The Spice

I’m going to go out on a limb here and admit that I am, in fact, a complete geek.  And that, yes, the title to this post is a reference to two extremely geeky phenomena.  1) Dune.  “The spice is the worm.  The worm is the spice.”  and 2) Dune quotes set to hypnotrance beats.  “The spice extends life.  The spice expands consciousness.  The spice is vital for space travel.”  Right.  I know.  Sorry about that.  This post actually has nothing to do with either worms OR space travel.  It has everything to do with THE SPICE.

But yes, it’s true.  It is that time of year again.  It is time for the secret spice.  The time that Mom-In-Law is harvesting the 4.72 kajillion chili peppers growing in her back yard.    It’s pretty impressive, to be honest.  There are round peppers and long peppers and short peppers.  There are green, red, yellow, orange, and purple peppers.  Habeñeros and jalapeños and Thai spur chilis.  To name them all would take about 4 days.  And so they all get cleaned, frozen, mashed, dried, and fried into all of the various secret spices.  And while these cosmic substances may not actually get you into outerspace, they might, in fact, blow your mind, if not your tastebuds. 

You may recall my references to the production of secret spice and the necessity of owning a gas mask if you should decide to step into this eyeball-tearing, throat-searing line of work.  I’ve taken the plunge, sans gas mask, and have begun the fiery task of replenishing the family secret spice jar.  As a matter of fact, I’ve double-dared myself and made not only Secret Spice #2, but Secret Spice #76, a spicy lao roasted pepper dipping sauce called jeow.  Granted, my jeow is probably not the same as or as good as the Authentic Version, but it has the same basic palate of ingredients: roasted chilis, roasted shallots, roasted garlic, salt, sugar, fish sauce, and cilantro all mushed up together in a blender.  S-Man’s comment: “Hmmm. It’s good.  More salt” (he was right).  Then, “Your jeow is hot!  I can feel it in my throat!  I think I even heard him making that awkward a-herm, a-herm noise that some of us white folks make when the spice gets stuck all over our tonsils while eating in Thai restaurants.

Waitress:  How spicy do you want your Drunken Noodles?

You: Oh, I like them spicy, all right.  How about 5 stars?

Waitress:  Okay, you sure?    5 stars very hot.

You: Sure, I’m sure.

Later on…

Waitress:  How is everything?  Not too hot?

You:  A-herm.  A-herm.

As for the Secret Spice #2, I actually fried the darn chilis this time, just to see how really painful it would be.  I know, I must be some kind of masochyst to do that to myself on purpose.  But it wasn’t really that bad, I just kept the peppers in the pan with a bit of oil on really low heat, cooled them off and then ground them up in the ex-coffee-grinder that shall never be used for anything but hot peppers ever again.  Seriously, it wasn’t that bad.  A-herm.  A-herm.

P.S.  If you are also the biggest geek on the planet, feel free to scroll down and enjoy some uber-geekafied Dune spice music, a-la-You-Tube.  If my first paragraph left you both confused AND annoyed, just stop now.  For real. 



Ragin’ Asian Tofu Tenders

Yes, it is the ongoing saga of the Tofu Chronicles, attempting to answer the age-old questions once again: What in the name of you-know-who can be done to give tofu some flavor?  and How can I make all of my food more like fried mozzarella sticks?

In addition to all of this, I have in my little brain a new obsession with home-made baby food.  Which of course, leads to a down the road obsession with home-made kid food.  And so I wondered to myself whether or not tofu could be tendered.  No, I did not pound it with a mallet or sprinkle tenderizer on it.  For real, people, even the extra extra firm tofu is really pretty tender.  What I mean is tendered,  in the sense of, breaded and cooked up like chicken tenders and then dipped in tasty sauce a-la-Burger King.  Could I have it my way?

