Cook Monkeys

I hate crabs.

They are ridiculously hard to eat.

I am declaring a war on crabs.

If a heart attack had a flavor, it would probably taste like the meatloaf I made.

I made this meatloaf TWICE in one week, because it’s just that good. The first time was because I was bored and wanted to do something different for dinner. The recipe I used was from Deep Fried, Live!, an online cooking show starring a cartoon octopus. This was literally, no doubt, the best meatloaf I have ever had. Period. It took me days to finish the meatloaf since it was so large (at least 2 pounds worth of meat, fillings, and bacon on top). The taste really makes you overlook how unhealthy the meatloaf is, but that’s the whole point of meatloaf. The meatloaf, in a nutshell, was: 1 pound of ground beef (80/20), half a pound of ground pork, half a pound of ground turkey (I couldn’t find veal), eggs, bread crumbs, various diced veggies, a mix of spices, and bacon on top. Mmmm…. bacon. Fat plays quite an important in making things taste good. A meatloaf with less fat will be dry and crumbly instead of juicy and not crumbly.

I managed to finish the meatloaf with some help. Eating that thing really makes you want to go to the gym. I made this again for a very recent holiday party. People really enjoyed the meatloaf. One person even said it was the best meatloaf she ever had and she doesn’t even like meatloaf. Said person asked if she would have to torture me to get the recipe. I came up with a meatloaf pick-up line I could use on the ladies at the supermarket, but I never got around to using it. Overall, the meatloaf recipe was the best I had ever had, one which I would highly recommend.

More photos are on my Flickr account.

Cross-posted on my personal blog:

For Christmas I received a copy of Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking and I read it cover to cover. He explains baking from the perspective of someone trying to understand the finer details of why certain baking actions result in certain final forms. The book begins with a discussion on the chemical building blocks of baking: carbohydrates, fats, sugars, water, etc. Unfortunately, you just can’t go into a supermarket and pick up a bag of carbohydrates or lecithin so the book then discusses the various basic ingredients you can purchase at the store and what types of basic building blocks are present in these objects, such as eggs. Scattered through these two portions of the book are various digressions into the finer points of what these components do and why they respond to heat and mixing differently, the emulsive properties of the lecithin in eggs, and things like the flour-water hydration that occurs when you rest a dough in the fridge for an hour.

One of the scarier parts of the book happens in the chapter on The Straight Dough Method. All of the doughs in this chapter are leavened using yeast concoctions and typically result in a bread or bread-like substance. This much I already knew from watching and helping my parents make pizza dough from scratch. Where the book started to scare me was when it ventured into a discussion on what sourdough starters are and how they are created and why they make the bread taste so different.

A sourdough starter is formed by putting a sugar, bread flour, and water in an uncovered bowl in a moderately temperate area of your house for 4-10 days to act as an airborne yeast trap and breeding ground. Depending upon where you live on the planet, these yeasts will travel with different types of bacteria and it is these bacteria (the ones that can survive the environment that the yeasts create in the starter solution) that lend the unique flavors to the resultant doughs. Alternate forms of starter substitute milk for water and end up having some alcoholic content.

Let me summarize: you put out a trap to catch and breed free-roaming microorganisms which you will then later feed with more flour and then kill off in the oven.

This sounded completely insane to me. But seeing how it is an established food practice and that the resulting doughs are cooked at 400°F and people don’t regularly die after eating many breads, I decided to try it.

I believe this was a mistake. You see, I live in a small, one-room apartment. Keep this in mind for later.

I decided to make the All-Purpose Starter and the Sourdough Starter at the same time since the AP Starter is seeded with yeast and the Sourdough Starter is left to catch its own. Well after I let the AP Starter do its merry little thing for 18 hours I used a cup of it to make some bread. I let it rise for about 30 minutes and did not notice any change in the height of the dough so I make the immediate decision that I had done something wrong with my starter and I threw out the rest and proceeded to make a second batch of dough using the standard process of proofing my active dry yeast in some warm water before using in the dough. By the time that this one was ready, I noticed that the first batch that had used the starter was finally starting to show some significant rising potential. So I decided to bake both loaves. And both loaves came out fine. I probably could’ve kneaded them both a bit more, but since I don’t have a stand mixer I did the best I could with just my arms.

Sometime the next morning I noticed that my Sourdough Starter had started to bubble and develop a slight odor. As if by magic I had caught some yeast and now I could make more bread with my own yeast, cool!

Not cool.

Ever since I started the starter project, I’ve had a slight cough that slowly got worse. Since I am coming off of a sinus infection and my antibiotics are almost out this was upsetting. Last night as I stirred my remaining starter I had a Homer Simpson “doh!” moment when I realized that the AP Starter that I had discarded in my (open-lidded) trashcan had probably been sending out spores or buds or whatever into the surrounding air which had landed in my yeast trap and replicated.

…in the air…

Damn. I’m coughing because of the foreign bodies in the air. Damn. Damn. Damn. I get like this with mold spores in the air, so why not yeast? Damn. So I immediately dumped everything left of my Sourdough Starter down my toilet, bleached the scum in the bowl and threw out my trashbag in the dumpster down on the street.

This morning I have no cough. My conclusion is that you should never make bread with anything other than prepackaged yeast if you live in an apartment—unless you enjoy inhaling lots of yeast.

“Why are all these American people staring at us?” I whisper to my sister.“Because we’re Chinese.”

