Atomic Nerds

So far all I can think to say of anything that’s happened recently is that when the Weekly Standard is agreeing with me that it looks like our possible field of Republican candidates is entirely capable of out-stupiding and out-hacking Obama, we really are in it up to our thighs.

So instead, have a recipe. Take my word for it that this absolutely delicious, and you will need lots of good bread to sop up the brothy sauce, because wasting it would be criminal.

From Apartment Therapy:

To serve 4-6, you need:

3 tablespoons of butter, unsalted
2 good-sized yellow onions, sliced thinly
4 garlic cloves, sliced rather than minced
2 sprigs of thyme, leaves thereof, or a teaspoon of the dried stuff
sprig of rosemary, or half a teaspoon dried
2 cups chicken stock or broth, as in 2 individual, separate cups
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
3 pounds chicken thighs (the original recipe specifies boneless skinless, but this is vicious lies and you want the bones and the skin)
2 ounces/1 cup shredded/grated Gruyère cheese

Get a deep saucepan big enough to hold all the onions comfortably, and melt the butter in it. Add the onions and stir them until the butter is coating everything. Season with salt and pepper. Cook on low-to-medium for about 40 minutes, stirring periodically to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan and everything is cooking fairly evenly. When the onions have turned light brown, add the garlic, thyme, and rosemary, and stir until everything is evenly mixed again. Kick the heat up to high and cook until the onions have turned a rich, dark brown, short of burnt. (If you have ever made or had good french onion soup- yes, that color.) When the onions have achieved the desired color and rich smell, add a cup of the stock and stir, scraping the bottom of the pan to make sure you get any burnt/stuck bits up and incorporated into the liquid. Simmer for ~5 minutes or until the liquid has reduced a bit.

Take the onions and stock off the heat and transfer to a dutch oven, lidded casserole dish of appropriate size and dimension, or a baking dish you can double-layer with foil.

At some point while the onions are cooking, pre-heat the oven to 375 F. Heat another pan- preferably a good cast iron skillet- over medium high heat. Pat your chicken thighs dry and season them with salt and pepper. Once the pan is hot enough, brown them for about three minutes a side, until they have a golden-brown crust on each. Throw them in on top of the onions in the dutch oven/baking dish*.

Add the last cup of broth to your chicken pan, and again stir and scrape to get up anything stuck to the bottom. (This dish benefits much from the delicious little burnt bits to make its sauce.) Stir in the vinegar and mustard and simmer the sauce for about five minutes or until it’s reduced by half. Pour the sauce over the chicken and onions and lid/foil the baking vessel. Let it sit around 15 minutes or so, then pop it into the oven for half an hour. After that, pull it, turn the heat up to broil, take off the lid/foil, and sprinkle the cheese evenly over the top. When the broiler has had time to heat (you know your oven), pop it back in and go another 2-5 minutes, or until the cheese is browning and melty.

Serve in shallow bowls or high-rimmed plates, with plenty of the aforementioned bread.

*Stingray points out that if you’re using a dutch oven as we do, you can brown the chicken and make that phase of the sauce first/while the onions are cooking in the dutch oven, and then just lift the chicken thighs before you put the onions in, and put the thighs on top where they belong. Saves a dirty pan.

EU Tries Frantically To Determine Which Organic Vegetable Is Killing Europeans.

Or, not organic necessarily, but “which vegetable” at any rate. The upshot is a particularly nasty strain of E. coli is knocking people down in Europe, and they’re frantic to figure out where it’s coming from and have just had to back off organic German sprouts. The article comes close to but just barely skates off pointing out that the confusion- and economic losses to various growers- is necessary because tracking down food-borne outbreaks is hard and the longer you delay to make sure you have it right, the more people get sick.

This is being used a bit as a taunt against the “organic is so much better for you” meme, which to an extent is deserved- especially because vegans so often use the potential for food-borne illness to knock meat as obviously terrifying and awful for you.

Fact of it is, though, E. coli is equal-opportunity whether you eat fast food, gourmet, locavore, carnivore, omnivore, or vegan. The reason for this is also part and parcel of why it’s such a bitch to track when there’s an outbreak.

