,” which is needed to bind the ingredients. (For more explanation, see the chapter on sausage making in Bertolli’s book “Cooking by Hand.”) Common problems with grinding meat at home are that the blades aren’t sharp enough and the meat is too warm. “Then you get what we call a smear,” he says. “It’s greasy, crumbly, doesn’t bind.”"

Watch Paul Bertolli
stuff salumi here. Since I am in Deutschland I am really thinking I ought to get a sausage stuffer and explore the world of sausage making... though to the idea of working with intestines in their raw form ... i can only say YUMUCK.

Other items in today's NYTimes:
- 'That's Amari'- a column about Italian digestive liqueurs.

- 'Passing the Bucket'- short piece about sawara wood buckets (cost $160 smackeroos) used to keep ice at its perfect consistency in Tokyo's snootiest bars.



- Grill Seekers
- a piece about all the latest BBQ gadgetry including the latest Viking r2d2-esque kamado-style ceramic lined BBQ:

Number 1 from an endless series.

A commercial sized smoker, purely devoted to pork ribs - One day I will need to cook pork ribs for 40 to 100 people, and quite thankfully, my partner agrees that owning two barbecues and a dedicated rotisserie is not enough. As a nation, Australians are brilliant at the act of barbecuing and our national holiday is ostensibly devoted to it rather than something more controversial, like invasion by white people. However, Australians tend to be poor at cooking barbecued food. We have the heart for barbecue but not the palate. We rarely even barbecue heart. We’re a nation of grillers rather broilers or smokers. I’m a firm believer that a well-placed smoker can change the world.

Note: Pictured commercial smoker is Ole Hickory Pit's Model SSO-SSI, boasting a cooking surface of 144 square feet and cooking capacity of 216 sets of baby back ribs.

Both Chef and I would really really really like one of these




I've been eyeing it up ever since I did some research a few years ago on "perfect bbq", it essentially works like a kiln except with air flow control, you can cook anywhere between 180 C to 800 C - meaning you could make slow cooked texas style ribs or pizza or even fire your own plate to eat it all on. Plus it's real pretty.

Two things stand in our way. One is the price, basic models start at $1000 USD and two is that we live in a condo.

But once these two issues are resolved it is top of the list

http://komodokamado.com/