The other day, I was craving cheese.

Here is a collection of party foods that are as easy to eat as they are to make. Each can be produced in 20 minutes or less. Many can be served at room temperature. And none require a plate. (Few people can juggle plate, wineglass and fork successfully, let alone gracefully.)

Most of these recipes are beyond minimalist: they never do in two steps what can be done in one, and they need no embellishment.

Seriously, there is a whole cluster of at least half a dozen different things, each wrapped in bacon.

Mike writes in loving detail about our brunch at the Slanted Door in San Francisco’s Ferry Building. God, that was, like, the Platonic Form of pork chop.

Wired online has a gallery of weird foods, and I’ve eaten 4 out of 10 of them (durian, haggis, reindeer, and silkwork pupae), though none of those in the canned form that they photographed for the slideshow. Oddly delightful little photo essay, really. It makes me think this bacon chocolate bar might not be soooo entirely crazy. I mean, we all like the salty-sweet thing, right?

I like chicken liver. Most (white) people I know think it's kinda gross, but i just love the velvety texture and the rich iron-y flavor. Mmm... (Hey, I tend towards anaemia.) Most Thai people seem to agree with me, because chicken liver here costs about as much as chicken breast, as far as I can tell. It's not a throwaway meat.

So my cousin mentioned a tasty dish involving chicken liver. It's a lot like something my mom used to make with pork or chicken and slivers of black mushrooms, so rest assured that if you don't like liver you can put something else in. But the liver made this childhood favorite a new and intersting experience for me. No one ever gave me a recipe, so I am guessing based on how I remember it tasting and the kinds of ingredients that I know my mom likes to keep around the kitchen.

Ingredients:

• half a medium onion (I think shallots would also do nicely)
  
• three cloves of garlic
  
• three thai chiles (on a five-star spiciness scale, this will give you about a two. There's room for more.)
  
• a chunk of ginger (like, maybe 1.5 inches cubed)
  
• a fistful of thai basil (the kind with purple stems)
  
• one chicken breast
  
• 3-4 chicken livers
  
• a splash of oyster sauce
  
• one teaspoon of that salty preserved soybeans in a jar stuff that you can totally find at asian grocery stores. (unless you're in asia, then you just find it at the grocery store.)

Toss some vegetable oil in a hot wok. The heat should be medium-high, or at least, my gas stove really only does high, medium-high, and off, so I work with that. While that's getting a het up, cut up the garlic very fine, and the onion into slices. Cut the peppers into thin, oblique slices, with that nice diagonal angle. They look pretty that way. And you can pick them out if you want in those bigger pieces. Throw that in, stir, and start cutting up the meat and liver. Toss that in and stir around.

Then you want to get very fine julienned slivers of ginger. Toss in that oyster sauce and soybean stuff, then the ginger. Stir things around for a couple minutes. At this point, if you turned on the rice cooker right before you got started, the rice should be nearly ready.

Turn off the heat. Toss in that handful of basil and stir it around till it's a bit wilted. You will have a pile of brown food that doesn't look like much, but tastes damn good.

Adding green bean or black mushrooms (you know? the kind that's kinda floppy till you bite down and then they're crunchy? I'm not sure if I'm calling them by the correct name.) Don't eat this too much, or you'll catch the gout.

I used:

6-7 whole smallish tomatoes, cut into quarters
a small splash of some italian tomato purée that i found in the fridge, to thicken it.
3 thai chilies, cut up real small
some fire-roasted bell pepper, cut into small chunks
4 cloves of garlic, chopped but not too squooshed

I let this all cook until the constituent parts became impossible to identify and it became a red, spicy-smelling stew. Then I added some paprika and olive oil, and a little later salt. (best to add salt late, i think.)

Then I let it cook, covered, till it looked about the right consistency. Then I made some wells with the back of the spoon and broke 4 eggs into it. Note: it takes a while for the whites to look cooked enough, but it goes from almost-cooked-enough to hard yolks very quickly.

This needs to be served in a bowl. And you need some bread to sop up the tomatoey goodness.

* shakshuka, shakshouka, chakchouka, shaksuka, etc...

Now the recipe left something to be desired, mostly that they were aiming for far too bland for our taste. Maybe with half the spinach and the same amount of everything else (which is what we did towards the end when it became evident that the recipe was too bland -- we started throwing in more of everything else and were able to salvage it). So I'm not reposting the recipe here, I'm only holding on to the good part, which is the curry powder. The following is cribbed directly from their site.