Eschericia coli, the species, is ubiquitous, normal flora in your gut and the guts of pretty much all warm-blooded animals. It’s a normal and unremarkable microbe, and ordinarily plays happily with everything else in your system and does you no more harm than the mites on your skin. Normally, what finding E. coli somewhere outside a toilet or inside someone is that there’s been some kind of cross-contamination and a general failure of sanitation- it isn’t inherently harmful, but it does tell you the situation could be hazardous because some other bug that lives in the gut and isn’t as good-natured could be getting in the same way.

There are a handful of strains of the critter, though, that AREN’T harmless and that pump out big volumes of toxins that will hit you hard. This is why tracking outbreaks of the hostile strains is such a difficult task and general pain in the rear; it’s like looking, in a field of mice, for the one that’s gone rabid. News articles usually don’t draw the distinction, although I’m sure the CDC and equivalent agencies wish they would, both to reduce panic and to give a more realistic picture of what’s necessary to find the origin of outbreaks.

Are organic vegetables any more dangerous than normal vegetables? Not unless the farmer’s being stupid. Organic crops do use more manure-based fertilizers, but normally such things are sterilized before sale. Most likely outbreaks involving organic vegetables happen the same way they do with other vegetables- contaminated water or a worker with dirty habits.

Avoiding meat, organic produce, or normal agribusiness produce won’t protect you. Wash your food, thoroughly, and don’t cross-contaminate- and hope that the restaurants you eat at do as well. That boringly simple, and the risk level is always there no matter what you do.

And don’t try and come up with blogfodder when you’re hungry, either.

We had a fabulous time over the weekend and got in a much-needed blowoff and recharge, although the part where we traded more funtime for less sleeptime means we’re not *quite* fully caught up and running on all cylinders either.

I’ll never quite forgive a friend of ours for introducing us to A Hambuger Today, a branch of the Serious Eats site (itself quite the black hole for those for whom food is an interest as much as a need) devoted to one of America’s more universal sandwiches. Going there is usually a bad idea for my productivity, going there when hungry a near-fatal blow, as it tends to do things to me like generate a pointless desire to attempt to replicate things like an animal-style In-n-Out double-double.

So, in the spirit of an older post, AHT and Serious Eats’ guides to variations and themes on the sacred:

Burger Styles
Pizza styles
Hot dog styles
Barbecue styles
Heroes/Grinders/Submarine styles

Right this moment I would murder several preschool children for an oyster po-boy, but I will content myself with the buttermilk fried chicken and cornbread that’s actually for dinner.

In the absence of anything else good to post, I’ll share a recipe:

Bacon and Egg Risotto

You will need: arborio rice (about $6 for a tub of the stuff), some good bacon- faux will not work here- an onion, butter, garlic, green onions, Parmesan cheese (not the canned abomination), eggs, about 20-30 minutes, and a basic understanding of how risotto is produced, which the linked post should adequately describe. The hardest part is separating the yolks and keeping them set aside for later.

You will get: a one-pot, one-dish filling and extremely tasty meal that may change your view of the role of eggs in cooking. The hot risotto itself will gently cook the egg yolk and turn it into a sauce, which once stirred into the risotto tastes not so much of egg yolk as it does of yum. Honestly if I’d been given a bowl with the yolk prestirred I would have probably guessed that ther was egg in there somewhere, but not that it was the sauce.

This is now standard in our rotation of Raid Night Chow.

You may have noticed that there haven’t been any Cooking Noob posts in a dog’s age, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that I’m not really such a noob anymore; my knife skills are still hilariously bad, but I’ve gotten a lot better grasp of kitchen nuts and bolts and am no longer nearly as prone to doing things that make for funny posting later, like set the stove on fire or mistake Celsius notation for Fahrenheit. I’m still bad enough at it to make anything take longer than it should and make a few face-palming mistakes, but it’s nowhere near the vein for easy comedy it used to be. The second is that between the dish and the post, they tended to take half my day- given that the logical course to take it would be to graduate to more complex recipes, that phenomenon would only expand. Maybe tempation will bring me back to it, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Recently, I was reading one of those works of light and frothy fiction (in this case, translated from Japanese) that uses cooking and recipes as a major frame around whatever little slice-of-life storyline it has going at the time. The vast, vast majority of the food centered around ingredients I could only hope to lay my hands on with a trans-Pacific flight, and thus were easy to ignore, but at one point things took a more Western bent and a potato salad was outlined.

