MouthSex + Ingredient Crowdsourcing

Maybe you’re a virgin of mouthsex, that amazing feeling you get from eating something that transcends taste buds. It’s more of an all-body euphoric high, causing every nerve in your body to shoot up like a cadet at 0500 hours. This was my mouthsex for the week:

This Causes Mouthgasams

Yup, a BLT. It might not seem like much, but in its simplicity lies it awesome power. Each ingredient is a powerful character that plays out an epic scene in your mouth: You have the savory bacon, the coolness of the crisp lettuce, the juice of the ripe tomato, all being offset by the texture of the slightly toasted bread. And where did I find this cast? A combo of two powerhouses in town: Ellwood Thompsons and Belmont Butcher.

I’m a big fan of Ellwood Thompsons, even if most of their selection is out of my grad student price-range. And Belmont Butcher always has an amazing selection of meat products.

MMMM cured meat!

Ellwoods and Belmont are probably the most well known places to find good ingredients. Since I’m still a Richmond noob, what are some other places in town to find good ingredients? I promise to go check some out and report back.

Revenge of the Food Nerds

This entry isn’t about slaving over the stove for hours on end to create some perfect edible that was created with nothing but the most raw ingredients. Instead, I would like to advocate quite the opposite, because let’s face it, neither you nor me has the time to cook meals from scratch every night. And just because we might not have that luxury of time doesn’t mean we should resign ourselves to resorting to fast food or cold cut sandwiches. So we must cut corners, and this is where the inherent drama arrives, as shows like Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee make a complete mockery of quick cooking.

Thanks to this drunk floozy, whenever anyone brings up a quick meal, we think they’re a hack. We imagine them bopping up and down the aisles of the grocery store, buying pre-chopped onions and boxed cake to concoct some Frankenstein of a meal. There is even a new book out that I guess serves as sort of a manifesto for those vehemently against convenient cooking.

Personally, I think this sort of separation is dangerous. This “real cooking” pretentious attitude assumes that you are only an “authentic” home chef if you are spending hours to cook your food only serves to alienate the foodie community. What’s wrong with the family that uses a taco kit? At least they are cooking tacos and having a family dinner instead of just going to taco bell.

My partner and I had a great Sunday night dinner with her family using a taco kit. Sure, those shells were probably loaded with preservatives, but the ground beef was free range and the vegetables came from our CSA box. So maybe not every meal has to be painstakingly created by hand, and that’s alright.

Delicious 1st Entry: Beef Bourguignon

Hey, I heard that sigh. Yeah, you did sigh when you read the title, right?
It’s okay, I understand. Beef bourguignon is “played-out” by this point in the blogosphere. But look, I am not some crazy woman frantically trying to plow my way thru a cookbook for some insane stunt.

 

Oh Hell No

 

In case you didn’t know, Beef Bourguignon is not only hella good, it’s really easy to make. Just take a nice cut of beef (shoulder works great), cook it in some red wine, veal stock, carrots and onion, then blammo! You have tender beef packed with flavor.

 

Beef Bourguignon on top of homemade egg noodles

 

And here’s the real secret: If you let this dish set up overnight, the flavors infuse more and the stock takes hold to create an insanely full-bodied sauce, making this dish even  better.

Plenty of recipes for Beef Bourguignon abound, but here is the classic.

Pre-postin’ with Veal Stock

Okay.

I have a lot of recipes I want to share with you. I got little tips and things to make excellent food when you’re in a less-than-steallar kitchen in Richmond, VA. But before we go on our long and fruitful journey together, we gotta get something out of the way.

Take a look at your freezer. Now back at me. Now back at your freezer. I would guess you got some ice cubes chilling, a frozen pizza or two, maybe some thanksgiving turkey that you need to get rid of. What you don’t have in that freezer is the quintessential ingredient that can turn your cooking from “pretty good” to “holy shit, that’s good”. Here is what it looks like:

Yummy!

It may not look like much, but that’s bonafide veal stock, which is basically water that has been infused with the collagen and marrow of veal bones. Making stock might seem like a huge undertaking, but all you really need is a lazy Sunday to keep a pot simmering for eight to ten hours.

There are just as many ways to make stock as there are chefs, so it can seem a little daunting when trying to figure out how to go about picking a stock recipe. The French Laundry book has a recipe for stock that is insanely complicated, it makes Julia Childs look like Sandra Lee. The Les Halles cookbook by Bourdain has a solid chapter on stock-making, but when I followed his recipe for the first time my stock ended up watery. The real breakthough came from Michael Ruhlman’s book, Ratio, where he recommends a ratio of 3 parts bone and 2 parts water. This yielded the above stock, which has so much gellatnous goodness that it’s practically veal jello.

So here is the basic veal stock recipe:

3 pounds of veal bones.

6 oz can of tomato paste.

1 cup of flour

2 pounds of water.

1 pound of an equal mix of carrots, celery, and onion.

Start off by preheating your oven around 400. Throw the bones into a roasting pan, then add the tomato paste and sprinkle the flour evenly over the bones. Rub it all in with your hands, then roast those bones until they get nice and brown, about 15 to 20 minutes. Then take your bones and put them in a large stockpot with 2 pounds of water. There should be about an inch of water above the bones, so add a little more if you got bones poking up.

Then simmer.

Get that scum out!

Simmer some more.

Simmer for about 6 to 8 hours, occasionally skimming the muck that floats to the top. Drop your veggies in, and let it simmer for another 2 hours. Strain your stock through a cheesecloth and/or chinoise, and refrigerate overnight. When morning comes, run to your kitchen to see the magical transformation that happened, as the murky water has now transformed into beautiful, gellatnous veal stock!

You can freeze your stock, where it will hang in suspended animation for eternity until it’s thawed, but be sure to wrap it in plastic to prevent odors leaking into it. Julia Childs has a fun suggestion: Freeze your stock in ice cube trays so you have a handy pre-measured portion that you can easily drop into soups and sauces to give it that extra kick. You could also make veal stock pops. Yum!