FoodNerd!

Craving something a little extra after lunch today, I put two spoonfuls of cocoa into a mug; added generous dashes of cinnamon, clove and chipotle; and maybe two tablespoons of agave syrup. Then I stirred it up — the resulting paste was better than most truffles, but I resisted the urge to just eat it that way — and filled the mug with hot water.

The resulting drink was more spicy than anything, with the sweetness diluted down by the water, but it was warming and energizing and sharp. I feel great, without any of the creamy sluggishness that sometimes comes with a cocoa treat made with milk. Yum!

I have been making pots of chicken soup for tallasiandude, who is feeling poorly this week. And since I have been buying whole chickens for that, I have had access to small amounts of chicken liver.

Normally what I do is just fry it up and glaze it with a little balsamic vinegar, which is lovely. But this time, since I’d just done that YESTERDAY (tallasiandude eats a LOT of soup when he’s sick), I decided I’d make some chopped liver, Jewish-deli-style.

So I fried some finely diced onion in a tablespoon of butter, put in 3 pieces of chicken liver once it was starting to brown, sprinkled in salt, and fried it till the onion was just about to burn, at which point I tipped in a little bit of sherry and let it cook till the liver was done and the liquid was syrupy. Then I put it into a bowl, ground on a little black pepper, and smushed it into a paste.

I just put some of that on a cracker just now, and it is HEAVEN.

I just started a pot of red beans on the stove before settling down to work (Cook’s Illustrated’s Cajun Red Beans and Rice recipe, if you’re interested, which is super easy and exceedingly delicious), and the house smells absolutely gorgeous. Who needs air freshener when you have garlic, paprika and bacon?

is what I am having with the combination of corn cut off the cob plus pimenton de la vera, usually in a salad-ish mixture with other vegetables like peppers or onions and perhaps some cheese. HOLY COW. I mix up the veggies, then put on a sprinkle of sea salt and an undignified amount of pimenton, and it is so very, very delicious.

my lunch today was a bowlful of:

Trader Joe’s ready to eat butter lettuce
sliced radishes
crumbled feta
sliced green onion
diced spicy-garlic carrot pickles
Trader Joe’s chipotle hummus
half an avocado
drizzle of white wine vinegar

The feta, hummus and avocado served as dressing. It was tangy, spicy, savory and crunchy. YUM.

Today I made some tiny meatballs and miniburgers out of:

1 lb ground pork
5 soaked and minced shiitake caps
a minced scallion
juice from a thick slice of ginger
2 or 3 tablespoons of oyster sauce
ground pepper
a crust of multigrain bread
1 egg

I browned ‘em in peanut oil, and I just had some now as a snack, and they came out pretty good. Good with rice, Asiany in flavor but not so much so that they won’t also be tasty with the peas-and-turnips in butter I’m making next. Nom.

I finally broke down and bought a fancy electric meat slicer in order to properly slice the salumi I often get from my brother. Now, this is not the slice-everything-in-sight wonder that the brochure claims it is, but hot damn if it doesn’t slice the paper-thin bejesus out of my cured meats. Worth every penny.

Last night I sliced up some mole, finocchiona, and tartufo salumi to eat with the pasta and red sauce that was the sole dinner option after a hectic week. Yes, and it was only Tuesday. Yeesh. And today I was able to enjoy the leftover sliced goodness with a few slices of bread and fresh cherries for lunch. Summer does not suck.

Whenever we get BBQ takeout, inevitably there is a bunch of obligatory cornbread, and because we are in the North, said cornbread is inevitably as sweet as cake. Eeew. I never eat it. But I feel guilty throwing it away if no one else eats it either. So this morning, I took a couple of pieces, crumbled them into a bowl with some canned peaches, poured milk over it like cereal and ate it for breakfast. Not at all terrible, and remarkably filling.

I couldn’t help it — today I was seized by an overwhelming desire for a rice ball filled with canned salmon and chopped kimchi, and I even waited to eat lunch until the rice was ready — but damn it if that rice didn’t collapse all over the place as soon as I picked up my nice pressed, molded treat. I have been buying the short-grain brown rice from Whole Foods. It’s tasty and easy to acquire in the course of normal food-gathering. However, I find that it is utterly useless for making onigiri — the grains don’t stick together for crap. This confuses me, because the grains are the same shape as the white short-grain rice I use for less-diet-friendly onigiri. However, that white rice I bought at the Korean market, so perhaps they are not the same varieties of rice despite their similarities. I would prefer, of course, to just buy one kind of brown rice, since it keeps much less well than white rice, but I guess I better trot over to the Koreans and see if they have any brown rice that can be used for my fiberrific rice balls. Or is it just that brown rice doesn’t work for this application? Maki at JustHungry claims that it does…

Oh, what a wretched pun. Last night we made spaghetti all’ubriaco, the delicious pasta cooked in red wine that we ate in Florence, tipped off by E&O, our intrepid eating pals. And our other pal brought over a huge baggie of ramps that she foraged with her mom, and it seemed only logical to chop some ramps and add them to the pasta. Logical, and in actual fact, truly delicious. The ramps added a sharpness and savoriness to the buttery, nutty, fruity weirdness of that pasta, and made it even better. The other nice thing is that a bowl of chopped ramps makes your whole house smell terrific if you leave it out on the table for a couple of hours while you finish off some sliced salumi and bread and cheese and wine. Better than air freshener!