I love potato salad, and the version I’m used to is pretty typical southern American- it centers around mayo, egg, mustard, and bacon, with any allium flavors coming from various powders. This, however was new; it involved a few techniques I’d never encountered mentioned as though standard, like salting crisp vegetables and letting them sit for awhile, and the major vegetable ingredients were onion and cucumber, which was entirely new to me. This lodged in my brain for awhile until it occurred to me in passing that cucumber gets along very well with yogurty sauces in Greek and Indian cooking, at which point I decided to see how it all played out. If you’re nodding your head in agreement at the notion, this is about how it all played out:

1. Quarter out an onion, set three of the quarters aside for some later and inevitable onion-requiring meal, and either chop or thinly slice the last quarter. Place in the bowl you plan to use for the eventual complete potato salad and treat to a quarter-teaspoon of salt. Toss to make sure all of the onion is salted and set aside.

2. Take two baking potatoes, wrap them in plastic wrap, and pop them into the microwave for four minutes. When the four minutes are up, turn and let ‘er run for another four.

3. While the potatoes are being nuked, wash the onions. This is a fair bit easier with thin slices, but I think the finer chop works out better in the end; either way, which may require a sieve, strain off the water and squeeze to get more moisture out. Once this is done, sprinkle the onions lightly with sugar, give them a bit of balsamic vinegar, and then put in a bit of milk to help marry everything and make the potatoes go smoother later. Other seasonings may be entertained at this juncture (my source favored a small bit of chicken stock), but I was keeping it basic to see how everything would turn out.

4. When the potatoes are done- check with a fork to make sure they’re soft through- divest them of their plastic wrap and place them in the bowl with the onions and seasonings. Peel and mash them thoroughly (I just used a fork) in the bowl; the retained heat will partially cook the onions and take away their bite. Mash and mix until everything is blended.

5. Return to your cutting board and thinly slice a cucumber. Place the slices in whatever size bowl is needed to hold them comfortably, and introduce half a teaspoon of salt. Gently toss the cucumber slices until you’re fairly sure all of them have been introduced to the salt. Set aside for a few minutes.

6. Check your potato-onion mash; whenever it has mostly lost its residual heat, return to the cucumbers, which should have softened somewhat in the intervening time. Turn the slices into quarters, and add into your larger bowl.

7. Add a two-to-one ratio of mayonnaise and good plain yogurt; I used six tablespoons of mayo to three of yogurt. Sprinkle a generous few grinds of black pepper over the whole thing, and mix until everything is thoroughly combined.

This actually turned out almost exactly how my mind’s tastebuds thought it would, which made me happier than perhaps it should have. It’s not traditional potato salad as most Americans would recognize it, but it’s pretty damn tasty; I thought I would need to add more salt, but what was left on the cucumber provided enough that the final product is pretty much “salt and pepper each serving to individual eater’s taste”. If I were doing it again, I think I’d add a sliced-up hardboiled egg (which I would have this time if I hadn’t screwed up some mental math and softboiled the egg instead- Kang got a treat), and I think I’d make the mayo-to-yogurt ratio half and half instead. I used the same mix I do for egg salad, but the cucumber would have made more yogurt more welcome. Lemon juice, maybe? Paprika? Garlic?

We’ve been eating a lot of chicken soup lately. This is not so much because of the cold as it because we’ve had something of a minor culinary revelation*, one that should have been an easy no-brainer but turned out to make a much bigger difference than we remotely imagined.

