Road Vittles

One summer in college I shared an apartment with my boyfriend and several of his friends.  Living with 3 college-aged men was not as challenging or disgusting (minus a very contained experiment in the bathroom I will not go in to) as one might anticipate.  For the most part they were all fairly neat, everyone paid their bills on time and all were oddly domestic.  Everyone took turns cooking dinner.  And the dinners were affairs.  We cooked dinner. It took several hours, it involved numerous courses. Thanks to my roommate Luke’s discovery, often we would crawl up a chute, out a window and enjoy those dinners on the roof of our 4-plex over-looking downtown North Bennington, Vermont, which if you have ever travelled to North B know consists of an intersection with a stop sign.  But it is quaint and it looks like Vermont.

Dinner became pretty multi-cultural affairs in that apartment; J.P. grew up in Belguim, Andy’s dad was from Greece, Luke’s parents were from Japan, and then there was me.  Luke, of course, made the most interesting dinners.  It wasn’t sushi and it certainly wasn’t on the menu at Bennihanna.  He made dishes his mother made which I’ll dare to call Japanese comfort food by way of the many other influences of Flushing, Queens, where he grew up.  Luke could cook.  And we became those people, the ones that buy the kitty litter sized bag of rice so large you cannot put it on a shelf; you must stack it in a corner like a piece of furniture.  Luke even took a trip to New York specifically to get the rice and a few other staples.  Oddly he seemed surprised that he missed these things.  I can’t speak for Luke but I know his relationship with his parents was strained at the time.  I suspect that by simply cooking, he was finding that perhaps they had more in common than he thought and actually missed them.  You could see it in his face and you could hear it when he described what we were going to eat.  He wasn’t just cooking dinner.

One weekend Andy, Luke and I decided to take a road trip to Burlington to visit Andy’s sister.  Prior to leaving Luke surprise packed us some snacks for the road.  We started our trip up Route 7.  I remember this trip well.  I drove; Andy entertained us with Bible tales from the perspective of a young man who would eventually get a PhD in folklore.  It was fascinating and Luke passed out snacks from the back seat; onigiri (or rice balls).  Luke’s were a little smaller than a tennis ball and they were fully covered in nori and perfectly shaped.  Luke explained that this is what his mother would pack for road trips; the insides are a surprise but were usually filled with fairly common ingredients, like tuna fish or vegetables with soy sauce.  I don’t think Andy or I had ever been so charmed by a snack.   We ate them all almost immediately, curious to find out what was in the center.

You can put whatever you like in the center and take them on your next road trip.

Avocado Onigiri - makes about 10

4 cups cooked sushi rice

1/2 of an avocado, sliced in to 1/2” pieces, run under cold water and patted dry

2 sheets of toasted nori, cut in to 1/2” strips

2 tablespoons Kewpie mayo

1/2 teaspoon grated ginger

sesame seeds

Stir the ginger into the mayonnaise. Prepare a wide bowl full of salted water, this is for your hands so the rice doesn’t stick to them.  Place a 12” x 12” piece of cling wrap in the center of a small bowl with it. Sprinkle in some sesame seeds. Grab a golf ball sized amount of rice, shape it in to a ball and flatten it and place it in the bowl.  Put two 1/2” avocado slices in the center and a small dot of the mayonnaise.  Grab a tablespoon amount of the rice and put it on top of the filling.  Pull up the sides of the cling wrap and shape the contents into a ball.  Remove.  Get your fingers wet in the water and drip a little on to the nori strip then make a belt around the rice ball with the nori.  Repeat.

Cult Following (AKA the 100 hour meal)

So Jim got me the Momofuku cookbook. My sister had warned that it was un-cookable, an unfriendly and over-involved cookbook. Jim has been hot to eat at Noodle Bar for years and since he has not yet had the opportunity and with no trip to New York planned anytime soon he hopped over to the bookstore. He happened to open the cookbook to a page with recipes for refrigerator pickles and thought to himself ‘this is easy’. He brought it home, presented it to me as a gift and got excited about our new project together.

Our project began this week. I’ll start by saying David Chang makes Thomas Keller look like a complete amateur when it comes to the number of sub-recipes you must make to produce a dish. His bowl of ramen = 10 sub-recipes. Not joking. Not smiling either. And we purchased the noodles and the fish cake. So since I spent this week frantically putting in half of the work for the following items: appetizer, entree and dessert I am going to blog about it based on man labor hours. You will forgive me.