--------------

Curry Powder:
2 tablespoons coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1/2 teaspoon whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon cardamom seeds
1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns
2 dried red chiles, broken in pieces, seeds discarded
1 tablespoon turmeric

Toast the whole spices (coriander, cumin, fennel, cloves, mustard, cardamom and peppercorns) and the chiles in a small dry skillet over medium-low heat, shaking the pan often to prevent them from burning. Toast for a couple of minutes until the spices smell fragrant. In a clean coffee grinder, grind the toasted spices together to a fine powder. Add the turmeric and give it another quick buzz to combine. Use the spice blend immediately, or store in a sealed jar for as long as 1 month.

Yield: about 1/2 cup

-----------------------

But we just used a mortar and pestle. It sounds like a lot of extra effort and for very large quantities it is. But for half a cup, ::shrug::. And you get to smell it as you crush it. I consider it akin to hand-whipping cream -- it's usually worth it. In fact, I'm quickly coming to believe that it's not worthwhile to buy pre-mixed curry powder. It's much much better when it's fresh and you mix and grind yourself, and the fragrance is both more potent and more nuanced. Thai curries are a little more difficult to make from scratch, just because of all the wet ingredients and the larger volumes, so I could totally see taking a shortcut and using stuff from the can. But with a totally dry curry mix... I think it's always worth it to make it from scratch.

I really hate the Thai Kitchen brand of curries. They are everywhere, and not tasty. Better, and usually findable at stores like 99 Ranch, is Maesri curry, the only one I have ever found to make an acceptable Massamun curry.

But over the summer I had this truly transcendant green curry. I mean, like no green curry I've ever tasted. I think my aunt had slipped some cardamom into her mix. There is good canned curry, which will get you better Thai curry than you'll usually get at a restaurant if you do it right. But to have a religious experience with curry you have to make your own.

I went looking for recipes and to my surprise Epicurious had one that didn't look too bad. (I always thought of them as a little white.) So compiled from several different sources, I put together recipes for red and green curries.

Red curry: from epicurious, recipezaar, and temple of thai.

20 dried chilies
4 tsp coriander
2 stalks lemongrass
1 tsp peppercorns
4 tsp galangal
2 tsp chopped kaffir lime leaves or grated lime rind
2 tbsp coriander root or cilantro stems
6 tbsp chopped shallots
1/4 cup chopped garlic
15-20 red fresh chilis
2 tsp gapi (shrimp paste)
salt or fish sauce.

green curry: from bbc recipes and syvum.com

30 green chilis
2 tsp whole peppercorns (white would be good, I had black)
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp coriander
2 tsp cardamom <-- not in any of the recipes online but I suspected it was in my aunt's
2 tbsp coriander
1 cup shallots
2 tbsp garlic
2 tbsp coriander root or cilantro stems
1 tbsp galangal
about the same amount, maybe a little less of ginger
2 tbsp (about one stalk) lemongrass
1 tbsp shrimp paste
1 tbsp fish sauce
2 tsp lime rind or kaffir lime leaves

It's pretty straightforward, but time-consuming. For the dry spices you want to get them whole and toast them in a pan. For the rest, chop it up real good. Then grind it all in small batches in a mortar and pestle. Or, if you're less dumb than me, use a food processor, but then you may have to add a bit of liquid.

I didn't find shrimp paste at 99 ranch, probably not because they didn't have it but because it's sometimes hard to find something in all the abundance. But I did have dried shrimp, so I rehydrated them and crushed them with some fish sauce. I kept all that separate from the rest because I have a vegetarian roommate, so I froze that separately in individual doses, to be added to curries she's not eating.

The spices used in each curry are pretty similar, but the ratios are different, which I think may be just a peculiarity of my recipe sources. I actually liked the green curry quite a bit better... I don't like having too much spice relative to the other flavors. Don't get me wrong, I like my curry spicy, but I want those other flavors too. If I want spicy I can use a lot rather than a little curry... I'm not going for spice efficiency here. So next time when I do the red curry I'll probably use a spice ratio similar to what I used for the green.

And here's what I made:

gaeng khiew wan poo (green curry crab... yum!)
4 soft shell crabs
a bunch of thai eggplants. like, maybe 6 or so. if you can't get those, then try to find some of those cute round ones at the hippy grocery store, or the japanese eggplants. The big dark purple ones are a last resort.
some chopped onion.
maybe some baby corn, though i didn't use it this time.

green curry
coconut milk

start by deep frying the crabs. They react violently with the hot oil. watch out.

set the crabs aside and sautée the onions in sesame oil. then toss in the eggplant, cut into bite-sized pieces. cut each of the crabs in half and throw those in . stir in a heaping tablespoon of green curry.
then a splash of coconut milk, but not much. like 1/4 of a can or less. This is not a soupy curry, it should be thick and mostly clinging to the food chunks. and a nice, dark, green-brown.