Most of the chicken that is sold in America these days is BSB- Boneless Skinless Breast. Not only is it most of the chicken, it seems to be the most popular cut of meat period; it’s the perfect unit of nearly fat-free, guilt-free protein. A disturbing amount of the how-to for cooks out there is aimed at teaching people how to make it come out juicy and flavorful instead of like poultry jerky. (This is not that difficult, but that’s a post for another time if ever.) The skin is removed because that’s the evil fatty part, and the bones are removed because we’d have to anyway to eat it, and after all, we don’t eat bones. What chicken soup that is not canned is generally made using BSB; it’s cheap, it’s easy to measure how much food you’re actually getting, and it has zero hassle factor.

As we have discovered, none of these are adequate reasons to use boneless or skinless chicken in chicken soup. You want bones in, skins on. All other chicken soup is protein chunks in cloudy, salty water.

It is true that we don’t eat the bones in that we don’t crunch down the bones after a meal of fried or grilled chicken, and the bone is indeed extraneous for those purposes. However, the entire traditional purpose of soups and more pointedly of broths was to eat the bones; while there’s still a calcified structure you pull out of the pot and throw away, in a properly prepared broth, stock, or traditional soup the connective tissues and some of the marrow within the bones will have dissolved and leached into the water: it is liquid, simple proteins with a bit of fat from the yellow marrow, which is why it’s such a traditional meal for the sick. When cooled, such soups and broths will set like Jell-o- because they are, in fact, gelatin, which is made by boiling bones and other collagen-containing animal parts. We look back at cookbooks with gelatin aspics and molds like some sort of relic of housewife performance art, but at the time it was an extremely cheap way to add a lot of protein to food. When we speak of soups, stews, sauces, and stocks that have “body”, we are often referring to the collagen; when hot enough to still be liquid, it adds a velvety mouthfeel to the final product. If you have ever forked over a lot of money in a restaurant for osso bucco or oxtails, the rich and sticky sauce is entirely produced by collagen.

As for the chicken skin- the fat- for any meat, the fat is where the flavor lives. (As well as a lot of fat-soluble vitamins.) If you can manage to trim all the fat from a piece of beef and a piece of lamb, they will taste identical; one of several reasons “tastes like chicken” is such a cliche in our culture when encountering a new food is that so many of us are used to eating skinless chicken; without its fat, it functions as a completely generic white meat. Chicken soup with naked chicken tastes like tetrapod; chicken soup with chicken skin and fat tastes like CHICKEN. The flavors of some of the aromatic seasonings and vegetables you use will also be carried and magnified by the fat.

Next time you make any chicken soup recipe, especially one that calls for long simmering, don’t buy chicken cutlets or BSB. Buy chicken thighs with the skin on and the bones in. (It is much easier to find these than skins-on, bone-in chicken breasts, at least in our experience.) They’re cheaper anyway. Cut the chicken into chunks, skin and all, and toss all of it in. Trim the meat off the bones, then throw the bones in. When you are ready to serve, fish the bones out and toss ‘em, then dish up the soup. Drink the broth when you’ve eaten all the meat and vegetables, though I doubt you’ll need much convincing once you’ve tasted the soup.

You’ll never buy Campbell’s, or malign the wisdom of grandmothers, ever again.

*Stingray’s been using skin-on, bone-in for quite awhile now, which is why I’ve been eating an awful lot of soup this year. The inspiration for the post was his trying again a recipe that I remember being vastly unimpressed with previously- when he had used skinless, boneless. This time it was second-helpings, freeze the leftovers material.

We’ve all been at Thanksgiving’s grimmest scene: at the table, gazing upon the majestic turkey that granny or an equivalent clan elder has produced and carved, and hoping to be the first one passed a plate so that you can pounce on the dark meat- because the white meat, alas, is as dry as the Gobi desert and about as flavorful and appealing as its sands.

This need not be, and I will tell you the single best way you can prevent it- certainly much more effective than mucking your oven about basting the outside while the interior slowly surrenders its precious bodily fluids.

