Bakery preparations

 

My favorite bakery is about a mile down the street from us. Lately my dear wife and I go over there about once a week, and I get a loaf of bread. It's not exactly what I might think of as a "normal" loaf of bread. It tends to have a lot of local grains in it, and maybe a spare ingredient or two I wouldn't have thought of for bread. It also costs more than I ever imagined a loaf of bread might cost; nine, ten, eleven, twelve dollars. But I have found that I can pick any bread there, take it home, and find it profoundly delicious. Today's bread was called something like Mueslibrot, and it had rye, oats, apricots, and several other things I can't remember. This one was a dense, heavy, squared off loaf. At home, feverish with hunger, I cut a slice of it, spread some homemade maple lime tamari mayonnaise thickly on it, threw some local smoked turkey on top of it, along with a few slices of ripe avocado.

That bite!

I felt like a cooking genius.

I am not a cooking genius.

It's really good bread.

Around the corner from this particular bakery is another one that only opens four days a week, and then only for a handful of hours until it sells out, which it surely does every time. I have never eaten anything from this bakery because I couldn't hack the wait in line which is always prodigious. So around the corner from the best bakery I have been to in Saint Minneapolis and possibly the whole United States, is another that is, apparently, so good that people wait in line for half an hour despite the first one being readily available.

What is going on with all these great bakeries!

And then, heading in the opposite direction from these bakeries, though still only a few miles away, is a patisserie where we get our flourless brownies. Their patisserie are also terrific, and an hour ago we had a a rocher, which was basically like a macaroon, but maybe the best one I've had.

So...

I have a theory.

Saint Minneapolis knows we are leaving for France soon.

It's helping to prepare us.

Chestnuts

 

Here's a chestnut for you:

There used to be four billion chestnut trees in my country. But then the chestnut blight, or ink disease, came along in the early 1900's and wiped most of them out. But don't worry, counting just mature chestnut trees there are still like a hundred chestnut trees now in the U.S.A.

That's a lot!

If I had a hundred readers of clerkmanifesto I'd be sitting pretty!

But I'll grant you that it's not quite four billion.

Tonight my darling wife and I had some roasted chestnuts. They were probably imported. So they're kind of a metaphorical nut for... every single thing about America in every way possible. 

These chestnuts were quite tasty, but I didn't like cutting X's into their tough shells to roast them. And there was some peeling that was challenging too, and had to be done to get rid of a kind of inner skin that was inedible. I saw a recipe that told me how to roast easy peel chestnuts. The recipe said it was a 30 minute recipe, but it involved soaking the chestnuts overnight. 

This sounded more like a 12 hour recipe to me.

I didn't have 12 hours. We needed to eat some chestnuts in a hurry!

In Rome (and probably loads of other places in Europe), people roast chestnuts on street corners in charcoal braziers, and they sell them in paper cones. They are very fun to buy and to eat and they make you think:

Maybe when all the Chestnut Trees died something in America died too.

Actually, I don't think those street chestnuts make very many people think that.

And that concludes everything I know about chestnuts.

I would, at this point, refer you several excellent chestnut blogs, but there aren't any!

Did you know that there used to be four billion blogs on the Internet?

Now there are barely one hundred!

I am one of them.

It's a lot of responsibility. 

I'm trying to get around to every possible subject, but it takes awhile. 

Thank you for your patience.

 

Origin story

 

For a little while in the 1950's in California, famous musical artists Nat King Cole and Cole Porter lived next door to each other. And as they both liked to garden they formed a friendship over their shared backyard fence.

One late Summer they both found themselves with bumper crops of cabbages coming in. They liked to tease each other about whose cabbages were biggest and who could grow the most cabbages. Indeed, they argued about everything regarding those cabbages- when to water, the best fertilizer, and how to control the pests that would try to feast on their harvest. But there was one thing they absolutely agreed upon, and that was just what a person should do with cabbage once it was picked. 

Cole Porter and Nat King Cole both strongly felt that cabbage, all cabbage, should be shredded raw, and then tossed liberally with mayonnaise, cider vinegar, and a bit of mustard.

They felt this so fanatically that it became known all around town as "Coles' Law".

Taco diet

 

It's not a diet!

So, even though I called it a diet, let's not call it a diet. 

It's just...

I eat tacos for every meal now. 

Every

Meal

Is

A

Taco!

No, that doesn't spell,

 an acronym.

Think of it,

More as a poem.

