Looking for a custom bike frame?

Then think about this. Great advice and perspective from Joe Lindsey.

Little Beckham

And we're back.

Going to tie up some loose ends here with a couple or three videos of the boy. Sorry about the low rez quality. The iPhone video cam is super convenient but has its limitations in low light, despite M's Tarrantino-esque vision and de Millian camera-work.

First up: check out the rocket right leg on the boy. 18 months and he's firing shots that have every junior league goalie trembling.

One of my faves: showing off his juggling skills.

Truth be told, traditional ball-centric sports are a distant second on Z's preference sheet. He's more of an extreme outdoor enthusiast: climbing and BASE jumping.

Another Non-Recipe

Posole is a staple in these parts. Mexican soup. And like chicken noodle or any other soup, it has a million variations. You need hominy, probably pork but chicken isn't verboten, a clearish non-tomato-y but still thick broth but tomatoes aren't unheard of, chiles of any flavor, spices ... and the rest is left up to you.

You can cook it in the crock pot or on the stove. You can cook the meat in the liquid or brown it first on the stove or braise it in the oven. There's basically no wrong way to cook it, as long as you end up sort of in the same space.








Your building blocks are:

Meat: 1.5-2 lb pork shoulder, boston butt, picnic, or any roast. Pork loin or tenderloin is not unheard of.

Hominy: either dried or canned. Dried will require overnight soaking and then boiling. Canned is fine. About 4 cups.

One onion, a few garlic cloves, chiles of any sort (sweet or hot).

Chiles: Yeah, I know I already said chiles, but wanted to make sure. Freshly roasted is great, canned are alright, frozen are convenient if you can get them in your neck of the woods. About a cup, more or less to taste. Mild or hot, doesn't matter.

Spices: Cumin, oregano, cayenne, maybe cloves. I've seen folks prep the meat in a stock with cloved onions, whole peppercorns, and cumin seeds, and then use the ground / powdered later as well. Pre-mixed chili powder is cool as well. I'm digging Savory Spices' no-salt chili powder right now, a lovely mix of Ancho and Chimayo chile, garlic and cumin, paprika and cayenne, and Mexican oregano.

Step One: Prep the meat.
There are three basic ways to get started. You can chop the meat up, add it to the soup while it's cooking, and cook the meat in the soup liquid. That's the easy way, because it's fewer steps, but the meat gets a little bland and everything can taste watered down. A very common way to get started is to simmer the meat in salted water or broth (chicken or veggie stock). If you're using water, maybe add a clove-studded onion, garlic cloves, peppercorns, cumin seeds, and even a carrot or celery stick or two.
Yet another way, and the method pictured here, is to brown the pork shoulder first. Pre-heat your oven to 350º. Then prep the meat by chopping your pork shoulder in several 3-4 inch wide chunks. If you're using a bone-in shoulder, leave some meat on the bone. Using an oven-safe pan with a lid (a Dutch oven would have worked as well), take a couple of onions, sliced fairly thin, and sauté over medium-high heat in olive oil, 3-4 minutes, and then add a mix of chili powder and Mexican oregano (one Tbs each), some freshly ground pepper, and cayenne or red chili pepper flakes, if you're into that.
Then add the pork chunks and brown on all sides, just 2 minutes tops per side. At this point I threw in some carrot and celery chunks, totally optional. Add 4-5 cups water or broth, bring to a boil, cover and transfer to the oven. Braise for 1-2 hours, depending on how much meat you have. The meat is ready in one hour, while two hours will give you a richer stock.



When it's done, you're going to remove the meat and set it aside, then strain out the onions (and carrots and celery, if you used it), and use the stock for the soup. After the meat has cooled, chop it or shred it into bite-sized pieces.

Since you have the oven already going, you can roast a couple of jalapeños at the same time. I use a gringo technique of slicing them in half, removing the seeds, then wrapping in tinfoil and baking for 30 minutes or so, just enough to soften them up and slightly sweeten them. When they have cooled, chop them up and set aside.

In a large stock pot (or, again, a Dutch oven works here as well), sauté another 1-2 onions in olive oil, medium-high, 3-4 minutes. Add a few cloves worth of chopped garlic. Add about 2-3 Tbs total a mix of cumin, chili powder, cayenne, black pepper, and/or Mexican oregano, and stir to coat the onions evenly. Then add the shredded pork and continue stirring for a few minutes to again evenly distribute the spices.

Add hominy, stir, and then pour in the reserved pork broth. (You can always top it off with chicken broth, if you don't have enough to cover the pork and hominy.) Then add about a cup of chopped green chiles and the oven-roasted jalapeños.