To a large extent, this is not actually Granny’s fault; when she learned to cook, turkeys were large but normally proportioned birds. Nowadays the demand for breast meat on poultry has encouraged breeders to produce birds with more and more breast, to the point that the resulting animal is very nearly spherical and somewhat alarming to regard while alive. This is not an optimal shape for roasting. An optimal shape for roasting looks like, well, a roast; wider than it is tall, uniformly shaped, and composed of muscle tissue that has uniform requirements for cooking until done. A turkey, meanwhile, has a large interior cavity that is not filled with muscle tissue, limbs, and a gigantic muscular structure on one end that has different requirements than the smaller and differently shaped ones on the other. While the thighs at the bottom of the oven finish cooking, the gigantic breast at the peak of Mount Bird overcooks.

While there are assorted ways to cope with these fundamental problems, the easiest way to prevent the breast from turning into a re-enactment of a mummy movie is to brine the turkey.

While immersing the bird in salt water for a day or a day and a half doesn’t necessarily strike a cook as intuitive, it actually helps immensely. In a solution of 3%-5% salt, two things happen: for one, the muscle fibers are disrupted and loosen, so the cells’ overall capacity to hold liquid rises. For two, osmosis happens and the muscle cells suck up the salt and the water alike- and hang onto it. As a bonus, they’ll also suck up other molecules that happen to be in the liquid- like aromatic herbs and other seasonings added to the brine for flavor. As an even better bonus, due to the way the liquid seeps in, even if you don’t have time to do a properly long brine the meat on the outside of the bird most likely to suffer overcooking gets its benefits first. Water will still be lost at the same rate during cooking, but the meat will have sucked up so much additional moisture that the overall loss will have been effectively cut in half.

So, if you are in charge of the turkey for your family’s Thanksgiving affairs, mix up a solution of brine (we use Alton Brown’s, hail the Good Eater), and dunk your turkey in it the night or afternoon before you plan to cook the bird. Watch the white meat fly off the platter as fast if not faster than the dark- and enjoy your family’s adulation as Conqueror of the Roast Beast.

Last week I was bitching about butter. ‘Cause let’s face it, 90% of what I do is bitch about things. After inspecting the bleak butter landscape at the local supermarket, I vowed to make my own butter. To top things off, our friend Breda decided to surprise us with a butter bell. I say surprise, since a) it’s in the shape of a skull:

and b) I’d entirely forgotten when she said she was sending us a surprise, so when we opened a box containing a bizarre skull-jar with a bowl on the underside of the lid, we were unsure if it was supposed to be a threat or a present. Even before she clued us in on last night’s reality distortion we more or less figured on “present” since threats don’t usually come from Etsy.com, but I digress.

Thus suitably primed, for the princely sum of about tree fiddy I came home with three half-pints of the highest fat content heavy cream the store had. And I won’t be buying butter anymore. This is just too damn easy, and amazingly enough, it actually does taste better than the store-bought butter. The only real drawback is the lack of poorly-aligned tablespoon-increment-marked wrappers, but going out on a limb, I think I can deal with that. The recipe, in its entirety, is as follows:

2 cups high-fat whipping cream, 1/2 tsp fine sea salt (optional)

Pour the cream into a bowl of a stand mixer and let it warm up to about 60F. Using the whisk attachment, whip the cream on medium-low speed. The cream will thicken, become stiff, and then start to break down. After 7-15 minutes, depending on the cream, it will separate into a milky liquid and globules of fat, and the latter will collect on the whisk. Stop whisking.

Remove the pieces of butter from the whisk and place them in a fine-mesh sieve. Strain the liquid from the bowl through the sieve. This liquid is true buttermilk, and you can drink it. Rinse the butter under cold running water until the water runs clear. This rinses off the remaining whey, which could turn the butter rancid. Using your hands, squeeze the butter hard to remove any excess water. Place it on a work surface and knead it with your hands and a dough scraper to remove any remaining water. If you prefer salted butter, work the salt into the soft butter with your hands. Shape the butter as you like, wrap it well, and refrigerate. The butter will keep for up to a week.

