Cooking Techniques and Kitchen Gadgets

During my first fall as a single person, I started eating fried fish for dinner a few nights a week. I cooked it with ingredients I bought at M2M, a Korean bodega across the street from my apartment building in the East Village. M2M sold three types of fish: salmon, sole, and basa. The salmon was bright orange and fat, the sole was thin and yellow with odd raised bumps like pores, and the basa was light pink and smooth-fleshed. I have a bourgeois distaste for salmon stemming from a childhood vacation to France where it had was served at nearly every meal, and I feared the wan, pebbly sole. So I always bought the basa, despite the fact that before moving across the street from M2M I had never heard of this fish.

Each package of basa contained two fillets; when I cooked dinner for myself, I used only one, leaving the other piece in its yellow Styrofoam tray and covering it with cellophane wrap to spend another night in the refrigerator. I rinsed the basa fillet under the water, sometimes squeezing the juice of half of a lemon onto the slippery flesh. Then I traced the seam that ran down the center of the fillet with my small ceramic knife and divided the fillet in two parts. There were no bones. I cut each of the twin pieces into smaller chunks, then broke an egg into a bowls and beat it. In another bowl I mixed together equal parts flour and cornmeal with half-teaspoons of black pepper and oregano and a pinch of salt. I dropped the pieces of fish into the beaten egg, rinsed them around with the fingers of my left hand, and then dropped them into the flour mixture. I tossed them in the flour with the fingers of my right hand.

I didn't really think much about food and what went into making a nice meal until I was somewhat forced to learn how to cook when I was laid off (again) about ten years ago. I needed something to do with my free time and felt like I should contribute something to the household, since I was no longer bringing in any dough, so to speak. While I had certainly thrown things together over the years, this was a new quest to eat better and see if time and effort really made a difference.

I know that seems ridiculous, but I honestly had no frame of reference. My mother always did all the cooking when I was growing up, preparing hearty meals from scratch for her family of six. Of course, this was in the days where the whole family sat down to dinner every night and you had to finish everything on your plate before you were excused and then were promptly put to work cleaning up the kitchen. It was her domain and we ate what was prepared. Now I got to choose what graced our table.

With a subscription to Cooking Light and The Betty Crocker Cookbook in hand I began to create and in time to actually innovate and uncover the joys of foods I never thought would ever enter my mouth. One of my biggest revelations in the intervening years has been the deliciousness of the olive. I am addicted to everything about this "fruit" and now instead of picking them out of things I put more on. I think I could actually subsist on crusty bread dipped in e.v.o.o. (at least for a weekend). If the oil is infused with something, even better. One of my favorite cooking "tricks" is to add a bit of infused olive oil, usually garlic or basil, to the dish to brighten it up and deepen the flavors. I'd always pick up a tin here and there to keep on hand, never very concerned with the producer. That's all changed now that I've found Nudo Olive Oils.

Umami was discovered by a Japanese researcher one hundred years ago. Dr. Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University recognized that certain foods like asparagus, tomatoes, meat and cheese all shared a common taste. It's a bit hard to put your finger on, though it's often described as "savory." I think it's easier to think of it as the taste that makes your mouth water. It also has a distinctive mouth feel, it lends a fullness or roundness.

One of the first things I learned at a recent Umami Symposium is that while taste and flavor are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Flavor is determined by taste and smell. There are only five tastes--sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Just as sweetness is imparted by sugar, umami is imparted by glutamate, a type of amino acid, and ribonucleotides, including inosinate and guanylate, which occur naturally in many foods. It is also manufactured in monosodium glutamate. It is added or occurs naturally in products with hydrolyzed soy protein and autolyzed yeast such as Marmite, Vegemite, Maggi, and Kewpie mayonnaise. It also exists in most cheese flavored snack foods.

From the L.A. Times

The other day, I just couldn't shake the thought of slow-smoking some ribs. I was in the mood for Memphis-style baby backs, the meat fall-off-the-bone tender, a simple dry rub tantalizingly complicated with deep hickory notes, the flavors drawn out with a tart vinegar-Dijon mop.

There's a primal wonder to smoked food — that such depth of flavor can come from so simple a technique. And then, of course, there's the lure of the sunny afternoon spent in a lawn chair with a cold beer while you're waiting, patiently, for the Weber to work its magic.

But then it started raining.

The audacity of winter. Even in Southern California, we have our seasons. I took a good long look at my kettle grill through the kitchen window as it rained, but those ribs wouldn't stop dancing through my head, like a song that just wouldn't let go.

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