Simmer for at least 45 minutes, until the hominy is tender. Simmer for up to 2 hours to maximize the flavor of the broth, to let it soak up the chile and pork flavors.

Depending on how well you strained your pork broth, you might need to skim a little fat off the top of the soup before serving. Or, if it's winter time, leave it there for extra warmth!

You can serve it up as is, or you can add a little bit of chopped green cabbage, white onion, and chopped cilantro. A squirt of lime juice is not unheard of. Warm tortillas on the side, of course.

Confederate Coffee

Ran into this in the doc's waiting room the other day:

How a coffee shortage killed the confederacy, in Mental Floss.


Turns out it wasn't the substantially larger population, industrial infrastructure, or transportation assets, but coffee that determined the outcome of the Civil War.

For those of you who want to really get down to the details at your next re-enactment, here's a coffee recipe from The Confederate Receipt book, 1863.

Take sound ripe acorns, wash them while in the shell, dry them, and parch until they open, take the shell off, roast with a little bacon fat, and you will have a splendid cup of coffee.

A letter to the Tennessee Baptist in 1861 claimed that okra coffee is indistinguishable from the real thing:

We Have Tried It.—We have been somewhat skeptical about the various substitutes that have been proposed for coffee.—We have doubted whether any thing would have the flavor of the genuine article. But, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." We have tried the okra coffee, and had we not known it to be okra, we should have supposed it the best of Laguyra or Java. It has all the rich spicy aroma of the genuine article, and we have no doubt, is equally nutricious [sic] and probably less injurious.
We would advise all our friends to reserve a large space in their gardens or farms, for planting okra. It will do, and no mistake, blockade or no blockade.

Me, I'm going to stick with good old coffee beans for now.

Super-quick non-recipe Coq au Vin

I knew I had all of the ingredients for coq au vin, but I wasn't sure how much time I had to get it ready before M. got home. And I knew we had about seven different recipes for it, so I was left in a predicament: do I grab the first one I see, or take a few minutes to scan them all to figure out which one is the quickest? Because I wasn't looking for the original version, with the cognac flambé, but just a quick last-minute throw-together version.

I went with the latter, and somewhat fortuitously, the first one I found was called "Quick Coq au Vin." Bingo! That had to be it. But there was something now quite right about it. It called from frozen pearl onions. Frozen pearl onions? Never bought any such thing, so this clearly wasn't the recipe I had played with before.

So I left that book out and kept looking, and low and also behold, the next one was also called "Quick Coq Au Vin." Ahh, mon Dieu! Now, what I should have done right there was to just start cooking, but something struck me about these two menus. They had different pictures, but the fonts looked remarkably similar. One called for chicken parts, the other for chunks of breast meat. But the moving pieces were laid out the same: brown chicken, sauté veggies, deglaze and create your sauce, simmer. So instead of getting to work, I spent a few minutes browsing. And noticed the really weird thing: that both recipes were from the same magazine, one from the original magazine and one from a reprint collection. Same magazine, same title, very similar but completely different.

And that's when I realized that this was one of those dishes that really doesn't have a recipe. It's more of a technique, or a starting point. There's no such thing as having the right ingredients for this, because there is no such thing as "right." One of the recipes called for frozen boiling onions, the other for leeks. One started with bacon to help flavor the chicken, the other was straight-up olive oil. One used the traditional mix of carrots and onions and mushrooms, and the other used red grapes.

But the process was the same. And it's the process that makes the wine sauce that coats the chicken and veggies and soaks into your noodles, potatoes, rice, or whatever side-dish you want to add.

So instead of a traditional recipe, here's a process-centric version with a pick-and-choose ingredient list.

Meat: 1-2 pounds of chicken. Maybe 4 bone-in thighs and 4 drumsticks or boneless breasts, cut into 1-2 inch cubes or strips. Dust with a few Tbs of flour, salt and pepper.

Sauté: 2-3 Tbs of olive oil, or 3-4 slices of bacon plus 1-2 Tbs olive oil.

Veggies: 3-4 cups total, pick from julienned leeks, thinly sliced onions, mushrooms, carrots, maybe a tiny bit of celery.

1 Tbs tomato paste, maybe a few cloves of garlic.

Deglaze: 1 cup red or white wine plus 1 cup chicken broth. (Adjust based on the size of your pan and the amount of chicken and veggies you have.)

A dash of thyme or sprig of fresh thyme. Maybe a couple of Tbs of butter to thicken the sauce.



Chicken with bacon, veggies waiting their turn

Season the chicken with salt and pepper and dredge in the flour. Or, put the salt, pepper and flour in a bag, add the meat, and shake. Whatever.

Grab a huge non-non-stick pan with a lid. (Yes, non-non-stick. You want the chicken and veggies to stick just a little.)