Honestly, I was expecting this to be a fairly simple process, but this recipe is about 90% padding. “Whip the cream on medium until it stops being cream and you hear glopy noises” would have sufficed. Being male, I of course ignored the measurements and just dumped in all the cream I got, and being impatient I didn’t bother warming it. I put the mixer on about the fourth notch up from off and walked away to check back in seven minutes.

This is where the recipe could have used an addendum: no, those are not chunks of butter, those are still bubbles. You’ll know when it turns to butter. Between the increased volume, the cold, and the fact that apparently the setting I used was too un-aggressive, the total whip time was closer to 35 minutes than 7-15. Now when I say you’ll know when it goes to butter, I’m not exaggerating. The mix went from “thick-ish unsweetened whipped cream” to “chunky” literally in the space of a few seconds. One moment I was watching the bowl, then when I futzed with the attachment drive cover for a span of less than thirty seconds, I looked down to see a thick, chunky mix coating the whipping wires. I stopped the mixer and gave it a poke, then realized that there was none of the promised buttermilk, and turned it back on. Another minute had the whey separated out, and I had to reduce the mix speed just because “squishy solid in runny liquid moving fast” does not lend to a tidy kitchen. I rinsed, squeezed, decided to skip the salt for the first go, and packed it into the skull.

Well, I packed some of it into the skull. Apparently a pint and a half makes one metric shit-ton of butter. Eyeballing things, the bell will hold maybe half a cup, and after that was filled there was still another cup and a half left, easily. That went into the freezer, destined for a radish-based application later on. With 16 Tbs per cup, I’d estimate we very easily hit the same quantity as the standard “grab a pound from the chill aisle” for roughly half the cost.

For flavor… well, there may have been a bit of alcohol involved in this process. And LabRat is still suffering from the effects of plant bukakke, so her sense of smell is nerfed and messing with her impressions of flavors. But slathered on some toasted pumpernickel bread, this butter is frickin’ amazing. No, I can’t taste that the cow was dining on sage and daisies, or any slow-food snobby crap like that, but it does taste better than the boxed stuff with the Indian girl with boob-knees*. It’s a very rich mouth-feel, and the buttery-flavor is more intense. I’d say maybe a 7 or 8 compared to the boob-knee’s 5-6. So it’s cheaper, you get two products for one, it’s interesting and dead simple to make, and even though there’s no ZOMG TASTE WHAT IT TASTED cred, it does taste somewhat better. It’s not an orgasm of butter, but it is still better.

And I’m going to use the buttermilk in cornbread tonight.

*For the record, I think “butter boob knee” is probably the strangest thing I’ve ever put into google. I’m doubly impressed that it actually found what I was looking for.

For reasons that somehow boil down to Stingray having had a bloody mary and being in an unusually good mood when Breda stormed across our radar somewhat freaked out because Bonnie went down for medical reasons shortly before BB & Guns was scheduled to air, he was the co-host this week. Join us in a parallel universe in which he exclusively uses language acceptable in church, shows no trace of rage, and does not link anything that requires brain bleach or therapy. No one was more surprised than us. Or, for that matter, Breda. More or less, it wound up a cooking show with a hunting edge.

BB & Guns, Basting Bambi and Beyond

We’re foodies. There’s not much getting around it. Both LabRat and I would rather eat food that tastes good, so all the low-fat carb-free low-sodium anti-food is largely absent from our abode. We’ve got lard and we’re not afraid to use it!

In that spirit, one of the latest additions to the bookshelves here at the nerd ranch is Jennifer McLagan’s book Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. I’ve gone through the chapter on butter already, and while I agree with the spirit, and a lot of the recipes look damn tasty, the thing is pissing me right the fuck off.

Things start off smoothly enough, with an explanation of fats (saturated vs. un, poly, mono, trans; frankly it reads like a printed version of something familiar, only less detailed). There’s some fat-lore and a bit on the history of margarine (which, given the original form, I suddenly find myself with fewer objections to the modern incarnation thereof). What there’s also a lot of is the plague that hovers around the whole/organic/slow/sustainable/$buzzword-for-I-just-want-something-that-fucking-tastes-good movement, the snooty disdain for major brand/readily available sources.