Or a prayer.

Or...

A recipe!

Every 

Meal

Is

A 

Taco

But "Hey!" You cry out now that the poem part is finally over. "What if I would like to eat a taco too, but it is way to complicated to make one?"

I will tell you how to make the tacos I make twice a day for every meal every day, and get this:

It is not complicated at all!!!!!!

 

It is pretty easy.

"Oh thank god!" You cry out. "I went looking for a taco blog eleven years ago, and I found clerkmanifesto, where you talked about libraries, books, art, music, death, time travel, street design, customer service work, anarchism, cats, and baked potatoes, but you never talked about tacos."

"I had almost given up hope." You add in a small voice.

Well. I say:

You...

Have come to the right place.

And finally...

It is the right time.

Taco

You heat the pan and put in a little olive oil or butter where the butter is slightly tastier and the olive oil is slightly more healthy.

Put in a pinch of salt and some ground pepper if you do that.

Now add something, anything meat-like:

Potatoes diced very tiny, or wheat gluten chorizo, or ground cow, or chopped up shrimp, or tiny diced eggplant. 

I have used all of these and hope to expand my horizons even further in the future. If there is a future.

Let's plan on a future, okay?

 

You can now add a little chopped up tomato and a single, brave, sliced garlic clove. The tomato is pretty optional. The garlic is too, but a lot less so.

After a minute or two throw in a handful of greens. I mostly use spinach, but have also used arugula. I would try chard, but I don't have any.

A squirt of lemon or lime juice is good here, and a spoonful of salsa. Gently mix it all up, meat, greens, seasonings.

When the greens are mostly wilted, push the mix aside in pile in the pan to make room for a corn tortilla. Put the tortilla in and spin it around to pick up any oil or juices you can find. Hopefully there are some, but not too many. Lay sharp cheddar cheese (or similar yummy cheese), grated, or in small pieces of slices, evenly over the tortilla, and put another tortilla on top.

Two tortillas!

Cook a few minutes until the bottom tortilla is cooked through but still soft and pliable. Flip it with a spatula. Spin it around to pick up the current juices. Press down on it with the spatula to flatten and spread the melting cheese inside.

Scoop up your meat and greens mix and put it all on top of your tortilla sandwich wherein you have made two tortillas into one thicker, cheesier tortilla. 

When the bottom tortilla is cooked and the cheese has melted, fold it into a, wait for it....

Taco.

  

Yes, a taco.

You do not need to add anything, anything, to this taco! But maybe let it cool for a couple minutes.

And that,

dear reader, 

is,

my,

taco.

And, for me, it is now every meal, because...

Every 

Meal

Is

A 

Taco

My CSA recipe

 

Yes, this is a recipe, believe it or not.

Recently in this space I introduced you to my CSA, a subscription to a farm for a bi-weekly box of Winter produce. I suggested that instead of cooking all these virtuous vegetables, I instead went out for oysters with my darling wife, and when the resources for doing that were used up I resorted to chewing on an old husk of parmesan cheese rather than cook all that produce.

But ultimately I did cook my produce. 

You see, I worked out a trick!

Fresh vegetables are so profoundly healthy that one is free to do anything to them to make them delicious, and no matter how unhealthy the cooking methods might be, one's nutritional lead, so to speak, is so great, that one cannot possibly lose in the preparation of so many fresh Winter vegetables, kind of like the hare in a race with the tortoise.

Anyway, here is how I cooked the food from my CSA box.

A refresher or partial ingredient list:

I had potatoes, red kale, broccoli, and a cabbage.

I reserved the cabbage for another time because my wrist hurt too much to cut up a cabbage the size of a prize winning pumpkin.

I diced the potato.

I cut up the broccoli into pieces.

I tore the red kale laboriously into bits.

Then, in a saucepan, I melted several pounds of butter, added plenty of salt and pepper and some mashed cloves of garlic, apple cider vinegar, cherry tomatoes, and an alarming amount of maple syrup because it is so good on pancakes. Then I threw in all the veggies. I cooked it for awhile. I added a can of tomatoes and a can of beans. Then I cooked it all for a long time.

How does this sound?

No, I didn't know either, but...

It turned out it was delicious! So delicious that I am sharing my recipe!

It was...

Very...

sweet. And buttery.

I've already practically eaten it all!

So I hope this method works with cabbage.

My angels and demons

 

I am regularly accompanied here by demons and angels.