Soft-shell crab is expensive true, so this recipe would really work nicely with most any seafood. Green curry is particularly tasty with seafood (whereas I think red goes better with land based meat).

Start with some flaky white fish. I used a humble red snapper because that's what was available, though I imagine a higher-end grouper or chilean sea bass would be even better. I steamed it in a bamboo steamer above a wok, with a circle of parchment paper beneath the fish to keep it from sticking. I didn't pay close attention to the time, but I think 10 minutes or so would be adequate. Personally, I like my fish a little rare and this time I overcooked it (to my taste).

The sauce:
Leftover chardonnay poured into a hot pan.
A big diced up chunk of ginger, and 3-4 thinly sliced scallions go in the liquid.
About a teaspoon of cornstarch to thicken.
Half a teaspoon, maybe even less, of garlic black bean sauce.
A couple teaspoons of sugar, because the wine gets a little sour.

This was shockingly easy to prepare adequately. However, I have not mastered the perfect subtlety and minimalism that this dish can achieve at its best. Next time I'll try water or fish stock instead of wine and no black bean sauce or sugar and the very best, freshest white fish I can find.

Here are some pictures that damnyou took:

(There's more on his flickr photo set.)

The thing I had never before appreciated about competitive eaters is the quality of the food they eat. 8+ pounds of chili cheese fries is one thing. 8+ pounds of Weinerschnitzel chili cheese fries is... unspeakably disgusting! I couldn't eat half a plate of that stuff! (OK, well, I did inhale eat a couple of italian sausages left over from the "celebrity" eating contest.. but I was SO HUNGRY. And they were free! It only occured to me later that they were probably also from Weinerschnitzel and I felt vaguely queasy.)

The odor of these chili cheese fries permeated the Queen Mary's dining room. It smelled like my middle school cafeteria. I was sitting near the back too; Scott and damnyou were up front taking pictures. I tried to imagine the sounds and smells they were getting up there, as the competitors stuffed pound after squishy pound of stinky meat?-cheese?-potato? concoction in their faces. Sonya Thomas was the only woman in the competition, and half the size of the dudes she was competing with.

Meanwhile, the hilariously snarky anthropologist sitting next to me kept leaning over and whispering comments to me about the gender performance in the MC's introductions of all the "athletes". I swear, one guy went by "El Toro" and gelled his hair into little bull horns... though he only barely ate more than two pounds, which is a pretty poor showing. Sonya, on the other hand, is the "shadow beneath the lotus petal, the sharp intake of breath before the moment of revelation" and other zen-influenced expressions indicating that she is some orientalized supernatural force.

Whatever it takes to make these guys feel better about getting their ass handed to them by a girl half their size. However the competitors felt about her, I think most of the guys in the audience had a crush on her. A couple of comics from the "celebrity" competition were sitting in our row and were very vocal in their support of her.

In the end, it was very very close. They had to weigh both Sonya Thomas's and Joey Chestnut's plates and it looked like neither of them really thought they had won. This was probably one of the tensest and most dramatic eating competitions of the year. Which is good, because while I'm glad I went to this one, I'm not sure I'll ever go again.

• small onion
• small butternut squash
• one apple
• paprika
• garam masala
• cayenne pepper
• olive oil
• cream or half & half
• chives

dice the onion and sautée it in olive oil with some paprika, garam masala, and a pinch of cayenne pepper. let it get all brown and caremelized.

toss in dice squash and apple, a little vegetable stock or water, stir around.

cover it all in water or vegetable stock and let it boil/simmer covered until everything is mushy. maybe... 15 minutes?

blend or use one of those handheld thingies to get it all smooth.

add a splash of cream or half&half to make it a little richer. salt and pepper to taste.

garnish with chives, a little fresh ground black pepper, and a shake of paprika.

serves two.

Twisty at I Blame The Patriarchy posts pictures of her dinners and that is really one of my favorite parts of her blog (though I do sometimes like to get my blame on).

Pappa al Pommodoro

Good way to get rid of your stale bread.