Only those who lived in the countryside and churned their own enjoyed the taste of fresh butter. Thankfully, our butter is no longer adulterated, since it is highly regulated and mass-produced, but the same system that guarantees a certain standard also results in a uniformity in both the butter’s color and (lack of) flavor.
…
To enjoy the benefits of butter you must eat the best you can buy. Good butter not only tastes better, but it is better for you. Butter from pasture-fed cows has omega-3 fatty acids, which we need more of in our diet.
…
Butter shouldn’t taste only of fat, but also of what the cows ate. We should be able to savor the grass, the herbs, and the flowers. While we are all willing to spend a small fortune on deluxe olive oils, we grab a pound of butter without thinking.

Outstanding! I’m right there with you, butter is awesome already and should be awesome-er with some care and attention and selection! I’m gonna actually check this shit out at the store rather than just grab a pound! Only one problem. Above the vast swaths of margarine, which we’ve already established is bad and really only good for spreading on toast* there are…hold on, this is tricky counting this high… there are three brands available! Store Brand, the one with the Indian girl you can cut the box up to make it look like she’s showing her boobs, and the one with the deer! Well, ok, let’s go by the actual numbers and compare the fat content on these suckers. They all have the exact same FDA grading, so we can rule that out as a yardstick off the bat. As it turns out, the fat content and breakdown of saturated vs. un is identical across all three! So between the three brands I can pick from, the only measurable difference is price.

Ok, no problem. A little effort isn’t too much to ask in tracking down better chow. I’ll just pop over to the specialty store and… oh. Wait. No I won’t. Los Alamos has two grocery stores, both branches of the same major chain. Oh, and some of the convenience stores sell milk by the gallon, which I’m sure is the very peak of quality and not at all priced unreasonably. Fine! I’ll just make my own!

The simple act of making butter will give you an insight into the magical transformation of cream into butter and show you just how good very fresh butter can taste. Unlike Alexandre Dumas, you won’t need a horse (see quotation at right)**- just an electric mixer, a sieve, and the best cream you can lay your hands on.

All right, over to the milk section, let’s see what they got.

Really? Just three brands, and that ZOMG WE’RE ORGANIC PAY AN EXTRA FIVE BUCKS stuff? Again? Dammit.

Well, maybe I’ll go straight to the source and visit the nearby dairy? Nope. Some effort is fine, but a two hour drive each way for better milk and butter just ain’t gonna happen. And these are still outfits looking to maximize their profits. I don’t think we’re gonna be seeing milk from cows treated all Kobe style out of these joints.

And this is really the crux of what gets me. There is virtually no middle ground between that twit on Food Network going on about how to pick the right curtains to go with that stove-top-and-kraft-cheese concoction and the hardcore “IF YOU CAN’T TASTE THE SEASON YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” crowd. Yes, absolutely there are some truly amazing foodstuffs available locally. But small-scale pasture-fed cows? Not likely. Well fatted chickens? Not unless I raise ‘em myself. Damn near every one of these current crop of “make food that doesn’t suck” books and/or personalities come from a big city where you can’t swing an organic, locally produced sustainable dead cat without hitting a specialty store that imports your poison of choice direct from the world’s best poison-of-choice producer.

Fuck it. Maybe I’ll just get an ostritch egg or two next time I go to Albuquerque. Meanwhile, I’ll just go raid the freezer for the beef*** Ms. McLagan only wishes she could get. She can look down her nose at the butter I use all she likes, it ain’t gonna magic up a better option.

*Yes, I know. I do think the butter tastes better on toast, but there’s a certain point of diminishing returns for effort to reward, and the hassle of getting hard, cold butter to actually spread on toast is beyond that point for me. Your mileage may vary.
**Apparently he tied a jug of milk around his horse’s neck at the start of the day’s ride and got butter out when he stopped in the evening. A bit slow for my taste, but clever, I’ll grant that.
***We lurves us some FarmFamily raised beef. Oh yes. If you find yourself in a position to obtain some, it’s well worth it.