Oils and Vinegars Do Mix

Oils & Vinegars by Liz Franklin (2008)

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist -- the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar. ~~ Oscar Wilde

This is my favorite specialty cookbook, and I still use it ten years later.  We live in a wonderful time and country, you can go into even the most simple supermarkets and find shelved and shelves of diverse flavored oils and vinegar. My local Foodmaster has 10 types of olive oil, vegetable oils, 5 types of nut oil, sesame oil. The vinegar section has red wine, white wine, rice, sherry, balsamic, and cider vinegar. When I was a child, there were red, white, and cider vinegar only. If I go to Whole Foods or a food specialty market, the number of oils and vinegar available is double or treble.

Now, what!?! Honestly, most of this stuff I might buy a small bottle of it for a special dinner and never use it up. In the middle-class, we are blessed to have such choices, but choices to do what? And then there are some baffling things such as argon oil & vincotto. Well, I have a few little tomes that cover how to make flavored vinegar and how to use some, and then oils are even more of a mystery. I've books that tell me to make flavored this and that, and some users, and recipes that seem very well dull. What I have always needed and desired was a book to give me a survey of using all these beautiful ingredients of oil & vinegar as an intro. You know the recipes I mean, like when someone makes you a fantastic meat dish, and you get the recipe, and it is easy and perfect all the time. Well, Christmas 2008, I got a book with 40 incredible and delicious recipes. It was so good that in the following 2 days I made four recipes out of it; 

1) Avocado oil, Lemon, and Pistachio Cake, 
2) Rosemary and Roast Potato Tart with Olive Oil Pastry, 
3) Hot Garlic Shrimp with Spinach and Ladolemono Sauce 
4) Olive Oil and Orange Cake

Frankly, this book is excellent for an adventurous cook to a gourmet chef who needs a little pick-me-up challenge. Some specialized tools might make things easier to cook some of these recipes, but don't you just have all those appliances collecting dust anyway.

This book got me on a hunt for a cheap ice cream maker, and at 16 bucks at a yard sale, I got one. We all like ice cream, sherberts, and other frozen concoctions, but what possessed me to get such a limited appliance. I was desperate to make "black-pepper & balsamic ice cream," it sounded so weird that I promised myself if I lost half the weight on my diet I could make this dish. I served it to a group of adventurous people, and they melted at the savory flavor of this dish. You pour fresh crushed strawberries splashed with framboise and sugar over the ice cream to just take it to a new level.

This book is exceptional, and for each oil or vinegar, Liz Franklin presents a fantastic recipe to try, some a just merely scrumptious, other methods are not so easy and require moderate skill, but the results are memorable.

It is not just that she show you beautiful, inspiring pictures, taken by Richard Jung, of the dishes, but there are little gems of cooking techniques in the book to that are explained simply.

The book covers simple, wholesome dressings, fruit oils, nut and seed oils, vinegar, and a list of suppliers; if you don't live near any place that sells things as exotic as pumpkin oil, vincotto, or argan oil.

This book is like having gotten an expert cooks recipe file, with better instructions. Cooking anything from this book makes the house smell incredible, and the plate looks great. The other thing is the bool is small, it is not intimidating, there are just 40 recipes that help you use some of those great ingredients you have always wondered at. They also give you recipes that are solidly good that you could make a couple times over the next couple of months and use up that 12-ounce bottle of $9 oil. I actually improvised with pumpkin seed oil on a squash soup I made that just sent the dish over the top; I learned that tip from this book, and it emboldened me.

Here is a commissioned link to the book on Amazon:  Oil & Vinegar by Liz Franklin


*The link above is a paid link and gives me a commission if you buy something.  I make enough so that I have a regular 9-5 job.  I own and still uses this book all the time.

Post-Mayan Apocalypse Supper Invite

Location:  Death Valley National Park >>directions<<

Time:  impending

BYOB: et al, see below

So I'm planning the menu for the Judeo-Christian post Mayan Apocalypse supper after the 21st of December .  Now traditionally the menu includes the Behemoth, the Leviathan, and Ziz (reference Cabal myths, Messianic Supper). Now the good Catholics can only have fried Leviathan that Friday, so I think this Messianic meal will be later in the week, Sunday sounds best. Plus, I don't think the logistics of filling a volcano with cooking oil to deep fry the Leviathan is practical, let's not even talk about eggs and bread crumbs needed for breading. I will be poaching the Leviathan, this is just the easiest, since the seas will be boiling anyways, with a side of steamed clams, urchin, seaweed, and everything else from the sea.