So when I tell you about a coffee drink I am immensely fond of that includes the flavors of maple, coffee, and cherry, the demon cuttingly says:

"That sounds awful, but what would we expect from someone who, as an eight-year-old, loved ketchup on their cottage cheese?"

And the angel says "Right, because it's well established that cheese and tomatoes are a hideous combination."

The demon blushes, though it's hard to detect.

I say warmly to the angel "You are like a demon for demons."

The angel blushes a little too. But in a different way.

A drink for nobody but me

 

Usually I like things I can recommend to everyone!

But here is my favorite afternoon beverage. It's really good, and though I can't imagine most people not liking it, I can't imagine anyone liking it either. 

It doesn't sound like it's good. Not even to me. And I love it.

"How do I love this drink?" I ask myself as I drink it. I do not have an answer. And yet it is strange and distinctly lovable. It reminds of the best qualities of an old fashioned soda fountain, the promise of it, the strange, sweet confluence of fizzing, charged, reinvented flavors, all combined in the drink I didn't know I was always looking for in every new coffee shop I've wandered into on a midafternoon day.

Maybe this is too much preview for a drink no one else in the world will ever try.

So I will just tell you how to make the drink- which has no name because it is humble and without vanity. And you will never make it and I don't advise it anyway, but you'll have read it, which is nearly the same thing.

You put in a third of a glass of concentrated cold pressed coffee. You add a real vigorous lashing of maple syrup, like, it should be a bit too sweet at this point. Then you put in some whole milk. You should probably be at about half a glass now. Give it a good stir. Add a cube or two of ice if your ingredients weren't super chilled, but it's better to just have really cold ingredients to start with. It this was a cooking blog I probably would have mentioned that first. Now you need a can of black cherry-flavored sparkling water. I prefer the Waterloo brand and actually don't know any other brands with this flavor. So there.

Pour in this sparkling water to fill up the glass.

Take a sip.

Yes, it actually should taste like a cherry candy coffee phosphate. I know that doesn't sound right.

But it is.

Naturalism

 

Remember how I'm on vacation?

I warned you about it yesterday?

But no one can leap into a vacation. One has to ease into it. Get the hang of it. One has to clean the floor of the apartment first before one can call it a vacation.

No, that's not a metaphor.

Today, on the first day of my vacation, but before I cleaned the floor (which I am putting off at this very moment!), I took my real camera out for the first time in ages. It had been hurting my injured back to carry it around, so I'd been wandering this photogenic world without it.

Today though, I had my camera, so I took some pictures, which we will now look at while sipping Aperol Spritzes.

Here's how you make an Aperol Spritz:

In an oversized wine goblet, place five cubes of ice. Add two or three ounces of Aperol. It's pretty! Add some more for fun. Pour in one of those single serving bottles of Prosecco. Top with sparkling water.

Should you stir?

I guess. If you want. But you don't have to because it's vacation.

Here are all the pictures. Because it is vacation I won't annotate as we go, I'll just let you know that the pictures involve the usual naturalist Summer assortment: flowers, bees, dead fish, sunsets over the city, a bird, and a rabbit.

I trust you to sort it all out, but you should drink about halfway through your Spritz first.

Not a recipe: Tomato Sauce

For the tomato lovers among us it is generally appreciated that a tomato is easily enjoyed raw, whole, and as is. There is no concern given to the seed or the skin. They are perfectly fine for eating. And while intriguing additions of olive oil, salt, basil, and bufala mozzarella can certainly delight, they are all augmentations, never edits.

But notable in every recipe I've seen regarding saucing tomatoes, one is emphatically instructed to remove the skins and the pulpy seeds.


I say not.


Oh these recipe writers, Italians, and culinary traditions are certainly correct. I won't dispute that. Their progenitors are all more proper, wiser, and better cooks than me. Their recipes are absolutely right and true and brave and thank you for your service, but

No.

Not for me.

I really like tomato seeds. I like their soft crunch. I like boiling them down in olive oil and all their prodigious juices. I like their density and gravity and the way the rest of the luscious sauce fries into and sticks to them.

I don't have a garden, but the CSA my lovely wife and I subscribed to this year has provided such a wealth of tomatoes that eventually there was nothing for it but to sauce them.

Big pot. Pour in an unnerving amount of olive oil. Chopped up garlic, get it cooking. Salt. Lime juice. Honey, balsamic, fresh basil. And then chop up all the tomatoes, coarsely indeed, and cook.