If you're using bacon, fry the bacon, remove the cooked bacon, and add a Tbs or two of olive oil to the bacon fat. Or, just heat the olive oil over medium high heat. Brown the chicken on all sides, then remove and set aside.

You'll have some burnt bits (fond) on the pan. Don't worry about it.

Add the veggies in the order of longest cooking to quickest cooking. Do not crowd the mushrooms! Keep the heat up to medium high and gently stir so as not to bruise the veggies. (I just made up that last part.) Sauté for 3-4 minutes or so, maybe a bit longer for onions and leeks.

Stir in the tomato paste and optional garlic. Sauté for another 2-3 minutes, stirring frequently until the tomato paste is evenly distributed.

Now for the money move. Add your wine to deglaze and scrape up anything that stuck to the pan. Turn up the heat just a skosh, and let the heat and wine soften up the fond so that it gets incorporated back into the sauce. Return the chicken back to the pan, sprinkle with the thyme, and add the chicken stock or broth. Bring it all to a boil, then reduce to medium-low, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes. Watch it closely for the first couple of minutes, just to make sure that it doesn't boil over, but after that, you can let it go.

Maybe, if you're feeling crazy, add a Tbs or two of butter to the final product and stir in. Not necessary, though.

Serve over mashed potatoes, egg noodles, or any other starch.

Weekly Highlights for Jan 14

1. From endurance athlete and world champion burro racer Hal Walters, home-made energy bars.

Homemade real-food energy bars
By Hal Walter

2. Growing and Repairing Your Brain, Dr. Phil Maffetone and Dr. Coralee Thompson

The brain, after all, is just a muscle, albeit one we are only beginning to understand. Check out Dr Phil's thoughts on working it.

• Eat more brain food and avoid processed carbohydrates
• Move your body—walking, dancing, swimming, etc.
• Get more sun exposure—without sunscreen
• Live your passion—find things you're crazy about doing; and do them
• Get more sleep
• Change routines often
• Perform respiratory biofeedback (AKA “The 5‐Minute Power Break”)

(The original 7 ideas are here.)


3. Is the Military Getting Soft? Interesting discussion. I'm ashamed to admit this, but the day after the Ft Hood tragedy, the NYTimes ran a front page photo of Ft Hood soldiers doing PT. And instead of feeling anger at the murderer or empathy for the victim's families, my first thought was, damn, soldiers are fat these days.


4. Running Barefoot: Trend of the still very New Year. The running barefoot discussion is really heating up. It's not quite at teaparty-esque momentum, but there is a certain grassroots feeling to it, with the little people going up against the big corporate giants who are scheming to keep our little piggies trapped in their over-priced coffins.

Check out this piece in the February Runners' World.

No-Rise Cinnamon Rolls (which makes them sort of a cinnamon biscuit / scone / muffin / roll)

No yeast but 4 tsp of baking powder make these "rolls" more like biscuits. To me, they're just as good as traditional, but just a little different. I actually prefer the more biscuity texture, instead of the doughy, bready feel of your standard roll. And since they take about 20-25 minutes of hands-on time, it's worth it to give them a shot just once. If they're not your thing, go back to the yeast rolls.




Ready for the belly. Maybe the world's ugliest cinnamon rolls, but wicked easy. One notch harder than opening the Pillsbury tube.









2 cups flour
2 Tbs sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup butter, ice cold, baby
1 cup milk
1/3 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
3 tsp ground cinnamon

Optional: 1/4 to 1/3 cup of raisins, currants, or almonds. (We went with almonds today. Like how they caramelize when they bake in the brown sugar / butter mix.)

Frosting:
1/2 cup powdered sugar
Splash of milk


Grease your muffin tin. Mix the 1/3 cup butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon together. Put 1 tsp into each of cup of the tin. Save the remaining mixture for your roll filling.


bit of brown sugar and cinnamon that will soak up into the rolls


In a largish bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut in 1/4 cup butter.

* Side: I hate cutting butter. Never get it quite right. But then I read Scott Peacock's description in his American Classics series. Makes a lot of sense, and easy to follow instructions.


In your flour mix, make a well in center and pour in the milk. Slowly stir until you have a smooth dough.

Turn dough out on lightly floured cutting board or counter top. Knead about 10 times. Roll out into rectangle about 1/4 inch thick and a foot long. (That's 12 inches, and you have 12 muffin cups ... so guess how thick each cut will be when you're ready to make your rolls.)

Spread the remaining cinnamon mixture over dough rectangle. Sprinkle the almonds or raisins (optional) onto the cinnamon mix. Roll up so you have a foot long roll, and the cut into 12 slices. Instead of measuring, just cut it in half, and then each half in half again. Then cut each of those pieces into three equal pieces.







