More from the mo(u)ldering crypt of posts which didn't get auto-posted. -J.
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It's 1521. You're a chieftain of some lovely Pacific island. You have the most women, the biggest hut, your pick of outrigger canoes. Life is good. Then some big ships show up. "Great. MORE Europeans." The Europeans make friends with your rival chieftain from the other side of the island. You snub everyone. The Europeans take the snub as a snub and choose to attack you. But they misjudge the tide and leap into water waist deep in full armor, and too far to use their weapons.
You slaughter them all, especially the leader.
That leader was Magellan. Immortalized by the Magellan Straits and also that GPS* thingy, among other things.
You?
You're chief Lapu-Lapu and, instead, you're immortalized by a tiki drink served in a cored-out pineapple, most famously at Walt Disney World's Polynesian Resort's Tambu Lounge. This past Labor Day** we went to this very spot. TFBIM had the selfsame beverage. Verily she loved it and has developed a fondness therefor and I was commissioned to replicate it.
Like so.
You start off with a pineapple. Note the corer. US$3 on eBay. Before I get more carried away with this, let me say I cannot say enough good things about this cheap-o corer. Yes, you can get fancier ones, made of stainless steel with sharper blades and finer teeth. These will give you less jagged pineapple rings, if that means that much to you. I, personally, couldn't care less about the aesthetic qualities of the rings...so the extra 600% premium isn't worth it.
You lop the top off, much like Lapu-Lapu's warriors seemed to have preferred. (Hence the name?)
All you have to do to core out the pineapple is center the corer right on the, er, core of the pineapple and drive the corer in, twisting with slight downward pressure. When you get down as far as you want, you pull up as with a manual corkscrew.
Et voilà
TIP: Place the pineapple being cored inside bowl of some kind, as there WILL be juice spouting forth generously and you want to capture said juice. This will also keep your wife from exhibiting displeasure.
1 Tbsp Simple "2:1" syrup
1 Tbsp Passion fruit syrup (50-50 passion fruit pulp and 2:1 sugar syrup)
1 Tbsp Orgeat
2 oz Orange juice (absent any fresh-squeezed, of all the supermarket brands, I suggest Florida Natural)
2 oz Pineapple juice (absent any fresh-squeezed -- you'll recall I said above you wanted the fresh juice -- I suggest Dole; this scenario presumes you're making this in a regular glass)
2 oz Dark rum (Bacardi 8 in this case)
2 oz White Rum (I like Cruzan Aged Light, but I was trying to finish up the Bacardi Silver)
[Picture would have gone here, but NOS was getting hollered at by TFBIM.]
Put this all in a shaker with about 6oz of cracked ice. Then you shake...
...and shake. Until the tin of the shaker frosts over.
TIP: With any drink calling for syrups, juices, etc. and you're only using ONE measuring vessel (i.e. a jigger or shot glass) do so in this order: syrups THEN juices THEN any flavored liquors or liqueurs THEN the spirits.
And here you are.
(all photos -- both the excellent and the ones which proved unusable -- courtesy of Numbah One Son)
-J.
* SatNav to the rest of the Anglosphere.
** First Monday in September to the rest of the Anglosphere.
Posted by Joke at 6:54 PM
Monday, September 28, 2009
Whither Junior
Another from the archival mists, or something.
-J.
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One thing I have noticed in having two sons is the dwindling of naming a son for his father. Numbah One Son is not merely a Junior, he's actually a fourth. He, for reasons which I suspect are inextricably linked to genetic insufferability, particularly enjoys appending that IV to his name.
But within his (and his brother's sphere of influence) there are pratically no other boys named after their dad. This is not a rant about people who give their children crazy-ass names such as Carrion or Treyteur, what PG Wodehouse used to term "raw work at the font." In fact, our census shows exactly one other Junior, and that's pretty much all there is.
I'm not really sure why this is.
Some of them, I am reliably informed, have to do with the fact the wife, while she may love and adore her husband, she does so in spite of his name. Maybe it reminds her of a childhood bully, maybe she has harbored a grave distaste for the most prominent consonant thereof, maybe there is a villainous TV character who shares the name, no matter. That name will NOT be levied upon HER baby. And that's that.
My BiL is a Junior, and when my nephew was born, his wife resolutely refused to allow the lad to be saddled with a III. And so the long day wears on.
This isn't to say that every dad should have a lad named in his honor, but I am perplexed as to why this is in decline.
-Joke the III
Posted by Joke at 2:59 PM
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Cherry
Yeah, yeah. I know.
Mea maxima culpa. Here's what you would/should have seen a while back.
-J.