Cook cook cook cook cook cook!

And simmer. Stew, bubble, heat, and seethe. And simmer and boil.

Until three long hours later:

Simmer some more!

This is my sauce.


I rarely get to make it, only when by chance I am bursting with tomatoes. 

There are worse things to be bursting with.

It isn't quite like regular tomato sauces, it's chewy. It's tangy and sweet. It's unorthodox. And I know it wouldn't be proper of me to recommend it.

So I won't.

I'll just sit here quietly and think about eating it on some pasta.

But it was nice of you to listen.

Tacos in a jar, a recipe!

In the library breakroom there is much notice for our upcoming holiday potluck. And on the table where one is to sign up and indicate the dish one is bringing, someone thoughtfully placed a copy of Emeril's Potluck, presumably to spark ideas for what to bring. I promptly opened it up... 

and was horrified! 

This was for reasons I feel I can best express by providing my own recipe below.





This recipe is for my super popular, and very handy, and perfect for potlucks, Clerkmanifesto's Tacos in a Jar. Festive, portable, tasty, and charmingly packed, Clerkmanifesto's Tacos in a Jar will enliven any party or picnic!

Clerkmanifesto's Tacos in a Jar

Ingredients:


3 cans Clerkmanifesto brand tomato paste
2 pounds ground beef
2 onions
2 packets of Clerkmanifesto Tacos in a Jar! Seasoning Packet available online or at your local grocery
2 cans Clerkmanifesto Style Special Italian Pitted Black Olives (generic substitute is okay if you don't care whether anyone likes the food you cook)
4 ears shucked F1 Hybrid Feldenstein Variety Corn on the Cob
1 lb. extra sharp white cheddar, as aged as you can afford.
24 corn tortillas cut into inch sized pieces


12 Clerkmanifesto's Tacos in a Jar Taco Jars!


Assembly:


Carmelize the onions, set aside in a Clerkmanifesto Fiesta Bowl.

Salt and brown meat, drain, stir in tomato paste, and Clerkmanifesto's Tacos in a Jar Seasoning, set on low heat.

After awhile add onions, Clerkmanifesto Style olives, and shucked Feldenstein Hybrid Corn (non gmo).

In an oversized Tacos in a Jar, a Recipe!, the Blogpost Skillet, cook the tortilla pieces in salt, lime juice, and olive oil until they are crispy as many places as you can get them. Add the meat mixture and cheese. Stir.

Using a Clerkmanifesto Taco Scoop, fill your 12 Clerkmanifesto's Tacos in a Jar Taco Jars!




You're ready to go!

Don't forget to mention where you got the recipe every few seconds while people try to avoid you at the potluck.

And remember: Don't eat any of that other potluck food, that stuff is not wholesome. It may be full of Emeril products!

Sweet and sour

Oh, don't mind me, I'm just cooking. I'm making Sweet and Sour Shrimp! Well, sort of Sweet and Sour Shrimp, but actually a little more like Fried Shrimp and Seared Broccoli in Sezchuan Sauce. Yeah, that.

It's going to be so good!

But it is taking a very long time to cook. I wonder if I will ever get to eat it. I don't think it helps much that I have had to come work at the library for eight hours in the middle of the process.

Last night I peeled the shrimp. Then I dredged them in flour, salt, pepper, and a little corn starch. I dipped them in beaten egg. Then I coated them in panko bread crumbs. Then I fried them in walnut oil until they were golden and crispy.

It was a lot of work. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They'll try to. I've seen them do so in those fancy cookbooks. But Thomas Keller won't. He is a revered and very famous chef and I saw a glamorous ad for some online class he was doing. At the end he said something like, and I wildly paraphrase here, "Cooking great food requires commitment and time. And remember, patience, patience, patience." 

I don't have a lot of patience. Like when I dropped all my shrimp in the panko bread crumbs BECAUSE IT WAS SO TEDIOUS ONE AT A TIME!

First you had to peel each little shrimp. Then you had to wiggle each little string of gut out of each little shrimp. Then you had to roll each shrimp around in the flour. Then you had to dip each shrimp in the egg. Then you had to AAAAUUUUUUGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

So I only have great food occasionally.

But where were we? Oh, then we set aside the golden shrimp and cooked cut up broccoli in the oil, adding chunks of onion and baby sweet peppers until they were all softened and glossy. I set that aside too. Then I went to sleep. Then I woke up and had coffee and toast with my wife. Then I went to work.