Bake at 400º F for about 20 minutes. If your rolls are nice and tight, the cinnamon mix will stay put, but mine were a bit loose and the mix bubbled over the top. I needed to put an extra baking sheet until the muffin tins to catch the overflow.

The rolls should pop right out as soon as you take them out of the oven. Drizzle the tops with your powdered sugar / milk glaze.

Living without eating, drinking, or speaking

There are a lot of people struggling, and it serves no purpose to try to rank their suffering. But Roger Ebert is living a hell that I cannot imagine. Since his surgery for thyroid cancer, he has been unable to eat, drink, or speak. That took a while to sink in. No food of any sort. No meat or dairy or plant. Not a sip of water, let alone a bottle of wine or a Grape Nehi. And every bit of communication is non-verbal.

Nil By Mouth

Mango Chutney Chicken and Friends

This one takes about an hour, but the chicken has about three seconds of hands-on time, so you have time to make the rice and clean up while it's in the oven. The grilled tomatoes can go in with the chicken and bake for the full hour, at the chicken's temperature, instead of the time/temp called for in the recipe.





The first night, make the chicken, rice, and tomatoes. Double the recipe if needed so you have leftovers. Then on the second night, substitute the stir-friend cauliflower for the tomatoes.




Mango Chicken Chutney

3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons curry powder
¼ teaspoon ground cardamom
¼ cup dry white wine
2 pounds boneless, skinless
chicken breasts
1½ cups jarred mango chutney
2 tablespoons shredded coconut
1 tablespoon snipped fresh chives
½ cup golden raisins

Preheat oven to 350°. Melt butter in a small saucepan over low heat. Add
curry powder and cardamom and cook 2–3 minutes. Stir in wine until well
blended and remove from heat.
Place chicken pieces in a casserole dish. Pour butter mixture over chicken
and bake 30 minutes. Spread chutney over chicken and continue baking
an additional 30 minutes, basting frequently. Sprinkle with coconut,
chives and raisins. Serve with Carrot Jasmine Rice Pilaf and Oven
Roasted Cherry Tomatoes.














Oven Roasted
Cherry Tomatoes

2 pints cherry tomatoes
1½ tablespoons olive oil
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dried orange zest
3 cloves garlic, chopped
¼ teaspoon ground cardamom

Preheat oven to 425°. Put tomatoes
in a 9 x 13-inch glass dish or roasting
pan. Drizzle with olive oil and
sprinkle with salt, orange zest, garlic
and cardamom. Roast until dish
is fragrant and tomatoes are fully
cooked—about 20–25 minutes—
stirring once halfway through.















Carrot
Jasmine
Rice Pilaf
1 tablespoon olive oil
¼ cup finely chopped shallots
2 tablespoons pine nuts
1 cup uncooked jasmine rice
2–3 carrots, chopped
3 teaspoons dried grated
orange zest
¼ teaspoon ground cardamom
¹∕8 teaspoon crushed red pepper
2¼ cups chicken broth, heated
½ teaspoon honey
1/8 teaspoon salt


Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan
over medium heat. Add shallots and
pine nuts and cook 4–6 minutes.
Stir in rice, carrots, orange zest,
cardamom and crushed red pepper.
Stir and cook for 2 minutes.
Add chicken broth, honey, and
salt. Cover pan and simmer 12–15
minutes, until liquid is absorbed.


Indian Ginger Cauliflower and Green Peas

3 Tbs EVOO
1-3 chiles
1 Tbs ground coriander
1 tsp cumin seeds or ground cumin.
3 Tbs minced fresh ginger
1 jalepeno
One head of cauliflower (about two pounds or larger)
--> cut into 1 inch florets, about 6 cups
2 cups frozen green peas
1-2 tsp sea salt or kosher salt
1/4 - 1/2 tsp garam masala

At medium-high, heat the EVOO, then add the chiles, coriander, and cumin. Stir continuously for 2-3 minutes. Add the ginger and jalapeno and stir quickly for another minute.
Add the cauliflower and stir vigorously until it is evenly coated with the spices. Cover and reduce the heat to medium, and cook for about 5 minutes. Add the peas and salt, give the whole thing a quick stir to distribute the peas, cover and cook for another 5-7 minutes until the peas and cauliflower are tender. Uncover, turn up the heat to high, cook for two minutes until any liquid is gone, and then sprinkle with the garam masala.

Age Is Just a Number

May we all be going this strong when Nine-Zero comes rolling along.

Seeing Old Age as a Never-Ending Adventure











Update: 104 year old strong-man hit and killed by mini-van.