• Stale bread, cut into bite-sized cubes.
• olive oil
• garlic
• canned tomatoes or other tomato substance
• maybe some red pepper flakes
• basil
• parmesan

cut some stale bread into 1/2 inch cubes. or, if you only have fresh bread, toast it in the oven at 350 degrees for a few minutes.

saute this in a pot with some olive oil and a few cloves of chopped up garlic. The bread will really soak up the olive oil. careful not to burn the garlic.

add the tomato stuff and red pepper flakes if you want them. I have tried all kinds of stuff here, and it always seems to turn out fine. Canned tomatoes are fine. Fresh tomatoes with maybe a little extra liquid and tomatoe paste have also been fine. Just make sure you add enough that the bread can soak it all up and get mushy. You want this to end up the consistency of a very thick stew. definitely moist, but you could put it on a plate and eat it with a fork if you wanted to.

add salt if it needs it, but usually the tomato stuff is salty enough.

When you're just ready to take it off the stove, tear up some basil leaves... lots... and stir it in. you still want them pretty much raw and fresh.

About 10 seconds before you start eating it, grate some parmesan on it and sprinkle on a little more olive oil.

The key here is GOOD olive oil. You know when it kind of tastes the way fresh grass clippings smell? mmmm.

salad

• some kind of decent lettuce. Bib or Boston or Butter or whatever... just not Iceberg. Those mixed, slightly bitter salad greens don't really work here. I love them, and arugula, but this isn't the place for it.
• radishes, sliced very thin.
• ripe avocado

The dressing is that same nice olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and a little dill. And some fresh ground black pepper. This is so damn simple I'm not sure why I'm posting the recipe except to insert a note about how sublimely awesome a really good balsamic vinegar is on such a simple salad. My roommate's sweetheart is from Modena, so I got a few tips from her on this:

First, get balsamic vinegar from Modena.

Second, they are often numbered. This means something. We have a 5 and a 12. The 12 is thick and sweet, the 5 more like the typical tangy stuff. That's really all we know about the numbers.

I had heard somewhere that with the right kind of Balsamic, you could put a little on vanilla ice cream and have a delicious dessert. I always wondered about this it seemed so ill-conceived. But this new vinegar we got, it tastes just like raisins (it is made from grapes); I could totally see how you could treat it as a sweet.

(this link courtesy of damnyou, who continues to earn his name.)

It's all about the black bean sauce.

two eggplants + a brick of soft tofu.

Might do half a brick of tofu though. It's good to have some to contrast with the eggplant, since the eggplant really sucks up the braising liquid and the tofu does not, so you get chunks of relatively bland and salty. But I think we could have done with a little less tofu... when we boxed up the leftovers it was mostly tofu left. Do the initial browning in sesame oil with a dash of sesame chili oil. first throw in a few of those big whole dried chiles that you see in sezchuan recipes sometimes. when those start to smell a little burnt, then put in the eggplant.

the key is the braising liquid.

• three heaping teaspoons of black bean garlic sauce. "teaspoons" here is not even really a measurement... take a teaspoon and dig out of the jar as big a heap of that stuff as will sit on it, then do that twice more.
• three or four large cloves of garlic. yes. more garlic.
• a big old chunk of ginger, grated. maybe 2.5 or 3 inches.
• a splash of rice vinegar.
• vegetable broth. maybe a cup or so.

Put the tofu in at the same time as the braising liquid. Cover till the eggplant is mushy and then reduce.

Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds and green onion (which I forgot this time) just before serving with rice.

This is very tasty, but soft eggplant and soft tofu need something to contrast... I'd suggest some crisp vegetables. Some sort of slightly bitter green would be good. On the other hand, we had a jicama/cucumber/carrot/thai chile pepper/lime-ok-well-lemon salad. Both had a kind of subtle, not-overpowering sneaky heat to them.

(thanks, goonley.)

1 small onion
chicken bouillon
paprika
black pepper
oregano?
allspice
cinnamon
serrano chile
----------------
tomato juices
mango
----------------
garlic
ginger
----------------
water
----------------
tangerine juice, water
black beans
lentils
smoked tomatoes

I'm not sure exactly what I was getting at, but I interpret the lines as separating stages of preparation, basically "let this cook for a few minutes or reduce or whatever". I'm guessing that this would be a pretty mean black bean / lentil soup.

A year from now, I will look back at my Networking Lab notes and find a shopping list for eggplant parmesan, gorgonzola and arugula risotto, pappa al pommodoro, and mulled wine.

I got crepe-making equipment for Christmas (not one but TWO crepe pans and a cookbook), so I will report back on my experiments with things like chocolate soufflé crêpes, and ratatouille with cheese crêpes, etc.