Mr. Chang and Ms. Tosi have also managed to create a ripple of emotions as well. We argued at the grocery store about ingredients while trying to translate Chinese based on bottle shape. Disappointment, frustration and good old fashioned anger when the sub-recipe for praline paste (followed to the letter!) seized the food processor. Joy, the smell of bacon, pig bones and chicken bubbling away for 6 hours. Bewilderment, the recipe for the Korean red dragon sauce brought, instead, the red dragon’s less attractive cousin, the Korean brown dragon sauce.

So, just to clarify, that’s 2 people + 5 days = 1 meal. We produced the rice cakes with red/brown dragon sauce, Chang’s legendary ramen and Tosi’s iconic cereal milk with chocolate hazelnut thing. The verdict? I feel like David Chang treated me like an over zealous intern. Was it good? Yes. Was it worth the effort? Hell no. As my friend Kasia, who has eaten at Noodle Bar, put it ‘Heck, you both could have eaten at there 3x for the same expense.’ And there you go. Some things are better left to other people.

While Mr. Chang won’t be figuratively bending me over any surfaces again anytime soon I would make an exception for Ms. Tosi and her cereal milk panna cotta. I found it to be a very special dish, really tasty, certainly something I have never had before and something I want to eat again. It took me two tries to make this thing successfully and I ended up having better success with recipe for dummies on the NYTimes website rather than the one in the cookbook. Now, I realize offering changes for such a thing is heresy but I am simply offering my opinion. Here it is: I would reduce the salt in the panna cotta, offer the addition of a little vanilla and please, don’t try to press the avocado puree through a sieve, it’s like putting a square peg in a round hole.

Cereal Milk Panna Cotta with Chocolate Hazelnut Thing and Avocado Puree - Serves 6

Cereal Milk Panna Cotta

6 cups corn flakes

3 cups milk

2 cups cream

1/4 cup light brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/2 packets gelatin powder

Pre-heat the oven to 300. Put the corn flakes on a baking sheet. Toast corn flakes in the oven for 15 minutes or until slightly golden. Combine the milk and cream in a large bowl, add the warm corn flakes and let steep for 45 minutes. Strain the corn flakes by pouring the mixture through a sieve and pressing on the corn flakes to extract as much liquid as possible. Discard the corn flakes (or as Chang suggests, eat them). Add the vanilla, salt and sugar, microwave (yes, microwave) on half power for 1 1/2 minutes until the sugar has dissolved, stir to combine. Remove 1/4 cup of the custard batter and place in a bowl, sprinkle the gelatin on top and let it rest for 5 minutes. Once it has bloomed return it to the bowl and whisk it in until it has dissolved as well, this takes a while. Pour the custard into the 6 bowls (making sure the gelatin gets n to every ramekin or bowl) and allow it to set in the refrigerator over night. To serve top with avocado puree and a chunk of the chocolate hazelnut thing.

Chocolate Hazelnut Thing

1/4 cup praline paste

1/3 cup Nutella

1 tablespoon semi-sweet chocolate

1/2 teaspoon corn syrup

1/4 teaspoon neutral oil (they say grape seed, I used vegetable)

2 tablespoons caramelized cornflakes

Place everything in a bowl and microwave on 10 second intervals, stirring until completely melted and combined. Spread baking sheet with a silpat or waxed paper press the corn flakes in to the warm chocolate and place in the freezer to set. Once set break up into random chunks and store in the refrigerator. If making the caramelized corn flakes is the one step that takes you over the edge then I say skip it and just press in some regular old corn flakes.

Praline Paste

Chang and Tosi say you can purchase this, I have never seen it, but I would advocate buying it, not making it. If you must make it, do not follow the instructions in the cookbook.

1/2 cup hazelnuts toasted

1/2 cup sugar

1 pinch kosher salt

Toast the hazelnuts then put them in a food processor and process until finely chopped. Remove and place in a bowl. Heat the sugar over medium-low heat. Once it starts to caramelize stir it to combine until it has fully turned to carmel. Combine with the hazelnuts, work quickly!

Caramelized Corn Flakes

3/4 cup corn flakes

3 tablespoons non-fat dry milk powder

1 tablespoon sugar

3 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Place the corn flakes in a bowl and break up with your hands, crushing them about 8 times. Pre-heat the oven to 300. Toss the corn flakes with the remaining ingredients. Spread on a baking sheet lined with either a silpat or parchment paper. Place in the oven and bake for about 35 minutes or until golden brown. Store at room temperature.

Avocado Puree

1 ripe avocado, chilled for an hour

1 pinch sugar

1 pinch salt

Juice of 1/2 a small lemon

Combine the ingredients in a blender and process until smooth. Place in the refrigerator with plastic wrap covering and touching the puree until ready to use.