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One of the latest things which has taken the world by storm, or at least my corner of it, is taking the decidedly
fanatically, dysfunctionally obsessive Joke-like approach to food and extrapolating it into the cocktail sphere.
The first guilty party to go up against the wall, in matters of food or beverage, is The Artificial Ingredient. So, in pondering the ideal Manhattan cocktail, I was stymied by the fact the cocktail cherry is a concentrated repository of multisyllabic chemical evil. Of late, there have been some places where cherries not aswim in an ocean of something-hyde and something else-zoate are available, but at prices which betray their purveyors' wide-eyed innocence regarding prices during The Great Recession.
This leaves me no alternative but to pursue the DIY approach, as I am simply not going to pony up $22.99 for a mere 8oz. Especially when I know the ingredients contained therein add up to a princely $2 at very most.
Before you start to bemoan the the effort required to make your own cocktail cherries know this – setting aside the time required for cooling -- a batch takes but a mere 10 minutes.
There are, of course, aeleventy gazillion different cocktail cherry recipes, but a good starter cherry recipe is this one:
6 pounds dark, sweet cherries
¾ cup sugar
1 cup water
¼ cup fresh, strained lemon juice
2 cinnamon sticks
1 ¼ cups cherry brandy or liqueur. For this go-around we have
Cherry Heering, but the next time it'll be Kirchwasser. (You can use brandy, bourbon, pisco, rum, rye, grappa, vodka...etc.)
Put sugar, water, and cinnamon in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to medium-low. Add the lemon juice and cherries. Simmer 5 minutes. Remove from burner, fish out the cinnamon sticks, and stir in the liqueur/liquor.
The smart thing to do is to pit the cherries, but I chose to keep the pits for a more complex flavor...and because I couldn't be bothered in my zeal. Next time, I will enlist someone I have offsprung to man the pitter. I also chose basic supermarket sweet (
NOT SOUR) cherries.
These cherries are amazing!
You will need to make extra, because you will ingest half of them warm right from the stove. These will definitely migrate into your supply of vanilla ice cream and banana splits will suddenly begin to materialize. The ensuing cherry liqueur is also spectacular.
Mind you, bereft of chemical escort, the cherries will eventually "turn" at +/-2 weeks, and they hit their peak of excellentness at the 1 week mark.
Try it, I exhort you!
-J.
Posted by Joke at 5:20 PM
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Oh.
Seems the auto-post thing, um, didn't. So there has been an ominous silence from ovah heah.
Please stand by.
Management regrets the inconvenience.
Posted by Joke at 1:57 PM
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Beef. I like beef.
In two separate discussions elsewhere with the lovely 'n' gracious BabBab and the equally lovely and equivalently gracious Badgeah, the subject of steak came up.
Which prompted me to dig up and complete this post that had been mo(u)ldering away in a near-forgotten sector. (What the coarse and vulgah population might rudely term my "draft pile." But they'd be wrong.)
Anyway.
Last Christmas I received a sampler pack of seasonings from Williams-Sonoma. Smallish tins of +/- 1 oz. each. Mexican this, Seattle that, etc. Anyway. They had a steak seasoning which I rather enjoyed. But, while one is trudging through The Great Recession, buying the large tin at $10 (!) for a mere 4 oz.* (!!) is not going to happen.
So.
I set about deconstructing it and, frankly, improving it. If you ever pick up these sorts of seasonings you will notice three things at the head of the ingredients list (in the USA, ingredients have to be listed in order, starting with the most abundant one) sugar, salt, and paprika. Sure, they may give them ultra-posh adjectives such as "Herne Bay sea salt" or "Peruvian sun dried paprika" but you must realize these things are cheap filler. Also there were some variants of ingredients which I thought (correctly, as my lab research shows) could be substituted or upgraded.
Thus, I gathered Numbah One Son (Numbah Two Son is more of the taste-tester) and we assembled in the kitchen, gathering our spice jars and an old coffee mill we comandeered AGES ago for the purpose of spice grinding. You will NOT believe how helpful NOS was. He has an eerily accurate palate.
But I digress.
Here is my version. It is, on purpose, NOT identical to the original, because as noted above, I believed I should change some of the things I didn't like "while I was at it." I'll note those as I go.
(This is all by volume, use teaspoons, cups, or whatever.)
3 parts granulated garlic (Usually I'd go for fresh garlic, but in these applications, it'd fall off and/or scorch. So I got a good brand of granulated. The original rub had granulated roast garlic, but I found it got bitter over the chargrill's high/dry heat so I switched...oh, make sure you use the granulated and not the powdered stuff, which often has bizarro ingredients!)
