food

The Sounds of Pomegranate Season

by

800px-Pomegranate03_edit
I’ve promised myself that when I move, I will upgrade my kitchen equipment. I have a few exotic things—such as a fish poacher, a Moroccan tagine, and a Swiss pressure cooker—but as one of my readers recently pointed out, I’m lacking some important items. “Dude. Seriously. Buy a Kitchen Aid mixer. I mean, if you're going to go through the trouble of having this blog (which I just discovered) and do things in the kitchen, get 2 tools: 1) The mixer and a food processor,” wrote Jez, of the website Fresh Beer Every Friday.

He’s probably right, but I’m a firm believer that you do not need fancy equipment to make fine food. You need a few good knives and a few solid pots. Fresh ingredients are more important than anything else. A bread maker, fuhgeddaboudit.

I plan on staying in an apartment in the city, and not moving to a house with a huge kitchen, so I will always have to limit what I keep on hand. There is one thing I will be certain to improve, though—my kitchen stereo. At the moment, it has a half-broken old boombox that only plays the radio. I dream about installing a Sonos system that magically keeps the music flowing in all the rooms, but my budget will probably be too modest for that.

I have a sizable library of music, and I’m often on the lookout for new acts. Pomegranates, an up-and-coming quartet out of Ohio, just caught my eye. It is pomegranate season, after all, and the ruby fruit is one of Santa Maria’s favorites. (She recently left a half-eaten one on the counter, and I’ve seen her toting the bright red seeds around with her; last week she gave them to our friend Randall Eng, at a performance of his opera "Henry's Wife".)

It seems like a perplexing puzzle and an enormous amount of effort to open one and get the seeds out (though Santa Maria has never been afraid to do the work). A colleague of mine who is a fan of the fruit recently told me about a method involving a giant bowl of water. She swears it is easier, but I haven’t had the time to try it. As soon as I do, I’ll share the results here. 

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with Pomegranates, the band. They join a long list of quality acts from the Buckeye State, which includes the punk rock greats the Pretenders, Erika Wennerstrom’s raucous power trio the Heartless Bastards, the experimental blues-rock duo the Black Keys, and the eternally funky Ohio Players (“Love Rollercoaster”). The Pomegranates have a more contemporary and chiming sound (the remind me a tiny bit of the lovely English act the xx), and they even have a song called “In the Kitchen.” Enjoy.

 

 

Find more artists like Pomegranates at MySpace Music

How Not to Make Quinoa Salad

by

Burning Oven
In many ways, cooking for a family differs from running a restaurant, but in some ways it is similar. Restaurants serve several different entrees, and there have been nights when I’m deep into multiple dishes for each member of the family, such as when we have our seafood feast: Nina likes mussels, but Pinta does not. I try to limit the options each night, though. After all, I’m not trying to run a restaurant.

Both professional chefs and parents who cook also have to do more than one thing (or six things) at time. Chefs have training and develop skills to do this well. Take short order cooks. I learned a little bit about how their minds keep track of tasks from reading “The Egg Men,” Burkhard Bilger’s pulse-raising story about short-order breakfast cooks in Las Vegas, which ran in the Sept. 5, 2010 issue of The New Yorker (subscription required for the full article).

“Warren Meck, a neuroscientist at Duke University, has identified the neural circuitry that allows the brain to time several events at once. As it happens, short-order cooks are among his favorite examples. They’re like jugglers, he says, who can keep a dozen balls in the air at the same time. He calls them “the master interval timers.”
Whenever a cook sets a pan on a griddle, Meck says, a burst of dopamine is released in the brain’s frontal cortex. The cortex is full of oscillatory neurons that vibrate at different tempos. The dopamine forces a group of these neurons to fall into synch, which sends a chemical signal to the corpus striatum, at the base of the brain. “We call that the start gun,” Meck says. The striatum recognizes the signal as a time marker and releases a second burst of dopamine, which sends a signal back to the frontal cortex via the thalamus—the stop gun. Every time this neural circuit is completed, the brain gets better at distinguishing that particular interval from the thousands of others that it times during the course of a day. An experienced cook, Meck believes, will have a separate neural circuit set up for every task: an over-easy circuit, an over medium circuit, a sunny-side-up circuit, and so on, each one reinforced through constant repetitive use.”

In my case, I had a bit of trouble managing multiple tasks last night. I foolishly tried to roast the potatoes for my quinoa salad while at the same time trying to decide if acquiring a piece of real estate would be good move for my family. The house hunt is one thing that’s not giving me a dopamine rush, and I burned the potatoes.

Cheating Heart: Leftovers are an Easy Way to Improve Quinoa Salad

by

I make a quinoa salad just about every week. Santa Maria loves it, and she eats it for lunch almost daily. It's a tasty, healthy, economical, and easy-to-prepare dish. One nice thing is that it keeps. If you don't dress it, the salad will stay reasonably fresh for days. Make it Sunday night; finish it Thursday at noon.

I usually eat it once a week, but I need more protein than it provides, so I often pair it with poached chicken, or whatever leftovers I might have on hand. Yesterday, I was in a rush and I supplemented it with some prepared and marinated soy bars from the coop (which we almost always have on hand) and half a ball of mozzarella cheese. The salad is so low fat that I always need to add something rich, such as bag of potato chips or a half an avocado, to really feel full. The cheese did the trick. Like the soy bars, it was approaching the end of its usable lifespan, having lingered in the refrigerator for more than a few days. I was happy to eat them (part of my job around the house is cleaning out the refrigerator, a task I take literally), but I would not suggest it on a regular basis. It didn't taste very good.

Today, however, was a completely different story. I had a bit of the quinoa salad left in my office refrigerator, and I paired it with a real delight. Last night, Santa Maria was out at a business dinner at Community Food & Juice, a restaurant on the Upper West Side. She had the steak of the day, a slab of "sustainably raised Piedmont beef," she called it. Now I don't know if she meant that it came from Italy or from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. I do know, though, that she brought half of it home, and gave it to me. It was delicious. I sliced it up and had it, along with a bit of the restaurant's broccoli, with my quinoa salad. I couldn't have been more pleased.