The behemoth should be driven into an oak forest to be killed. We will then light the forest to smoke and BBQ it in place. Roast mushroom side with a squirrel-acorn canapé starter. Other hor d'oeuvres may present themselves, if there is time to plate them. Again, if there is time, I would like to marinated the carcass in some amount of the 3+ billion surplus liters of red wine produced in the world last year. 

The Ziz presents the most unpredictable ingredient component in the meal, the best case scenario is to kill it on a salt flat that was a formally a sea and desiccate the carcass skin for a few days, weeks or a year. I'm going for a crisp skin like Peking Duck.  We'll then use solar flares and secret government death rays to bake and then broil it.   We will need to get all of the OJ stored in concentrate to make the a l'orange sauce.

This event is BYOB, although if JC shows up we'll ask him to make a good chianti to go with the fava bean salad. Please don't bring any stray dead monsters, titans, or corpses of giants to add to the meal. This is a kosher meal and none of those are kosher. Giants and titans seem like cannibalism to me and there will be plenty of time & necessity for that later. Please bring some greens, vegetables, and beans. Also bring your own silverware, cups, bowls, and plates.  Otherwise, you will be eating off of hubcaps using the splintered remains of our society as utensils.  Children are welcome we will be showing "Nemo" to keep them calm. If you have any allergies, well, you'll have to suck it up and just try the beasts of legend.  Although it would suck to make it through the rapture and just die of anaphylactic shock once you know you're one of the inheriting-meek/chosen-ones.

Bless y'all and see you on the other side.

Rock Garden...

"I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died."

~~Richard Diran

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

~~Douglas Adams

"Garden: A thing of beauty and a job forever"

~~Anonymous

"Count the garden by the flowers, never by the leaves that fall. Count your life with smiles and not the tears that roll."

~~Anonymous

"Teachers who inspire know that teaching is like cultivating a garden, and those who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers."

~~Anonymous

"Criticizing another's garden doesn't keep the weeds out of your own"

~~Proverb

"As is the gardener, so is the garden"

~~Proverb

"To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed that can make life a garden."

~~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee . . . gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own."

~~Leonardo da Vinci

All these things have you said of beauty.Yet in truth, you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels forever in flight.People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.But you are life and you are the veil.Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.But you are eternity and you are the mirror."

~~Kahlil Gibran

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy of Gardening Cookbook

Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht. You can throw everything into it beets, carrots, cabbage, onions, everything you want. What's important is the result, the taste of the borscht. ~~Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet

Beets, what do you do about a vegetable like BEETS? Answer, grab a copy of Janet Ballantyne’s “Joy of Gardening Cookbook” (10^th Anniversary Edition). Glad I stumbled across this book, it is excellent for turning vegetables into wholesome food that allows you to taste the essence of the vegetable. The recipes are reliable and not to complicated, if you want gourmet recipes, this ain't it. Then again there are some inventive and tasty little gems here.

There are no exotic vegetables covered in the book (e.g Jeruselum Artichoke, Artichoke, Rabi), which would be great for Asian or Latin American veggies that are in fashion now. However, there are basic recipes that are written and encourage you to use them with any veggie you can think of (i.e vegetable cream or essence soups). So if you have a Kolrabi, just adapt one of the basic, Greens, or Brassicaceae recipes. Also, peppered throughout the book are some gardening, harvest, and kitchen technique tips.

I have been collecting cook books for two decades, and this is a great book for anybody with a farm share, a big garden, or a yen to learn to make vegetables more palatable. You won't win Iron Chef with this book, but you will make veggies more interesting at the next potluck. Also, the recipes are adaptable so a green bean pate recipe can be changed to make a combination of flavors with blanched green beans & onion with a zesty sauce. If you have some skills, you can adapt the flavors of one combination and present the taste in a new form. Remember, the quality of the vegetables is key, thus garbage in, garbage out, fresh wholesome veggies in, fresh zesty flavor sensation out.

Finally, the recipes are mostly easy to execute. Janet Ballantyne is an educator, and knows how to present recipes in a fool proof fashion. Go ahead and get this book so you can enjoy your garden fresh veggies more.

More information:

Joy of Gardening Cookbook by Janet Ballantyne
Also, Desserts from the Garden this looks very interesting.

Earthworm

Streamlined to the ultimate for functional performance the earthworm blindly eats his way, riddling and honeycombing the ground to a depth of ten feet or more as he swallows.

~Anatomy Underfoot, J.-J. Condue

Prayer and Potatoes

Pray for peace and grace and spiritual food,
For wisdom and guidance, for all these are good,
But don't forget the potatoes.

Prayer and Potatoes, J. T. Peter

Most Beautiful Landscape

Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. ~~Francis Bacon