So, after diligently squeezing the tofu-juice out of my hunk-o-bean curd, I dipped them in flour, then into beaten egg, and finally into a mixture of panko bread crumbs, sesame seeds, and Pensey’s Cajun Seasoning.  And then I fried them.  The health conscious fragment of my being is screaming and gnashing her teeth, “NOOOOOOO, not another FRIIIIIEEEEED food!!!!!”  and she wonders if this dish might be just as easily crisped up in the oven (probably).  But the rest of my inner hedonist is easily able to rationalize away these fears about too much frying.  For one thing, it’s TOFU.  For another, I usually fry with canola or olive oil, and after being brainwashed for years by the Spaniards about the Mediterranean diet being the absolute healthiest diet in the world (I’m sure that their smoking from age 5 has nothing to do with them all being so skinny), I’m pretty sure that frying stuff in olive oil is okay.

The tenders were pretty tasty on their own, but to top it off, remember the tasty sauce?  I took a bit of horseradish brown mustard and mixed it with local honey.  Horseradish honey mustard?  Absolutely.  And maybe, just maybe one day I can trick my kiddo into eating tofu by giving it the Burger King treatment.  Who knows, maybe I’ll even throw in a paper crown.

Fresh crusty bread… in as little as 3 days!

Generally, when my friends learn that I like to make bread, they ask me if I have a bread maker.  Then, when I say no, they ask me if I want their bread maker.  It seems that a lot of people have extra bread makers sitting around that they never use.  I’m pretty sure that I would never use it either, because I prefer to make my bread the long, drawn-out, you-better-have-a-lot-of-time-on-your-hands way.  The baguettes that I made the other day only took about 36 hours, but I’ve been known to stretch out my bread making for as much as 3 days.  It really stinks when you work on dough for that long and then somehow screw up on the baking, but that is the price you pay for not following recipes.

I got my first taste of non-recipe bread baking when I took a trip to Alaska with my parents several years ago.  Our family had lived there, on a community farm on an island near Juneau.  What, you may ask, were your parents doing on an island in Alaska?  Well, I’d tell you, but it’s complicated.  All I know is that it involved eating a whole lot of weird stuff.  Don’t even try getting my parents involved in a weird food contest.  They could put Andrew Zimmern to shame.   Radish pie?  Boiled skunk cabbage?  Pig testicle sandwich?  I was, fortunately, young enough when we left to not remember all of the radishes.

S0, if Alaska is a heiny with two legs protruding downward, we were more or less on the calf of the right leg, the one next to Canada.  So, twenty years after leaving, we went back for a visit to our old stomping grounds.  Besides the mega-tons of king crab legs and home-smoked salmon, one of my favorite memories from this trip was my baking session with the resident bread-mistress.  We did everything from scratch, right down to grinding our own wheat and rye flour with a hand mill.  Seriously, that is dedication.  Grinding grain into flour by hand is majorly hard work.  It gives your bread a wonderful, hearty texture, but you really have to try not to drip your sweat into the fresh flour.  That would give your bread a whole different kind of je ne sais quoi… sort of an eau de locker room.

So once I got back home to the mainland, I received a package from my bread mentor.  It included some of her flour, both wheat and rye, and a recipe for pumpernickel bread.  I followed her recipe a few times, but then, remembering how she just did everything without really seeming to measure, I began to experiment with my dough, trying to just slowly add the flour to my liquid ingredients until the dough just “felt” right.  I think it has taken years of practice to really get the feel for my dough, and the feel is different for whole grain flour and white bread flour, so there is a lot of trial and error.

My technique has evolved into this: I start my dough with a starter.  Shocking.  My cousin got inspired about a year or two ago and got some wild yeast into her starter by leaving out her flour/water/milk mixture in the kitchen for a few days.  She passed on a bit of that starter to me, which, after lying dormant in my freezer for a year or so, I pulled out, defrosted, and activated by adding some more water, milk, and flour.

I fed my starter regularly for about a day (about every four hours) with more flour and then eventually added some salt and kneaded the dough, shaped it into baguettes, let them rise and then baked them at 450 degrees for about 35-40 minutes.  I added hot water to the pan in the bottom of the oven for a sauna effect, and also let the baguettes sit in the oven for about 10 minutes after turning it off to really give that crust a serious crustiness.

It’s not artesan bread in 5 minutes a day, that’s for sure, but it feels good to watch your bread take shape over time, slowly, and naturally.  There’s something primal about it, too, doing things the way that women have done them for centuries, nurturing the warm yeasty dough until it is ready to bake.  There’s no rapid rising involved here.  Just good old-fashioned patience and love.