After over a month without posting, ongoing photography issues, and a series of shakeups in related areas, the Dangerous Kitchen Laboratory is closing its doors for the foreseeable future. When and if operations will resume is anyone's guess, at the moment.
August 13, 2008
To the Surprise of No One...
June 3, 2008
Chinese Eggplant with Okra
I am run off my feet this week, and sadly it is for the most part not in service of Dangerous culinary research, except in the sense of pursuing continued funding. It's remarkable what a person will do to get by in this world. Dangerous Kitchen business hasn't been entirely abandoned, but dealing with it can't be my highest priority right now.
May 24, 2008
Please Stand By
We here at the Dangerous Kitchen Laboratory have been experiencing some technical difficulties, particularly regarding our camera equipment - some recent photos have been so blurry that literally nothing is recognizable. The issue is at least partly resolved, and posting will resume shortly. Thank you for your patience.
May 10, 2008
Eggs Jǐnshàng
One of my favourite comfort foods is soba (the higher the buckwheat content the better) with Chinese broccoli and eggs over easy. The soba should be al dente, and the Chinese broccoli boiled briefly and then sauteed (without oil, preferably) with soy sauce and black pepper. The eggs are the most complicated part of the dish; first, you have to cook finely minced garlic and green onions in a very hot skillet in sesame oil and a little soy sauce so that the outside gets caramelized, and then reduce the heat a little, distribute the onions and garlic evenly over the pan, and crack the eggs over it. When the eggs are done the yolks should be completely runny, and in fact it's ideal to have the white just a little runny as well, so the eggs are essentially done as soon as they've been flipped. Other people might find the combination of textures a little off-putting, but when I eat it all is briefly right with the world.
Danger: Tofu Pizza
I'm expecting an update on the struggle against fava beans any day now, but in the meantime I have received a message about putting tofu on pizza.
The idea for putting tofu on pizza (which even I, a tofu lover, admit sounds questionable) came from the somewhat pretentiously named but excellent cookbook "A Taste of Heaven and Earth" by Bettina Vitell. The first pizza we tried was kale and tofu and it came out well, but once you know the trick of sautéing the strips of tofu with garlic first you can use pretty much whatever other ingredients you want. The second time around I used more "traditional" pizza toppings along with the tofu - mushrooms and sun-dried tomato - substituting That Dutchman's Gouda for mozzarella. (I am still searching for Buffalo Mozzarella with no luck. According to the CBC, "Cow's-milk mozzarella is a ball of fresh cheese swimming in brine, pleasant as ice cream but absolutely tasteless. Made out of buffalo milk, instead, it becomes an altogether different matter," and I agree.)I've never taken so long eating a pizza that it got soggy, unless I actually left part of it for breakfast, but that's good advice. I don't know if I agree that cow's milk mozzarella is "tasteless" per se, but compared to bufala it would certainly appear so. If you can ever find buffalo mozzarella, it's more like a good parmesan - a little will flavour the whole thing, and if you added enough to use it for texture, you probably won't taste anything else. It's fantastic, though, so that might not be a great loss.
The tricky bit has been using spelt flour instead of the whole wheat called for in the crust recipe. No matter how much extra flour I add it seems to come out too sticky to toss in proper pizza-crust-making fashion, so I've been forced to resort to a rolling pin. I don't know if you can tell from the picture but the cooked pizza is on parchment paper. According to a newspaper review of a local pizza restaurant this keeps the crust from getting soggy. Seems to work.
May 9, 2008
Random Cutting! Blind Cookery!
If you've ever watched old samurai movies, maybe you were a fan of Zatoichi, the masseur turned blind swordsman. You might remember the trailers for Zatoichi films, which at least in English contained bizarre exclamations like this post's title. If you haven't watched any old samurai movies, well, this is a cooking blog so we'll discuss your cinematic shortcomings some other time. The point here is that, although often emphasis is placed on cutting vegetables into nice, even, regular pieces, sometimes it's good to go the other way. Early experiments with chopping vegetables "blind" did not go well, but fortunately you can achieve the desired effect with your eyes open. Essentially an extremely course mincing, I think this was key to getting the eggplant just so in tonight's dinner: Vegetables in peanut sauce with lime-ginger tofu.
May 6, 2008
"Breadcore"? Seriously?
I'd like to thank my housemate Phil for the excellent photos in this post (look at that tomato!). Hopefully I'll get him to take more pictures for me in the future, so they'll actually look like food instead of blurry nightmares. You should see the originals - better than the actual food.