That's where I am now, so I can see that it's all kind of a recipe cliffhanger. Surely you are wondering: What happens next?



Imagine how my stomach feels.

Mayonnaise

Simple foods are the best foods. What overwrought kitchen construction of a dish could possibly rival a sweet, pure mandarin orange, just pulled from out of its jeweler's cloak of a skin? What twisted contrivance of food can stand up to a summer tomato, cherry red and bursting from its flower? What overworked, complicated conundrum of an edible could ever rival a simple berry, wild on the vines?

The answer, of course, is mayonnaise.

Yes, mayonnaise.

Hey, let's make some mayonnaise!

You need a vintage, 1980's Cuisinart. Put a raw egg in it. It has to be organic so you can tell yourself you won't get any diseases from it. Don't include the shell. Throw in, I don't know, a couple hearty splashes of sherry vinegar and as large a pinch of salt as your fingers can humanly make. Squeeze in the juice of half a lime, but don't work at it too much. Plop in a goodly spoonful of honey. Pour in the amount of olive oil that if it were in a skillet would make you say "Whoa! Way too much oil!"

Close up the lid on your vintage 80's Cuisinart. Turn it on and let it go a couple of minutes.

Now you need toasted walnut oil.

Fill up your feeder cup with it while the machine is running. It will slowly drip out thorough the hole at the bottom. For years I didn't know about the hole and patiently poured in oil in as fine a stream as possible. Then my wife said "Hey, there's a hole!"

Whoa!

After the oil is done turn off the Cuisinart and open it up. Uh oh! It looks a little too soft and liquidy! Surely one has to add something.

You know what you add?

More walnut oil!

I know, crazy, but that's how it works!

But first peel a thumb-sized clove of garlic and throw it in.

Now fill another feeder cup of walnut oil while the Cuisinart is running. When it's all empty you will have...

Mayonnaise!

Spread it thickly on good, fresh, rough bread. You can put other things on the bread if you want, but you don't have to.

Why don't you have to?

Because simple foods are the best foods.

And what could be simpler than mayonnaise?

TGD

Thanksgiving does nothing for me. I'm not keen on the symbols. Buckles? Pilgrims? The myths are all a little stomach turning in light of future events. And, most of all, I don't care for any of the traditional foods. I don't even like them. One of the volunteers at the library I work at told me about one of their family's traditional Thanksgiving dishes. It was jellied (canned) cranberries, whipped cream, and saltine crackers. You get a big bowl and put down a layer of crushed saltines, a layer of whipped cream, and a layer of jellied cranberry, and then you just keep layering over and over until you're done. He said it was really good.

"Hmm." I said. It would have been rude and wouldn't have been understood anyway if I said what I thought, which was "That has to be the most goyish recipe I've ever heard in my life."

But Thanksgiving is kind of a goyish holiday.

I did grow up celebrating it. But after a few decades I managed to winnow down my family to just people I was crazy about. That was one other person total, and since she's not too keen on roasted turkey either there's not a great deal of the traditional holiday going on in my house.

For which, among other things, I am thankful.

A review of The Fireroast Cafe burrito

I was thinking about this burrito I had at The Fireroast Cafe late this morning with my wife. I was thinking it was a very bad burrito and that I would write a scathing review of it and put it on the Internet. There millions of people would read about the bad burrito, and I would be revenged upon Fireroast Cafe!

But then I thought:

What did The Fireroast Cafe ever do to me?

Except maybe serve me an $8 burrito that was not to my taste.

I don't want The Fireroast Cafe to suffer. I want them to thrive and prosper. I want to help them.

So I offer the recipe for how not to make a burrito:

How Not to Make a Burrito

1. Mix together cooked rice, black beans, corn, and peppers, possibly in a big pot. Cook until hot and soft.

2. Mix in a trace amount of cheese to disappear into the hot mass.

3. Dish out a generous glop onto a big flour tortilla and add absolutely no fresh ingredients of any kind. Especially don't add any avocado.

4. Roll it all up proper burrito fashion and cook it handsomely in a panini press until it has nice grill marks and parts of it are luke warm and parts are scalding hot.

5. Enjoy the not very good burrito somehow, if you can. Also burn your lip. 



"Well fine." You think, especially if you're the owner of The Fireroast Cafe checking your reviews on the Internet. "That's all perfectly condemnatory. But then tell me, smart guy, how should I make a burrito?!"


I don't know. Surprise me.