1 part EACH black peppercorns and red pepper flakes (in the original, I couldn't detect much heat from the chile seeds/ribs...but I tend to like a bit of heat, so I used flakes instead of a seeded dry chile...although next time I might experiment with a varietal such as cascabel)
2 parts each coriander seed, dill seed, yellow -- I s'pose you could try brown -- mustard seed.
Put all in a spice mill and whiz 3-4 pulses...you want a pretty good crack, but not a homogeneous powder. I like mine a TINY bit finer than spice rubs straight out of the tin...in my opinion you get better adhesion that way.
Oh, and note the lack of salt. I like salting the meat first, letting the juices flow back and forth in an osmosis ballet and then adding the spices.
What I did is get a big ol' segment of cow (pretty cheap per pound at the warehouse-type places) and then slice myself. But before doing that, I let it wet-age. If you get the beef -- do not try this with pork, AMHIK -- you can age it in the original cry-o-vac if it has not lost its seal. I've let mine go 16 weeks and the results are spectacular. The taste isn't as minerally/gamy as with dry-aged beef, but it is really tender.
Now.
What you do with your steak is salt it first as it comes up to room temperature. You will see some "perspiration" on the surface and then you sprinkle your spice rub. Then go light your charcoal fire. (Or wait 30 minutes if your BBQ grill is a gas model.) For max foodieness, I used real hardwood charcoal, but you use whatever. I also use one of those "chimney starters" so that I don't need to worry about (yuck) lighter fluid. When the coals glow, you dump 'em into the BBQ grill.
You drop the charcoal WAY to one side of the vessel. Pile it as far and high on ONE side as possible. This is key.
When the "coal side" is intolerably hot, you put your steaks on the grate. You could, if you are insufferable like I am, give them that quarter-turn for fancy-pants grill marks. The idea is to sear the outside, HARD. You want as much stuff caramelizing there as possible. This is also key. Do not peek, do not flip, etc. Let it go there. 1 minute per inch of thickness per side. So, a 2" thick steak would go 2 minutes per side. Then you slide them to the part of the grill where the coals are NOT. You want the steak to cook to your desired doneness as slowly as possible. The slower you go, the more time certain tenderizing enzymes have to do their voodoo. This is key.
Finally, take them off and cover LOOSELY with foil, let them rest 10-15 or so, so the juices -- which are trying to exit as a result of the heat, much like water exits a boiling pot -- have time to calm down and go back into the steak where they should be.
There.
-J.
* That's 110gm for the metric kids.
Posted by Joke at 9:09 AM
Take Cuban bread, or Cuban rolls or, if you live in the provinces, something in the egg bread family (which turns this from a Cubano to a Medianoche, but whatever.) split them
and mustardize them. The classic choice is plain ol' yellow mustard
but I like the "deli" style mustard better. You do whatever you want. Some people, bless them, like mayonnaise in this sandwich. It's NOT correct, nor authentic, but whatever.
Then you lay down your pickle coverage. I love pickles, so I practically TILE the bloody thing.
Over the pickles you'll need to place a layer of ham. 
Since I am an insufferable foodie, I use prosciutto (but not the hyper-fancy stuff). Either way, you want to make sure it's sliced so thin, as to be translucent. This allows you to plop it down in a wavy sort of way, which is key to get the right sort of chew and mouthfeel.
Next,the swiss cheese. Yes, it must be swiss cheese. Or, if you're insufferable as I am, Swiss cheese (Emmentaler is a teeny bit preferable to Gruyere, but either is wonderful.)
To get the right melting action, you will need to grate it. Yes, slices will work okay, but by the time the cheese is melted, the bread will be too dry and brittle.
Shredding it in the food processor is fine, but yields bad photos. So I hand grated. Just for YOU, Internet. Scoop it up and get ready to apply to the sandwich.
Like so.
If you like to give the cheese a head start on the melting -- or you are a raving pyro -- you can use a kitchen torch.
Now, take your leftover roast pork (ideally a very citrus/garlic intensive roast pork, although that can be doctored up) which you have warmed up to about 125F (this is important)
if you have roasted it properly, it should shred into luxuriant, pillowy nuggets of porcine goodness.
Assemble atop the cheese (cold side cold, warm side warm). You want about a 3:2 pork:ham ratio. So that your whole assemblage looks like this.
Fold the bread around the filling. Place in a panini/sanwich press or, if you have a whole battalion to feed, use a griddle set to medium-high, buttered lightly -- DO NOT USE MARGARINE -- and toast the cheese side first until it JUST melts, and then flip over to warm the other side.
Eat.
-J.
(all photos -- both the excellent and the ones which proved unusable -- courtesy of Numbah One Son)