Our family sits in a new restaurant, one we had never been to before. It was originally located in Chinatown under the name New Shanghai; now it’s located in a suburb called Wellesley just off of Route 9 bearing the name CK Shanghai. Aside from the employees, there are almost no other Chinese people. The ones I saw earlier have left, and the mass of people at the entrance continue to grow due to lack of waiting space.

Employees are bustling about delivering their dishes to tables, taking orders, retrieving empty plates, and refilling glasses. I take a sip of my water while eyeing the environment. The yellow wallpaper, the hanging ceiling lights, and the small bar make me feel like I’m in a different restaurant. This doesn’t feel typical for a Chinese restaurant, at least the ones I’ve been in, but the random adornments around the wall make up for the contemporary look.

Napkin placed on lap, chopsticks in hand. The first set of dishes arrive at our table. We dig in. Chopsticks reach across the table. Plates are passed to help gather food into a meal. A communal sharing of what lies before us. This is how we eat. This is what “family style” eating is.

I make a quick glance to the neighbouring tables. The people on my left are talking about colleges with some mention of MIT and patents. The two tables to our right keep staring in our direction. I don’t know if they’re staring at us, our food, or at something else. Paranoia sets in, and I keep my head focused on my plate. Yet all I can think about is how damn good the food is.

More dishes arrive, and my family continues to eat. People at the big, round table on our right continue to look at us like we’re foreign aliens. To me, the way everyone else is eating is foreign. They are ordering single dishes as their own. Real Chinese restaurants aren’t like that. Chinese food isn’t the single-serving combo that you get at the small, dirty-looking, local place on the corner where you go when you’re too lazy to cook. To them, the way we eat is different despite the fact that this is normal, instinctive, and second nature for us.

That’s not to say that people couldn’t order their own dishes like they typically would in other restaurants. They just don’t get any real perspective of what Chinese food culture is like. I’m not saying it’s bad that non-Chinese people are eating Chinese food. My point is just that food is more than just what’s on the table in front of you. It’s how you eat it that also counts.

I decided to make sushi one day and get rid of those seaweed wraps thatI had lying around. This was my first time making sushi myself. I saw a real sushi chef do it once at my uncle’s barbeque in front of everybody. My sister and mom have made sushi before using just seaweed, rice, and smoked salmon. I chose to use eggs, avocado, and fake crab meat. I accidentally bought smoked salmon at the supermarket. I guess I had a subconscious craving for it.

After getting my ingredients out, I put the sushi mat on a cutting board and placed the first seawood wrap on the mat. There is a rice vinegar that one is supposed to add to the cooked rice before spreading it on the seaweed. I had rice wine thinking that it was sufficient. However, when I reviewed the recipe, it stated rice vinegar. I didn’t feel like going back out to the supermarket again after having just been there so I mixed the rice with the rice wine. It smelled a little funky due to the alcohol so I decided to add some white vinegar. It was a hokey process of mixing a little of each until it smelled like rice vinegar (or at least what I recall from memory) and tasted appropriate.

The next step was to place the ingredients on the rice. Rolling the sushi was something I didn’t manage to get a good hold of. I always either had too much filling or not enough rice. My first roll came out kind of weird and thick. However, with subsequent rolls, they improved a little bit. One of the important things for making sushi is to use a good knife when making the slices. It has to be sharp otherwise your sushi will tear and its content will just fall out all over the cutting board.

The sushi didn’t come out too bad for my first time. Most of them came out nice looking. Towards the end I was beginning to run out of rice. For my last roll of sushi, I had to thinly spread the rice around. When I actually rolled it, it didn’t stay together very well. Most of the slices fell apart. By the end, I did have a good pile of sushi roll ends and other craptastic slices that fell apart. But I did have a good plate of sushi to eat. It was three layers of sushi that lasted me for about three days.

You can see more sushi pictures on my Flickr account.

I went down to a friend’s house over the weekend for his birthday. His mom has been making cakes for him and his sister for a while (their whole lives I believe).

R.B. decided to go with a Red vs Blue cake for his 22nd birthday.

More pictures from his birthday can be seen on my Flickr account.

In closing, I’d like to wish a happy birthday to R.B.

The end of the school year was approaching. Finals were almost upon us. So what does a nostalgic college student do? They make hand-cranked vanilla ice cream with a bunch of friends.

When my dad came up to visit me a few weeks prior (at my request) he brought up one of the official Boyer ice cream making buckets and hardware.

For years my family has been making different varieties of homemade ice cream in our buckets for summer birthday parties and the like. It’s always a fun event of mixing the cream and flavoring together and filling the bucket, setting up the bucket hardware, filling with ice and salt, and then cranking it slowly to thicken the cream into an icy paste-like dessert confection.

We invited people over who were the kind of people who would enjoy this type of event (or just ice cream in general). I ran into some issues with having the gallon jug of whole milk freezing in the auxillary fridge (we had to fast-thaw it in pots of hot water) and with ice consumption problems. Overall, however, the production was quite a success, producing ice cream thicker than I recall my family ever making. Unless of course you count the time my dad added some Xanthan gum (a commercial-grade food thickening agent) to the batch and we almost had to eat the ice cream with a fork and knife.

More photos from myself and Matt.

Here’s a new link for our readers to read: The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza. Now go out and make a pizza!

Here is your link for today: http://www.kookisushi.com/. It’s a site about cookies that look like sushi.

I think we need to cook up something new.

Check this out: Store Wars. And I thought I did weird stuff with my food.